On anniversary today of atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, nuclear fears are renewed

Associated Press

HIROSHIMA, Japan

Hiroshima's appeal of "never again" on the 72nd anniversary Sunday of the world's first atomic bomb attack has gained urgency as North Korea accelerates work on its nuclear weapons program, showing its growing prowess with increasingly frequent missile launches.

When the U.S. dropped the bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, Toshiki Fujimori's mother was carrying him, then just a year old, piggyback to the hospital. The impact of the explosion threw them both to the ground, nearly killing him.

"Obviously tensions are growing as North Korea has been pushing ahead with nuclear tests and development," said Fujimori. "Nuclear weapons just are unacceptable for mankind."

Many Japanese and others in the region seem resigned to North Korea's apparent newfound capacity to launch missiles capable of reaching much of the continental United States. But the threat lends a deeper sense of alarm in Hiroshima, where 140,000 died in that first A-bomb attack, which was followed on Aug. 9, 1945, by another that killed more than 70,000 people in Nagasaki.

"This hell is not a thing of the past," Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui said in his peace declaration at Sunday's ceremony. "As long as nuclear weapons exist and policymakers threaten their use, their horror could leap into our present at any moment. You could find yourself suffering their cruelty."

Today, a single bomb can cause even greater damage than the bombs dropped 72 years ago, he said. "Humankind must never commit such an act," he said, urging nuclear states, as well as Japan, to join the nuclear weapons ban treaty adopted by the United Nations in July.

Fujimori said that each Aug. 6, his late mother, who also survived, insisted on retelling the story of the attack to children in their neighborhood, saying she had to keep reminding them to help prevent the same mistake from happening again. Decades later, 73-year-old Fujimori himself is a leader of Hidankyo, a major organization of atomic bomb survivors.