TOKYO (Dispatches) — Nagasaki paid tribute to the victims of the U.S. atomic bombing 77 years ago on Aug. 9, with the mayor saying the Ukraine war showed the world that another nuclear attack is not just a worry but “a tangible and present crisis.”

Mayor Tomihisa Taue, in his speech Tuesday at the Nagasaki Peace Park, said nuclear weapons can be used as long as they exist, and their elimination is the only way to save the future of humankind.

 “This has shown the world that the use of nuclear weapons is not a groundless fear but a tangible and present

crisis,” he said. The belief that nuclear weapons can be possessed not for actual use but for deterrence “is a fantasy, nothing more than a mere hope.”
The United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, destroying the city and killing 140,000 people. It dropped a second bomb three days later on Nagasaki, killing another 70,000. Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, ending World War II and Japan’s nearly half-century of aggression in Asia.
Participants, including diplomats from nuclear states, observed a moment of silence at 11:02 a.m., the moment the bomb exploded above the southern Japanese city on Aug. 9, 1945.
Japan renounces its own possession, production or hosting of nuclear weapons, but as a U.S. ally Japan hosts 50,000 American troops and is protected by the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Still, the Ukraine war has prompted some hawkish lawmakers in the governing party have also proposed a possibility of nuclear sharing with the United States.
Taue said discussions about nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation over the past decades have not been put into practice and trust in the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has become “tenuous.”
“We must recognize that ridding ourselves of nuclear weapons is the only realistic way of protecting the Earth and humankind’s future,” Taue said.