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2024 May 15 - 21 TOP3 [PEACE]

A-bomb survivors protest remarks made in US Senate that justify A-bombing civilian targets

The Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations (Nihon Hidankyo) on May 15 sent a letter of protest to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo in response to the remarks made in the U.S. Senate that justify the August 1945 atomic bombings.

During a Senate subcommittee hearing on May 8, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Charles Brown, in regard to the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan 79 years ago, said, “I’ll tell you it stopped the war,” and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin agreed with Brown.

The letter points out, “The historical view that ‘the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended WWII and that the bombings were necessary to quickly end the Japan-U.S. war’ is in the minority in the United States today.”

The letter says what has come to be seen as the accepted view of many U.S. historians now is that “the atomic bombings were not necessary to end the war.”

The letter criticizes the statement justifying the A-bombings as “being an anachronistic and malicious delusion from the distant past in the era in which the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is in effect.”

The letter states, “Nuclear weapons should never ever be used and should not even be allowed to exist,” demanding a prompt retraction of the statement in question.