Today, on the anniversary of the nuclear bomb dropped on August 6, 1945, on Hiroshima, Japan, killing over 100,000 civilians, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida spoke at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. He said: “As the only country to have experienced the horror of nuclear devastation in war, Japan has the mission of … steadily building up efforts over time towards the realization of a world without nuclear weapons.” The world currently stands at “a critical point where the trend towards fewer nuclear weapons could undergo a reversal for the first time since the height of the Cold War…. The widening division within the international community over approaches to nuclear disarmament, Russia’s nuclear threat, and other concerns make the situation surrounding nuclear disarmament all the more challenging.”
While Kishida notably did not name the United States, the only country that has ever dropped a nuclear bomb in wartime, and on civilians; nor, for that matter, did he single out any country making “the situation surrounding nuclear disarmament” more challenging, he was able to identify Russia as a nuclear threat.
