"Humanity is playing with a loaded gun" UN head Antonio Guterres said in Hiroshima on Saturday, the 77th anniversary of the United States atomic bomb attack on Japan.
"Tens of thousands of people were killed in this city in the blink of an eye. Women, children and men were incinerated in a hellish fire," he said.
"Nuclear weapons are nonsense. They guarantee no safety - only death and destruction," Guterres said.
“We must ask: What have we learned from the mushroom cloud that swelled above this city?”
“Crises with grave nuclear undertones are spreading fast — the Middle East, to the Korean Peninsula, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Guterres said, repeating warnings he made this week at a nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty conference in New York.
The United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, obliterating the city and killing 140,000 people. Three days later, the US dropped a second atomic bomb on the people of Nagasaki, killing 74,000 more.
The US remains the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons in war.
Thousands packed into the Hiroshima Peace Park in the center of the city to mark the anniversary of the bombing.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also spoke at the memorial: “I must raise my voice to appeal to the people around the world that the tragedy of nuclear weapons use should never be repeated. Japan will walk its path toward a world without nuclear weapons, no matter how narrow, steep or difficult that may be.”
A silent prayer was held at 8.15 am, the moment the bomb was dropped.
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Common Dreams staff.