Mayors for Peace, with 8,200 member cities from 166 countries, is working to abolish nuclear weapons. Those who barely survived suffered the effects of radiation exposure and faced discrimination and prejudice.
Taue Tomihisa, Vice President of Mayors for Peace and Mayor of Nagasaki, said that by the end of 1945, 210,000 lives in the two cities were lost. He pointed to the effects of radiation on future generations, including in the Marshall Islands, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Second-generation hibakusha and their parents are passing away from diseases such as cancer, he said, discriminated against in marriage and employment, and left without public assistance. “We ourselves are nuclear victims because there is no scientific evidence to clearly deny the transgenerational genetic health effect of A-bomb radiation,” he stressed. Similarly, Noboru Sakiyama, President of the Japanese Liaison Council of Second-Generation Atomic Bomb Survivors, noted both his parents were hibakusha of Nagasaki. “Humans are not created to be treated like this.” She appealed to the wisdom “of each of you who represent your country” to recommit to end nuclear weapons use. She said the empty lot next door became a cremation ground, with bodies collected by garbage carts and people numb to even the stench from burning bodies. Her mother, she said, recalled seeing people escape from fires “like ants”, their “brown, scantily clad bodies burned all over and their hair matted with blood, standing on end like horns”. Representing the hibakusha - as those survived the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War are known - Wada Masako of the Japan Confederation of A-and H-Bomb Suffers Organizations recounted her experience as a nearly two-year-old child whose house was 2.9 kilometres from the blast centre in Nagasaki. The Tenth Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons concluded its first week today, with gripping first-hand accounts by those who survived the horrors of atomic production, testing and use, and who moved the debate from one of concepts and proposals towards a timeless appeal to uphold a collective moral conscience in saying “never again”.
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