On Wednesday, thousands of people gathered in silence at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the United States dropping the first atomic bomb in history on the city, which killed tens of thousands of people and permanently altered the path of history.
Participants from 120 nations and territories, including the United States and Israel, bowed their heads in recollection at precisely 8:15 a.m., the moment the uranium bomb “Little Boy” exploded.
In the last days of World War II, a U.S. warplane dropped the bomb, which instantaneously killed some 78,000 people. An estimated 140,000 people had died by the end of 1945 as a result of radiation exposure and injuries.
Kazumi Matsui, the mayor of Hiroshima, called on world leaders to acknowledge the threat posed by contemporary nuclear proliferation in his speech.
