A Tragic Past: 1945 bombing of Hiroshima looms large as G7 leaders meet in Japan

As the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) countries meet in Japan this week, the location of the summit – Hiroshima – will carry a grim presence of its own. The city was the first place on the planet to be attacked by an atomic bomb during the Second World War. And it is due to this symbolism, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida chose Hiroshima to hold the G7 summit. The Japanese leader has also decided to make a push for nuclear disarmament as he meets leaders of the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. As Hiroshima hosts the leaders of seven of the world’s richest democracies, let’s retrace the city’s tragic past and the reason for Kishida’s anti-nuke push at the summit. 1945 Hiroshima bombing On the morning of 6 August 1945, the US B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped ‘Little Boy’, a 16-kilotonne atomic bomb, on Hiroshima at 8.15 am. As per The Guardian report, the bomb exploded 600 metres above Shima Hospital in under a minute, forming a “wave of heat that momentarily reached 3,000-4,000 degrees centigrade on the ground”.

Nearly 90 per cent of the 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima were destroyed – burned or reduced to rubble, the report added.

Setsuko Thurlow, who was a 13-year-old junior high school student in Hiroshima at the time and was recruited to decode intercepted Allied communications, told TIME magazine: “I had the sensation of flying up and floating in the air. That’s when I lost consciousness.” At the time of the aerial bombing, she was working on the second floor of the wooden building that acted as the Japanese military headquarters in what is now known as Hiroshima’s Higashi suburb. [caption id=“attachment_12617142” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Nearly 90 per cent of the 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima were destroyed by the US atomic bomb. Reuters File Photo[/caption] “It was a bright summer day, but by the time I came out of the rubble, it was like twilight,” Thurlow, who is now 91, was quoted as saying by the magazine. “So we joined this procession of people with parts of their bodies missing, blackened and melted skin; they were not walking, they were simply shuffling.” A 4-year-old boy named Eiji Kishida was out with his mother when the bomb exploded less than a mile away from them. His aunt, Thurlow, who later found the boy said, as per The Wall Street Journal, “His little body transformed into an unrecognisable melted chunk of flesh. He kept begging for water in a faint voice until his death released him from agony.” Days later, on 9 August, another US bomb destroyed Nagasaki, killing over 70,000 people. These nuclear attacks marked the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. The horrors of the war Many survivors, known as hibakusha or bomb victims, have recalled similar heart-wrenching stories about that catastrophic day. Thousands of homes were incinerated, while the city’s rivers were filled with corpses desperately looking for water before they passed away, noted the British daily Guardian. The blast instantly wiped out 80,000 of the city’s 420,000 population. By the end of the year, survivors succumbed to injuries or illnesses due to exposure to radiation taking the death toll to 141,000. Along with bearing the burden of their traumatic memories from that day, the ageing hibakusha also suffer from the long-term effects of radiation. “The cancer rate among elderly A-bomb survivors is high,” Yuki Tanaka, a historian and former professor at Hiroshima City University, told The Guardian. “Many A-bomb survivors have been fighting various cancers and other illnesses typically caused by radiation, such as heart problems, cataracts and leukaemia. There are very few survivors who have not experienced health problems as they’ve grown older.” A US president’s first Hiroshima visit After US president Harry Truman ordered the bombings, it took an American president 71 years to visit Hiroshima.

Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit the city in 2016.

While he paid tribute to the victims, he stopped short of issuing an apology for his country’s actions. Speaking at Peace Memorial Museum, Obama said at the time: “Among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them”. [caption id=“attachment_12617162” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima in 2016. Reuters File Photo[/caption] As per a TIME report, Gerald Ford made the historic first visit by a US president to Japan in 1974. A 2009 investigation by the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun and the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University found that Ford was encouraged to visit Hiroshima by White House official William J Baroody Jr. However, some in the White House believed “such a visit would be adding a dose of negativity to an otherwise positive trip, and that it would risk opening old wounds”, reported TIME. The other view won in the end as Ford only went to Tokyo and Kyoto during his Japan trip. Kishida’s G7 plans Hiroshima is Kishida’s constituency, who said he chose the city to bring attention to nuclear weapons. He will welcome leaders at the Hiroshima Peace Park near where the bomb was dropped. According to Associated Press (AP), the Japanese leader has also planned to escort the G7 leaders to the A-bomb museum, formerly known as Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, where they might also interact with the atomic bomb survivors. The leaders would come across torn school uniforms, the irradiated parts of a lunchbox and the frame of a tricycle, whose three-year-old owner was killed in the blast, as they visit Peace Memorial Museum, reported The Guardian.   “I believe the first step toward any nuclear disarmament effort is to provide a first-hand experience of the consequences of the atomic bombing and to firmly convey the reality,” Kishida said last week. Hibakusha believe this summit is their last opportunity to directly address leaders of the three nuclear powers in the G7 group – the US, the UK and France. “I want to see the leaders commit to getting rid of nuclear weapons,” Shigeaki Mori, an 86-year-old survivor, was quoted as saying by The Guardian. “I also know it’s very hard to get them to go that far.” The only nation to be targeted by nuclear bombs, Japan has spent the last eight decades adopting a pacifist foreign policy, restraining from developing a nuclear arsenal and urging other nations to give up their nuclear weapons. The Asian nation falls under the US nuclear umbrella, meaning America would protect Japan in the event of an attack. Can the G7 be persuaded? Kishida would make efforts to convince the G7 leaders to pledge to more transparency on stockpiles and reduce nuclear weapons, as per The Guardian. “I feel that with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the path toward a world without nuclear weapons has become even tougher,” 65-year-old Kishida told The Wall Street Journal. “But precisely because we are in such times, I feel that it is Japan’s responsibility to human civilisation, as the only nation to suffer an atomic attack in war, to continue carrying high the banner of idealism toward achieving a world without nuclear weapons.” [caption id=“attachment_12617172” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Japan PM Fumio Kishida will make a case for nuclear disarmament to G7 leaders at the summit in Hiroshima. AP[/caption] US president Joe Biden is likely to focus the three-day summit on issues such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the growing threat by China and the challenges posed by global inflation and climate change, The Washington Post reported citing White House aides. With Moscow’s threat of using its nuclear arsenal to defend its “territorial integrity” if needed, the West has realised the importance of nuclear deterrence, noted Japan Times.   According to The Guardian, Biden would not commit to “an independent agenda on nuclear weapons” in Hiroshima. Senior German government sources told the British daily that nuclear disarmament was not a “high priority” and that it was “important mainly for Japan”. With inputs from agencies Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News, India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.