MOSCOW, August 4. /TASS/. Russia stands against forgetting about the moral side of atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, State Duma Speaker Sergey Naryshkin said on Thursday.
Some are trying to erase "the ugly moral side" of bombings from the memory of the humankind, Naryshkin said at a session at the Rosatom state atomic energy corporation devoted to the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings. "Our country is against such silence and oblivion," the Duma speaker said.
He also called for legal assessment of the nuclear bombings of the Japanese cities. "This barbaric, cynical crime against civilians, which was not in any way justified from the military point of view, should be classified as a crime against humanity that has no expiration date. However, it has still not been properly legally assessed," the lawmaker noted.
Those who committed those crimes planned that destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki will become a threat to the Soviet Union. "The then US authorities sacrificed tens of thousands of human lives to their goals. Contemporaries knew this very well but descendants should not forget about that as well," he added.
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Naryshkin reminded that USSR designed a counterbalance to US atomic weapons, ensured strategic parity and thus prevented a nuclear war. "At the end, it was our country that opened the history of peaceful atom and thus made the development of atomic sphere constructive," the speaker said.
He also noted that humankind has been living in the nuclear epoch for over 70 years. "Even if someone wanted to, it is impossible to return to the past, rewrite the history of science and technology , and forget about the opposite - tragic - side of such powerful discoveries and breakthrough technologies," the lawmaker concluded.
The US Armed Forces dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the end of World War II. The purpose was to speed up the capitulation of Japan. Those atomic attacks became the only examples of combat use of nuclear weapons in human history.