SOLNECHNOGORSK, August 9. /TASS/. Not a single American president has ever offered an apology to the people of Japan for the terrible and militarily senseless atomic bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharov told an audience at the all-Russia youth forum Terra Scientia near Moscow.
"Currently, the prevailing attitude regarding the nuclear tragedy of the two Japanese cities in the United States and in Japan, too, which is under the influence of US propaganda, has nothing to do with historical truth. It depends entirely on time-serving political considerations. Historical truth has been sacrificed for a military and political alliance between the two countries," she pointed out. "To this day not a single US president has presented any real, full-scale apologies for the atomic strikes the way it should have been done. Japanese society strictly observes the taboo on simple public mentions of the plain facts related to those events. In the public space, everybody painstakingly keeps quiet about what country dropped the atomic bombs on Japan’s civilian population and what country is to blame for the terrible and senseless deaths of multitudes of its fellow citizens."
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first and fortunately sole instance of nuclear weapons being used against the civilian population," Zakharova said. "It is especially cynical the Target Committee the US leadership created in the spring of 1945 intentionally refrained from pinpoint attacks against Japanese military facilities. In fact Washington deliberately opted for the mass extermination of civilian population."
The US military carried out the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II on August 6 and 9, 1945. The official aim was to accelerate the capitulation of Imperial Japan. The bombings were the sole-ever combat use of nuclear weapons. To this day, the United States has never recognized its moral responsibility. It argues that such actions were justified militarily.