TOKYO, August 6. /TASS/. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres stated that nuclear weapons were "nonsense" during a ceremony in Japan marking the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Saturday.
"Nuclear weapons are nonsense. Three-quarters of a century later, we must ask what we’ve learned from the mushroom cloud that swelled above this city in 1945," Guterres pointed out.
It is totally unacceptable for states in possession of nuclear weapons to admit the possibility of a nuclear war, he added.
The UN chief called on members of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons "to work urgently to eliminate the stockpiles that threaten our future, to strengthen dialogue, diplomacy and negotiation, and to support my disarmament agenda by eliminating these devices of destruction".
On August 6, 1945, the US Air Force’s Enola Gay B-29 Superfortress dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. According to various estimates, between 70,000 and 100,000 people were killed in one day. The number of victims rose to 140,000 by the end of 1945 as many had died of wounds and radiation exposure. Over the past year, about 4,900 names of the deceased ‘hibakusha’ (the local residents who survived in the US atomic bombings) were added to memorial books, which also contain the names of those who died in the attack but whose death has not been confirmed so far. The total number of victims has already exceeded 350,000.