TOKYO, August 9. /TASS/. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, speaking at the ceremony to mark the 81th anniversary of Nagasaki atomic bombing, failed to mention that the bomb on the city was dropped by the United States.

"81 years ago, Nagasaki was fully destroyed by a single atomic bomb," she said, without elaborating on who dropped it.

At the same time, Nagasaki Mayor Shiro Suzuki, who delivered his speech before Takaichi, admitted that the bomb was dropped by "a US military plane."

In a statement, read out by UN Under-Secretary-General of Disarmament Affairs Izumi Nakamitsu, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also did not directly name the country that bombed Nagasaki in his message marking the 81st anniversary of the attack.

Three days ago, during a similar ceremony marking the Hiroshima bombing, Guterres, Takaichi and Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui also stopped short of directly naming the culprit.

Japanese officials generally do not emphasize in public speeches that the United States carried out the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the same time, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum presents comprehensive information about the atomic bombings of 1945. Japanese school and university textbooks also cover their history in detail.

The United States carried out the atomic bombings of the two cities at the very end of World War II, with the officially stated aim of accelerating Japan’s surrender. They remain the only instances of nuclear weapons being used in warfare in human history. According to various estimates, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed between 70,000 and 100,000 people on the day of the explosion. By the end of 1945, the death toll had risen to 140,000 as people died in hospitals from their injuries and radiation exposure. The total number of victims of the bombing now exceeds 350,000.

The United States still does not acknowledge moral responsibility for the atomic bombings, justifying its actions as a "military necessity." Former President Joe Biden, who attended the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima in May 2023, did not apologize for the nuclear attacks. Neither did Barack Obama, who in 2016 became the first sitting US president to visit the memorial. US President Donald Trump has not visited the memorials in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, although the two Japanese cities invited him both during his first presidential term and after his return to the White House.