Pope urges abolition of nuclear weapons at Japan’s ground zeros
Pope Francis brought his campaign to abolish nuclear weapons to the only two cities ever hit by atomic bombs yesterday, calling their possession indefensibly perverse and immoral and their use a crime against mankind and nature.
Francis visited the ground zeros of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both seared in the world’s collective consciousness after the bombs dropped there by the United States three days apart in August 1945 in an effort to end World War Two.
“Here, in an incandescent burst of lightning and fire, so many men and women, so many dreams and hopes, disappeared, leaving behind only shadows and silence,” Francis said at Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial after standing in silent prayer and listening to a harrowing account by a survivor.
Yoshiko Kajimoto, who was 14 at the time, recalled “people walking side by side like ghosts, people whose whole body was so burnt that I could not tell the difference between men and women, their hair standing on end, their faces swollen to double size, their lips hanging loose, with both hands held out with burnt skin hanging from them. No one in this world can imagine such a scene of hell,” she said.
More than 100,000 people died instantly in the attacks and about 400,000 others died in subsequent months, years and decades of radiation sickness or illnesses.
“The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, so too the possession of nuclear weapons is immoral, as I already said two years ago,” the pope said in Hiroshima.
Earlier in Nagasaki, Pope issued direct denunciations and demands.
Resources spent on the “arms race” should be used for development and protection of the environment, Francis said in Nagasaki.
“In a world where millions of children and families live in inhumane conditions, the money squandered and the fortunes made through the manufacture, upgrading, maintenance and sale of ever more destructive weapons, are an affront crying out to heaven,” he said.
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