Nagasaki (AsiaNews) – Nagasaki today marked with prayers and official ceremonies the 62nd anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city, three days after that on Hiroshima, killing 27,000 people in an instant.
Thousands of people, including children and many survivors, bowed their heads and observed a minute's silence at 11:02 am (0202 GMT), the exact moment when ‘Fat Boy’, the world's second atomic bomb, was dropped on August 9, 1945.
The occasion gave Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue to warn against the breakdown of anti-nuclear efforts.
“We are facing a crisis in terms of the breakdown of the very structure of nuclear non-proliferation," he said during the ceremony.
Besides the five established nuclear states of the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China, Taue lashed out at India, Pakistan and North Korea, which last October conducted nuclear tests, as well as Iran, which is pursuing a controversial civilian nuclear programme.
On that fateful morning 62 years ago, at 11.02 am, 30 people and two priests were inside Urakami Cathedral, the largest Catholic church in Asia at the time, for confession. The heat generated by the blast was so intense that the building and everyone inside burnt up.
Today like every year a special mass was held at Urakami Cathedral in remembrance of the victims of the tragic event. Some 8,500 of the city’s 12,000 Catholics perished that day.
Another 60,000 people died over the next year. At total of 143,124 people have died as a result of the bomb—about a thousand more die each year.