Pelosi Makes HistoricVisit to Hiroshima

The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the third most important person in her nation’s government, Nancy Pelosi, carried out a historic visit to the Japanese site of Hiroshima on Tuesday, on the occasion of a debate with her counterparts of the G8 countries.

Mrs. Pelosi, a member of the Democratic Party, is the highest elected official in the U.S. to come to Hiroshima (west), where no American president or vice-president has come to pay respects to the victims of the first atomic attack in history. She bowed after having placed a wreath bouquet before the memorial for peace.

School children waved flags of Japan, the United States and other countries of the G8 (Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, and Russia), then sang peaceful odes after the placing of the wreath.

The president of the French National Assembly, Bernard Accoyer, charged with then opening a debate on disarmament, warned against the possession of nuclear weapons by “instable states” or actors refusing “dialogue.”

“Peace and international security are in jeopardy,” he assessed, citing the risk of “destabilization” in the case that Iran were to equip itself with the atomic bomb.

Warning against “naïve pacifism,” he estimated that disarmament could not progress without the cooperation of all nations, implying that unilateral abandonment of the bomb by a nuclear power would not make the world more secure.

“In the 90s, despite the efforts of nations endowed in the domain of nuclear disarmament, proliferation has complicated and reinforced the threat,” recalled Mr. Accoyer.

On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the village of Hiroshima that caused the death of 140,000 people. Some deaths were immediate because of the heat or blow of the explosion, while others, in the months that followed, were victims of the after-effects of radiation.

The United States dropped another nuclear bomb on August 9th, 1945 on Nagasaki (south-west) that caused 70,000 deaths.

Japan had surrendered on August 15th, ending the second World War, but the pertinence of these atomic bombardments remains very controversial. In Japan, nationalists and pacifists consider these nuclear attacks to be an unpardonable wrong. But in the United States the opinion is less clear-cut.

Numerous veterans of the war are convinced that the dropping of the atomic bombs prevented a murderous landing of the American army in the Japanese archipelago. The pacifist movements and the left, on the other hand, denounce a horrible waste of human lives.

Historians are also split. Some consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be a “necessary wrong” to persuade the blind Japanese authorities determined on fighting until the end to fold.

Other researchers support instead the idea that the “realist” camp was gaining ground in power in Tokyo, and that they were trying to negotiate the conditions of Japan’s surrender. According to those researchers, the American government remained deaf to these appeals before using the atomic bomb. Washington wanted to test its new weapon and impress Stalin’s USSR, in the context of a pre-Cold War, they argue.