NAGASAKI, Japan (AFP) – Pope Francis yesterday railed against atomic weapons, the nuclear deterrent, and the growing arms trade, as he paid tribute to the victims of the “unspeakable horror” of the Nagasaki bomb.
In a highly symbolic visit to the Japanese city devastated by the nuclear attack in August 1945, Francis said nuclear weapons were “not the answer” to a desire for security, peace, and stability.
“Indeed they seem always to thwart it,” he said.
At least 74,000 people died from the atomic bomb unleashed on the city in western Japan – just three days after the world’s first nuclear attack hit Hiroshima and killed at least 140,000.
“This place makes us deeply aware of the pain and horror that we human beings are capable of inflicting upon one another,” said the somber Pontiff on the first full day of his Japan trip.
Hundreds of people in white waterproofs sat in torrential rain to hear the Pope’s speech, next to the emblematic photo of a young boy carrying his dead baby brother on his back in the aftermath of the attack.
He laid a wreath of white flowers and prayed silently, unprotected from the lashing downpour.
Francis took aim at what he called the “perverse dichotomy” of nuclear deterrence, saying that peace is incompatible with the “fear of mutual destruction or the threat of total annihilation.”
This marked a break with past pontiffs – in a 1982 United Nations speech, Pope John Paul II had described nuclear deterrence as a necessary evil.
The 82-year-old Francis also hit out at the “money that is squandered and the fortune made” in the arms trade, describing it as an “affront crying out to Heaven” in a world where “millions of children are living in inhumane conditions.”
Francis will visit Hiroshima later yesterday and meet survivors of the atomic attack, known in Japanese as hibakusha, at the world-famous Peace Memorial in the city synonymous with the horror of nuclear war.
Two survivors of Nagasaki, 89-year-old Shigemi Fukahori and 85-year-old Sakue Shimohira, handed the wreath to the pope.
Fukahori, a Catholic, has prayed every day for those killed and their bereaved families.
“My heart is just full of overflowing feelings,” he said. “Just meeting him is enough. I’m so glad and speechless.”
Shimohira, who was 10 at the time of the attack, conveyed the terror of the bomb.
“My mother and older sister were killed, charred. Even if you survived, you couldn’t live like a human or die like a human… It’s the horror of nuclear weapons,” she said.
