Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has not thought twice before remaining tight-lipped about the fact that it was the US who dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945.
"Seventy-nine years ago today, an atomic bomb deprived people, said to number well more than 100,000, of their precious lives. It reduced the city to ashes and mercilessly deprived people of their dreams and bright futures," Kishida said in an address at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony on Tuesday.
He went even further by referring to an alleged “nuclear threat” from Russia, which purportedly makes “the situation surrounding nuclear disarmament all the more challenging.”
About 140,000 people were killed as a result of the August 6, 1945 US' atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Three days later, Americans dropped another atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing an additional 74,000 people. The US remains the world’s only country to have used a nuclear weapon against a population center.
As for Kishida’s "Russian nuclear threat" allegations, President Vladimir Putin earlier underscored that there could be no winners in a nuclear war, and it should never be unleashed, noting that Russia consistently follows the letter and spirit of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
A Russian nuclear doctrine, which was signed by Putin in 2020, dubs nuclear weapons "a means of deterrence", stressing that their use is an "extreme and compelled measure." The document declares that Russia "takes all necessary efforts to reduce the nuclear threat, and prevent aggravation of interstate relations that could trigger military conflicts, including nuclear ones."
Under the doctrine, Russia could use nuclear weapons "in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies, as well as in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy."