Photo/Illutration From left: Ivana Hughes, Batyrkhan Kurmanseit, Mitsuru Kurosawa, Terumi Tanaka and Seiko Mimaki participate in a panel discussion at the International Symposium for Peace at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki on July 27. (Masaru Komiyaji)

NAGASAKI--Japan and the United States have a “special responsibility” to lead efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, the head of a U.S. nongovernmental organization told a 30th international peace symposium.

Ivana Hughes, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, was speaking at the “International Symposium for Peace: The Road to Nuclear Weapons Abolition” held at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum on July 27.

She said damage from radiation is still an issue in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean 70 years after the largest U.S. hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll.

“After all, although for different reasons, the United States and Japan both have a special responsibility to not only join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, but to lead efforts toward its full and complete implementation and total elimination of nuclear weapons,” Hughes said as she wound up her keynote speech.

Many speakers felt that the global situation surrounding nuclear weapons has deteriorated over the past 30 years, with nuclear disarmament stalled, and expressed concerns about growing international tensions, citing Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict.

“We should think about nuclear abolition from the perspective of the security of ‘mankind,’ not of nations,” said Mitsuru Kurosawa, an expert on nuclear disarmament and professor emeritus at Osaka University.

Batyrkhan Kurmanseit, minister-counselor at the Kazakhstan Embassy in Japan, said Kazakhstan is the only former Soviet republic that ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. He said an international framework for nuclear abolition has never been more needed than right now.

The Asahi Shimbun has been a co-sponsor of the annual symposium, which has alternately been held in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the municipal governments and local peace organizations every summer since 1995.

Terumi Tanaka, a hibakusha atomic bomb survivor and co-chair of the Japan Federation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization (Nihon Hidankyo), and Seiko Mimaki, an associate professor at Doshisha University’s graduate school specializing in U.S. politics and diplomacy, also participated in the symposium’s panel discussion.

In a speech, Kan Sang-jung, president of Chinzei Gakuin University in Nagasaki Prefecture, emphasized the importance of listening to hibakusha, saying that many lives have been lost as countries clash over what they believe is just amid the post-Cold War rise of nationalism.

Hibakusha Shizuko Mitamura read a hand-made picture card show that tells the story of what happened to her on Aug. 9, 1945, when the city of Nagasaki was leveled by atomic bombing, and the loss of her daughter to cancer in 2010, when she was 39.

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