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No wars and bombings

Apr 16,2016 - Last updated at Apr 16,2016

The US came closer than ever to “apologising” for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 when US Secretary of State John Kerry, together with seven other foreign ministers of countries that make up the G-7 group, visited the revered monument honouring the 160,000 Japanese people killed by the first of the two nuclear weapons used on the Japanese city.

What Kerry said at the site shows how close Washington got to express remorse and regret for the indiscriminate killing of some many innocent civilians during World War II.

“It is a gut-wrenching display,” Kerry said at the site.

“It tugs at all of your sensitivities as a human being,” he continued to say emotionally.

I have a hunch that Kerry’s visit to Hiroshima was approved by President Barack Obama who must feel that it is time his country expresses regret over the deployment of atomic bombs on civilian targets at the end of the war in 1945.

I believe that Obama himself has been mulling for some time about an apology for the terrible thing.

My guess is that he will apologise before the end of his term at the White House.

An apology is in order. The use of nuclear weapons against civilians is deemed a crime against humanity and a war crime under the Rome Statue that created the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998.

It is also a war crime and a crime against humanity under the 1949 Geneva law that preceded ICC.

On the other side of the coin, most other weapons used during the two world wars and still used during wars that occurred since then are also of indiscriminate nature and, therefore, their deployment, constituting war crimes under international law, is as condemnable.

It is now confirmed that no less than 300,000 people were killed during the five-year civil war in Syria by non-nuclear bombs.

Similar high civilian casualties occurred in the Vietnam war and in Gaza.

Democratic candidate to the White House Bernie Sanders described Israeli bombing of Gaza as indiscriminate.

Whether nuclear or conventional weapons are used in armed conflicts, the end result is the same: indiscriminate killings.

Kerry may have summed up the tragedies of war and the choices of weapons used to wage them when he said at the memorial site in Hiroshima that the occasion “reminds everyone of the extraordinary complex choices of war and of what war does to people, to communities, to countries, to the world”.

 

These fitting words sum up the arguments against wars and the use of nuclear and other weapons.

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