An 84-year-old witness to the Hiroshima nuclear attack called on countries to stop having nuclear weapons, indicating the serious consequences of a possible nuclear war.
"A nuclear war would probably bring the end of the world. I want all nuclear weapons to be eradicated," Sadae Kasaoka said at a panel discussion organized by Ibn Haldun University on Tuesday. On her first visit to Turkey at the invitation of the Turkish Red Crescent, she shared her bitter experiences over the nuclear attack.
She has dedicated her life to struggle for the elimination of nuclear bombs all over the world and told her painful story, while being brave enough to reveal her old scars.
"It has been 72 years" she said, adding: "I was only 12 when I lost both my mother and my father in this nuclear disaster. And they were just two of 140,000 people who died in this incident. Somehow I survived. Today, a nuclear war would probably bring the end of the world. I want all nuclear weapons to be eradicated."
Ibn Haldun University President Recep Şentürk expressed his pleasure at hosting such a guest at the university and stressed that drawing lessons from the past is also an education itself. "Informing younger generations about damage that wars have caused is of utmost importance. I hope the experiences and life story of our guest will be a lesson for us and for the young. People can easily turn to war if they to forget its consequences. We must pay close attention to experiences and sufferings of war witnesses, if we don't want these painful incidents to happen again," he said.
Red Crescent President Kerem Kınık pointed out that "a crazy armament race" all around the world is apparent nowadays and said that Turkey is striving to have a moral standing in this picture.
In 1945, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Japan, on Nagasaki on the island of Kyushu, killing another 70,000 three days after the Hiroshima bombing. Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, ending World War II. Barack Obama traveled to Hiroshima in May 2016, becoming the first incumbent U.S. president to visit the site of the deadly bombing. He expressed sympathy for the victims, but did not offer an apology for the attack.
