Mary the Hibakusha, a statue found around 500 meters from ground zero after the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki, was placed on the altar during a mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York on May 2, 2010, a day before the U.N. Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. The statue was brought to New York by Mitsuaki Takami, archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Nagasaki.
Mary the Hibakusha has become a messenger of peace and non-violence telling the world the horror and absurdity of nuclear weapons.
Speaking at the Non-proliferation conference, remembering the terrible toll of the nuclear attacks during World War II on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a senior United Nations official Monday appealed for an end to the use of the weapons, which remain an “apocalyptic” threat.
The two cities were destroyed in August 1945, and more than 200,000 people died of nuclear radiation, shock waves from the blasts and thermal radiation.
More than 400,000 more people have died – and are continuing to die – since the end of World War II from the impacts of the bombs.
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