European Council President Charles Michel (from left), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Emmanuel Macron, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, President Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at a monument for atomic bomb victims in Hiroshima, Japan, Friday.

Stefan Rousseau/AP

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Stefan Rousseau/AP

European Council President Charles Michel (from left), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Emmanuel Macron, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, President Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at a monument for atomic bomb victims in Hiroshima, Japan, Friday.

Stefan Rousseau/AP

HIROSHIMA, Japan — As President Biden and the leaders of the Group of Seven main industrial nations gathered in Hiroshima, host nation Japan tried to make use of the highly effective symbolism of the summit’s setting — the primary metropolis on the planet to undergo a nuclear assault — to attract the leaders right into a consensus on world challenges.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on his first go to to Asia, got here to the Hiroshima Peace Park on Sunday. In an announcement, the G-7 leaders pledged in Hiroshima, a “symbol of peace,” to attempt for a “comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine” as quickly as attainable.

On Friday morning, Biden and the opposite G-7 leaders visited the Hiroshima Peace Park and the long-lasting “atomic bomb dome” close to the middle of the devastation which, on Aug. 6, 1945, left round 140,000 individuals useless.

They additionally spoke to a survivor and visited a museum on the park, all meant to convey the inhumanity of nuclear battle.

Hiroshi Harada, the museum’s former director who’s a “hibakusha,” because the atomic bomb survivors are recognized, says the reveals can’t presumably inform the entire story.

“If we were to reproduce the situation of that time,” he says, “no one, including myself, would be able to enter the museum.”

The reveals can reproduce sights and sounds, however not smells, he notes.

“The smell that 140,000 citizens emit when their bodies rot and are thrown under the blazing sun cannot be forgotten, even almost 80 years later,” he says.

Hirada, who was 6 years previous in 1945, was getting ready to flee the town when the United States dropped the bomb a few mile from the place he was standing at Hiroshima’s prepare station.

In this Aug. 6, 1945, photograph launched by the U.S. Army, a mushroom cloud billows about one hour after a nuclear bomb was detonated above Hiroshima, Japan.

/U.S. Army by way of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum/AP

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/U.S. Army by way of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum/AP

In this Aug. 6, 1945, photograph launched by the U.S. Army, a mushroom cloud billows about one hour after a nuclear bomb was detonated above Hiroshima, Japan.

/U.S. Army by way of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum/AP

“Of course, there were heat rays and the blast,” he recollects. “But I happened to be in the shadow of the station building, so miraculously, I survived.”

Hirada and different hibakusha, or survivors, share a lifelong ambition with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who represents Hiroshima in parliament: to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

“I understand that he was listening to stories about the horrors of nuclear weapons from his grandmother, as a child,” says Noriyuki Shikata, Cabinet secretary for public affairs.

A pall of smoke lingers over this scene of destruction in Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 7, 1945, a day after the explosion of the atomic bomb.

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A pall of smoke lingers over this scene of destruction in Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 7, 1945, a day after the explosion of the atomic bomb.

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Given the mounting nuclear tensions among the many U.S., Russia, China and North Korea, “it’s very challenging to get rid of nuclear weapons all of a sudden,” Shikata says. “But we can make various steps forward in terms of continuing to reduce the global stockpile of nuclear weapons and improving transparency surrounding our nuclear programs.”

These measures are outlined in Japan’s “Hiroshima Action Plan,” which was referenced in a G-7 leaders’ statement on the nuclear issue.

Hibakusha have referred to as for Japan to signal and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which bans the use, possession, testing and switch of nuclear arms. But Japan has refused to take action, as it’s protected by U.S. nuclear weapons.

Japan’s dilemma is that it should “rely on nuclear weapons for its security, even as it also has the kind of moral imperative to argue for disarmament based on its experience of having received nuclear damage,” says Toby Dalton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

A Kyodo News poll final month of 521 respondents who have been straight affected by the bombing discovered that greater than two-thirds didn’t consider the Hiroshima G-7 assembly would result in vital course of in eliminating nuclear weapons.

“Many hibakusha have been betrayed by our own government, many times,” says Keiko Nakamura, affiliate professor on the Nagasaki University Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition.

Despite the hibakusha’s disappointment, she provides, they welcome the possibility the G-7 assembly affords to get their message out, and “they have hope that one day the Japanese government will listen to the real voice of the hibakusha and change their course.”

Speaking by cellphone after the G-7 leaders’ go to to the Peace Park, Harada, the previous museum director, famous that the leaders solely spoke to at least one survivor, and the total contents of their discussions haven’t been made public.

The leaders wrote messages in guestbooks on the museum, in line with Japan’s Foreign Ministry.

Harada says he learn the messages, “but they were superficial. What we expect is not only their messages, but also their actions, after they return to their own countries.”

Takehiro Masutomo contributed to this report in Tokyo and Hiroshima.