Nagasaki Mayor Shiro Suzuki on Thursday condemned U.S. President Donald Trump’s order for the Defense Department to restart nuclear tests, calling it “absolutely unacceptable.”
“The act tramples on people’s grueling efforts to achieve a world without nuclear weapons,” the mayor of the southwestern Japan city, on which the United States dropped an atomic bomb 80 years ago, said at a news conference.
The Hiroshima Prefecture Federation of A-Bomb Victims Associations issued a statement protesting Trump’s instruction, saying it “tramples on the feelings of Hiroshima for the abolition of nuclear weapons.”
The group, based in the city of Hiroshima, which also suffered a U.S. atomic bombing in 1945, urged the Trump administration not to resume testing nuclear weapons.
The Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, or Nihon Hidankyo, the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, released a statement from its secretary-general, Jiro Hamasumi. It says that Trump’s order “opposes countries striving for a world without nuclear weapons” and that the confederation “asks the United States to take the lead in abolishing” nuclear weapons. The statement will be sent to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.
Suzuki, the Nagasaki mayor, said that starting nuclear tests immediately means that Trump does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told Trump during their meeting in Tokyo on Tuesday that she intends to nominate him for the prize, according to a senior U.S. administration official.
Trump said in a social media post on Thursday, “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”
The U.S. president last month signed an executive order directing the Department of Defense to be known as the Department of War.
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