by Joana Ramiro and James Tweedie

HUNDREDS of thousands of people all over the world united today to tell world leaders: “Don’t forget Hiroshima,” 70 years after the atomic bomb annihilated the Japanese city.

And today — exactly 70 years on from the Hiroshima bombing and almost to the day of the equally devastating Nagasaki bombing — medics at Japanese Red Cross Society hospitals are treating thousands of survivors — known as Hibakusha — for long-term health effects.

Nearly two-thirds of deaths at the institutions are due to cancer.

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) president Peter Maurer said: “What more compelling argument could there be for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, especially as most of the bombs in the arsenals of nuclear-armed states today are more powerful and destructive?”

 In the year last year alone, the Japanese Red Cross Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors hospitals treated almost 11,000 of the nearly 200,000 living survivors.

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies president Tadateru Konoe will appeal for world leaders to sit  at peace memorial ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki this week.

“This commemoration is a reminder of the indiscriminate humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons,” he said.

“It is a reminder that these consequences travel across space and time and that, once unleashed, they can never be contained.”

Meanwhile events in London and Edinburgh today will also mark the countdown towards the potential renewal of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons in March 2016. Heading the ceremony in the capital will be Labour leadership frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn, a long-standing anti-nuclear advocate, who called on the government to lead the disarmament. 

“The 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima should serve as a reminder to us all of the human cost of war,” Mr Corbyn told the Star.

“It should also remind us of the lack of progress in achieving nuclear disarmament, despite global agreement on the need to do so. “We must break the impasse in global negotiations and push forward to an agreement that sees these weapons banned, as we have with chemical, biological and other weapons of mass destruction.”

Mr Corbyn will stand alongside the Green Party’s Jenny Jones AM, writer AL Kennedy, Battersea Peace Pagoda Reverend Gyoro Nagase and others during the two-minute silence honouring the hundreds of thousands killed in the bombings. 

The event will be hosted by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, whose general secretary Kate Hudson said she was mourning both the 1945 victims and those “whose lives have been blighted by their effects.”

She added: “On this poignant anniversary we must reaffirm our determination that this should never happen again. 

“The British government can play its part by scrapping Trident and kick-starting global abolition. 

“Senior military figures say that Trident is militarily useless and the British public thinks it’s immoral and exorbitantly expensive. 

“Today of all days we should remember what the effects of a nuclear bomb are and realise the only way to stop another detonation — by accident or design — is by getting rid of all of them.”

Participants will be laying white flowers by the Hiroshima Commemorative Cherry Tree planted on the square in 1967. 

In Scotland, members of Trident Ploughshares will be kicking off a fasting period of three days in an event launched by MSPs Fiona Hyslop and Bill Kidd.

The fast will last from today, when Hiroshima was hit by the first atomic bomb, until August 9, the date of the Nagasaki attack.