Photo: Cabinet Public Affairs Office of Japan / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later a second bomb struck Nagasaki. Estimates compiled by the city put Hiroshima’s death toll at roughly 140,000 by the end of 1945, with many more dying later from injuries and radiation-related illness.
The ceremony
Each year the City of Hiroshima holds the Peace Memorial Ceremony in Peace Memorial Park, near the ruined dome of the former Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, now the UNESCO-listed Atomic Bomb Dome. The program follows a familiar order: a register of the names of victims who died in the past year is added to the cenotaph, a bell is rung, and the city observes a moment of silence at 8:15. The mayor then reads the Peace Declaration, children read a commitment to peace, and the prime minister of Japan speaks. Doves are released.
The Peace Declaration is the city’s annual message to the world. In recent years it has called on nuclear-armed states to move toward disarmament and urged Japan to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021. Neither the United States nor the other nuclear-armed states have joined it. They point instead to the older Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, whose review conferences have repeatedly ended without a consensus document.
The survivors
The survivors, known in Japan as hibakusha, have been the moral center of the anniversary for decades. Their numbers are falling each year and their average age is now well above 80. In 2024 the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo, the national organization of atomic bomb survivors, for its decades of testimony against the use of nuclear weapons.
Remembrance closer to home
The anniversary is also observed in the Capital Region. The Grafton Peace Pagoda, in the Rensselaer County hills east of Troy, was built by the Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist order, which has built peace pagodas around the world since the war, and it has long been a gathering place for remembrance and peace walks. Faith communities and peace groups in Albany and the Hudson Valley hold their own observances in early August.
Where the debate stands
Arms control between the United States and Russia has narrowed sharply. The New START treaty, the last remaining agreement limiting the two countries’ deployed strategic warheads, reached the end of its term in February 2026, and its on-site inspections had been suspended for years before that. Debates over modernizing nuclear arsenals continue in Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
For readers who want to go deeper, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum’s website publishes testimony and the text of every Peace Declaration, and the U.S. National Archives holds the government’s records of the decision to use the bomb.
