Hiroshima Marks 70th Anniversary of World's First Nuclear Attack

"Democracy Now!" airs weekdays at 9 a.m. PT on KCET.

Seventy years ago today, at 8:15 in the morning, the U.S. dropped the world's first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Destruction from the bomb was massive. Shock waves, radiation, and heat rays took the lives of some 140,000 people. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing another 74,000. President Harry Truman announced the attack on Hiroshima in a nationally televised address on August 6, 1945.

Today, as the sun came up in Hiroshima, tens of thousands began to gather in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park to commemorate the world's first nuclear attack. "Democracy Now!" is joined by the acclaimed Japanese novelist and winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, Kenzaburo Oe, whose books address political and social issues, including nuclear weapons and nuclear power. "If Mr. Obama were to come to the memorial ceremonies in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, for example, what he could do is come together with the hibakusha, the survivors, and share that moment of silence, and also express considering the issue of nuclear weapons from the perspective of all humanity and how important nuclear abolition is from that perspective -- I think, would be the most important thing, and the most important thing that any politician or representative could do at this time," says Oe, who has also spoken out in defense of Japan's pacifist constitution, which Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has pushed to amend in order to allow the country to send troops into conflict for the first time since World War II.