In Japan, bells rang in Nagasaki Sunday as the city commemorated 81 years since the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb. The attack on August 9, 1945, killed 74,000 people — just three days after the U.S. dropped the first nuclear weapon ever used in war on the city of Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people. This is the mayor of Nagasaki.

Mayor Shiro Suzuki: “The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced us to confront the reality that humanity had crossed even the line of using nuclear weapons against human beings. … The theory of nuclear deterrence is extremely risky. Nuclear weapons are not a necessary evil, but an absolute evil, and humanity and nuclear weapons can never coexist.”

The anniversary came as the government of Japan’s ultraconservative Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has shifted defense policies to bolster militarization. Takaichi has been widely ambiguous about her long-term commitment to maintain Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles, endorsed over 50 years ago.