Horatores pacis

On August 6th 1945 the first time in history a nuclear weapon had been used outside a test area and was dropped on a major town. Suddenly a single plane with a single bomb was able to erase a whole city. Within a moment around 80,000 people died in the atomic inferno – by the end of the year, injury and radiation brought the total number of deaths to 140,000. When in 1947 on the occasion of the first Peace Festival near Ground Zero, the mayor of Hiroshima, Shinzo Hamai, raised his voice to commemorate the dead; he invented a tradition of Peace Declarations, delivered each year by the acting mayor. These mayors became horatores pacis: reminding and warning speakers for peace.