Leaders from India and other nations invited to the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima on Sunday visited the city's peace museum documenting the devastation of the 1945 atomic bombing, two days after a similar tour by the member states.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose country possesses nuclear arms, is the first Indian leader to visit Hiroshima, the world's first atomic-bombed city, since India successfully tested a nuclear bomb in 1974.
The latest visits to the museum came after the leaders of G7 countries, including its three nuclear-possessing countries -- the United States, Britain and France -- made their historic first joint visit to the museum on Friday. The other G7 members are Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan.
India, which also conducted nuclear tests in the 1990s, has been increasing its stockpile of nuclear warheads and is estimated by the Federation of American Scientists to possess 164 as of this year.
The country is one of just four U.N. members that have not signed the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. It also does not participate in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
The visit by the so-called outreach nations comes as Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida aims to make a "world without nuclear weapons" a key theme of the three-day event.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum conveys the suffering of victims through exhibits including burnt and tattered clothing, charred lunch boxes and human hair that fell out due to radiation exposure. The U.S. atomic bomb was dropped on Aug. 6, 1945 and had killed some 140,000 people in the city as of the end of that year.
Amid increased global insecurity, Kishida extended invitations to major nations of the "Global South" including India and Brazil to join the summit. The term collectively refers to emerging and developing countries in areas such as Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Other nations invited to the summit are Australia, Comoros, the Cook Islands, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam.
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