The mayor of Hiroshima has called on the world’s most powerful countries to abandon nuclear deterrence today as Japan marks a solemn anniversary: 80 years since the Americans dropped the world’s first nuclear bomb on the city of Hiroshima, ending the Second World War through devastating means.
The ceremony in the city’s peace memorial park was attended by Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba and officials from 120 countries. It was perhaps the last significant opportunity for large numbers of hibakusha – survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – to recount their experiences about the horror of nuclear warfare. Less than 100,000 survivors are still alive, and their average age is 86.
This is a significant anniversary too because it falls at a time when the threat of an atomic weapon being used in the 21st century is on the rise. Speaking from Hiroshima, mayor Kazumi Matsui voiced grave concern about the “accelerating trend towards military build-up” worldwide, and over the growing acceptance of “the idea that nuclear weapons are essential for national defence”.
He labelled these developments a “flagrant disregard [of] lessons the international community should have learned from the tragedies of history”.
The dropping of the US atomic bombs in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and on Nagasaki three days later killed more than 200,000 people – some from the immediate blast and others from radiation sickness and burns. The legacy of the weapons still haunts survivors, many of whom have suffered multiple cancers from radiation exposure.
The horror unleashed prompted Japan to surrender, finally ending the Second World War. As Iain MacGregor writes in Engelsberg Ideas today, the Japanese empire’s acceptance of unconditional surrender was a unique moment. It was the only time in modern history that a major industrial nation has chosen to surrender without a single enemy soldier occupying its territory.
The use of such a devastating arsenal changed the post-war world forever. As MacGregor puts it, the realisation dawned: “If such a weapon should proliferate around the globe, they could not just destroy cities, but would wipe out civilisation itself.”
In 2024, Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons and raise awareness about the catastrophic consequences of their use.
Unfortunately, their mission has been heavily set back by an increasingly dangerous new world order. Amid such geopolitical volatility, the threat of widespread nuclear proliferation is once again rearing its ugly head.
Russian aggression in Europe, combined with the (partial) withdrawal of the US security blanket, has, for instance, already prompted Poland to shift its stance on nuclear weapons. In March, President Donald Tusk told Polish parliament: “We must achieve the most modern capabilities even in nuclear weapons.”
Nine countries currently possess nuclear weapons: the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Another ten to twenty (including Japan) are “threshold” states, which possess much of the knowledge and skills to make their own bombs, but have yet to do so.
As James Rose wrote recently in Reaction, looking at recent history, it’s difficult to escape the bleak conclusion that having nuclear weapons buys you security.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Ukraine was left with the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. In 1994, it agreed to hand over all of its nuclear warheads to Moscow in exchange for security assurances from Russia, the US and the UK.
Following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, former US President Bill Clinton expressed regret for piling pressure on Kyiv to sign the 1994 deal, conceding that “Russia [would not] have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons”.
The brutal regimes of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi both gave up their nuclear weapons programmes, only to later be attacked and deposed by Western states. Other nations will have taken note.
Successive Japanese government have rejected calls by hibakusha survivors to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, setting out to ban the possession and use of nuclear weapons. In an ironic historical twist, Japan has done so because being under the nuclear umbrella of its now-ally America offers it protection.
Dozens of countries have signed the treaty, but – perhaps unsurprisingly – none of these signatures come from recognised nuclear powers or nations, such as Japan, that consider themselves to be indirectly protected by America’s nuclear arsenal.
Satoshi Tanaka, a Japanese atomic bomb survivor, expressed his fears today that the world “will continue to live alongside nuclear weapons that could wipe out humanity multiple times over.”
An end to the age of “Mutually Assured Destruction” does indeed appear further off than ever.
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