Sadae Kasaoka was 12 when she was exposed to the explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Now a nonagenarian, wiry and animated, she tells the story as if it was yesterday.
The bomb that was dropped on the Japanese city on 6th August 1945 had the explosive power of 15,000 tons of TNT. It killed in three ways: pressure, heat and radiation. The survivors talk about the pressure, the heat, the people who instantly died, the buildings that disappeared. They didn’t know then about the radiation, though some do remember the rain turning black, and people with burns drinking it, regardless, in their desperation for water. Three days later another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Six days after that Japan surrendered to the Allied forces, ending the Second World War.
No country has detonated a nuclear weapon in war since then, but many more nuclear bombs have been built. And today’s weapons are many times larger; the damage they can cause is far greater.
Kasaoka is speaking to us, a group of analysts and nuclear policy specialists from around the world, who have come at the invitation of the Hiroshima prefecture and the Royal United Services Institute thinktank to analyse possible paths to nuclear disarmament. These experts regularly advise governments. We are well acquainted with the facts and the theories of nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, as the elderly woman recounts the horrors of Hiroshima, several of us are quietly crying.
As the visceral horror of their use fades, nuclear weapons can seem increasingly necessary
The octogenarian and nonagenarian survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the other city hit by an atomic bomb in August 1945—are still working as peace activists, calling for nuclear disarmament. They hold talks three times a day at the city’s Peace Museum and some of them travel the world bearing witness to what these weapons mean for human beings. Kasaoka is one of many paired with a denshosha, an “A-bomb legacy survivor” who translates for her and learns her story in depth over a period of years. As the survivors grow older, this project is designed to ensure their stories are not forgotten.
It is now nearly eight decades after Hiroshima, and nearly 40 years after the peak of nuclear risks in the Cold War. As the visceral horror of their use fades, nuclear weapons can seem increasingly necessary in a world where conflicts are only intensifying. Nuclear deterrence has profoundly affected the international response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for instance. This has limited how far Nato countries are willing to go to defend Ukraine; it has also stopped Russia from carrying out conventional attacks on Nato members.
Russian TV presenters like to joke about nuking Amsterdam or London. North Korea brandishes its nuclear weapons while changing its constitution to designate South Korea as its principal enemy. Officials from Iran, which has always denied that its nuclear programme is for anything other than civilian purposes, have started to openly threaten that it might go for a weapon, at a time when it has traded direct attacks with Israel. China is ramping up its nuclear arsenal. Given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s claims on Taiwan, a US congressional review this year found that the US should upgrade its “strategic posture” to ensure it would be able to deter—or if necessary fight—two wars concurrently. One with a nuclear-armed Russia, the other with a nuclear-armed China.
Anxieties about a third world war are growing as those of us living in peaceful countries watch conflicts remotely, our smartphones offering up an infinite scroll of atrocity imagery from Syria, Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza. When the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings took place, the Japanese government tried to prevent them being reported. The local police in Hiroshima banned the use of the term “atomic bomb” in the press. Meanwhile the US government covered up the real nature of the impact and denied the emerging reports that the explosion caused a new and terrible sickness. Imagine if a nuclear bomb was used today. It would be far more difficult for a government to control the reporting of its effects, but there would be far more denial and disinformation. This would then complicate military, humanitarian and political responses.
Today’s social media feeds are full of footage of death, but there are only a handful of photos of Hiroshima from the morning that the bomb exploded. In a video interview at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Yoshiko Matsushige, a photographer from a local newspaper who took those images, explains it took him a full 20 minutes to be able to press the button on his camera. He was surrounded by people who were burned, dying—many no longer had on any clothes. There was too much horror, too much pity. Besides, the newspaper wouldn’t print photos with dead bodies in them.
But there are drawings and drawings and drawings. Survivors drew the scenes that haunted them: the black rain, people burning, hospitals overflowing, piles of the dead, rivers full of corpses with their bulging limbs and eyes. Hiroshima had seven rivers, and the people burned in the explosion were desperate for cool water. Many survivors recount people begging for water, but the advice at the time was that water could harm burn victims, and over and over again you hear people still filled with remorse for having withheld it. This is just one facet of their trauma.
There is a shirt stained with the radioactive black rain. There are many, many pieces of clothing, each with a family tragedy attached. There are so many stories of people who lost their loved ones and never found their body, but found a tin lunchbox with their name on it, or else simply kept something they used to wear so as not to lose them completely. The museum is full of these keepsakes, which people still donate.
Then there are the photos taken some months later by the US military. These show the city centre as scorched earth. Most things within a kilometre radius were destroyed. The Hiroshima Industrial Exhibition Centre, a proud building with a large dome underpinned by metal, partly survived. It is still there, making a visual connection between images that otherwise seem unrecognisable, the blackened wasteland of the 1945 photos and the mostly rebuilt city with a park where the bomb crater used to be. This area was the city’s downtown, and it was shattered in an instant. A large part of it was redeveloped as a Peace Memorial Park, including a burial mound for the ashes of tens of thousands of victims. Signs show photos and maps of the city’s former life.
In the weeks and months after the bomb, the “A-bomb diseases” would begin. The survivors faced stigma; people were afraid of how these unknown illnesses might spread. Kasaoka said she struggled to get a job because of discrimination and no one wanted to marry her. Eventually she met and wed another survivor. For a time they lived happily together, but he died, aged 35, of spinal cancer. She explains that survivors were always afraid: the sicknesses could emerge at any time.
There are still thousands of hibakusha, or survivors of the atomic bomb, says Kasaoka. People are often surprised by the numbers: there were 350,000 people living in Hiroshima and an estimated 140,000 of them were killed by the bomb or the radiation between 6th August 1945 and the end of that year. The estimate includes those who came afterwards to try to help the stricken city, however. They, too, were exposed to radiation—and it killed unknown numbers. Radiation poisoning, a unique feature of nuclear weapons, makes them particularly cruel .
Nearly 80 years on, the horror of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings has not been repeated. The number of nuclear weapons across the globe peaked in 1986. After that, despite the continuing tensions of the Cold War, in 1987 US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev managed to agree to reduce their stockpiles. The peace motto “No more Hiroshimas” has held.
There is now growing discussion of whether a major attack using new technologies could justify nuclear retaliation
One reason is deterrence. Since the 1950s the USSR and US have both had nuclear weapons, and they have devised the ability (“second strike capability”) to respond to any nuclear attack by the other by retaliating with devastating consequences. Another reason may be the “nuclear taboo”, named by scholar Nina Tannenwald. She argued that it’s not just about deterrence; it is also taboo for nuclear armed states to use their nuclear weapons to threaten countries that don’t have them and are not able to retaliate in kind. This is a significant example of restraint. Questions have been raised about whether it will last, with concern that Russia might use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, or North Korea against South Korea.
Putin has hinted at possible nuclear use in the context of the invasion of Ukraine and his contention that Russia is in a larger war with the west. In a 2022 speech, for instance, he said that the US had created a “precedent” by using nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945. Since late 2022 his rhetoric has been more limited. Some analysts think that this is because non-western countries such as China and India have objected to the use of nuclear threats, reflecting the global taboo. Still, last year Russia moved tactical nuclear weapons into Belarus and in May it carried out exercises to simulate their launch. Moscow says these are defensive moves—Russia’s official policy is only to use nuclear weapons in the event of an existential threat against the state— but this is obviously not seen that way by Russia’s neighbours.
Generally, nuclear-armed states say their weapons are for defensive purposes only. But most of them also say that they could use them to defend against a devastating non-nuclear attack, most obviously a “conventional” invasion. There is now growing discussion of whether a major attack using new technologies—like a biological weapon causing mass casualties, or potentially even a cyberattack that disabled critical infrastructure—could also justify nuclear retaliation. Thus, the US, UK and France, as well as Russia and Pakistan, refuse to rule out the possibility that they could be the first to use nuclear weapons in a war. By contrast, China and India both have a “no first use” policy, (while Israel has said it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict, a way of expressing a “no first use” policy without openly acknowledging that it has nuclear weapons).
One idea that has been put forward for reducing the risks of a future nuclear war is to negotiate a global agreement that no country would be the first to use them, even in the event of a devastating attack—a consensus that nuclear weapons only exist to defend against the threat of other countries using them. This is something that China is advocating for. Geopolitical tensions complicate progress; the US is sceptical about China’s intentions, noting that Beijing is rapidly increasing its nuclear arsenal. Such a pact would need to be backed by measures to detect whether countries appeared to be preparing for a nuclear strike as no one will trust purely rhetorical commitments. Under such a vision, countries with nuclear weapons would keep them only as an insurance policy against leaders that might renege on that treaty (it might also then be easier to negotiate reductions in the numbers of those weapons).
Joe Biden himself has supported a no first use policy in the past. During the presidential campaign in 2020 he wrote in Foreign Affairs that the “sole purpose” of the US nuclear arsenal should be to deter or retaliate against a nuclear attack. But in 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, his administration carried out a review of its nuclear posture and concluded such a change would not be desirable. One reason given was that the US’s allies—those that are under the nuclear umbrella—did not want Washington to do anything that might be seen as weakening America’s commitment to their defence. Under the system of extended deterrence, the US makes its nuclear weapons available to defend Nato countries and other key allies, including Japan and South Korea.
Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, comes from a Hiroshima family and spent his childhood summers there. He is seeking to balance a close relation with the US—notably attending this year’s Nato summit in Washington—with promoting multilateral nuclear disarmament. Last year he brought the leaders of the G7 to Hiroshima to meet survivors.
As more than one person pointed out to me in Japan, opinion polls suggest that the majority of the Japanese public wants the country to join the international Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, signed by a majority of countries in the world. However, a Japanese majority also wants to continue being protected by the US extended deterrence. On the face of it these positions are contradictory; Japan would need to exit the nuclear umbrella if it joined the prohibition treaty. Perhaps extended deterrence could be underpinned instead by troops and technology, to reduce the dependence on nukes for security. Right now, however, everyone is afraid of looking weak. The politics of US isolationism exacerbates this. In a fraught, uncertain environment, could Kim Jong Un misread “no first use” as a weakening of the US commitment to South Korea? What are the ways to compensate for that, or to prevent it?
Perhaps everyone involved in nuclear decision-making should visit Hiroshima
The implications of the isolationist trend within the US are far bigger. And questions about the future role of Washington in underwriting its allies’ security have huge implications for nuclear nonproliferation. South Korea has hinted that it might seek its own nuclear weapons. Even in Germany this is being debated: should the country obtain a bomb, or be more active in Nato’s nuclear mission? Could it reach an agreement to be protected by France’s nuclear deterrent instead? Currently France’s policy is that its nuclear weapons are there to defend vital national interests, not to defend other countries. It is up to the president to define what those “vital interests” are, however, and it is not impossible that this could be extended to the protection of neighbours at some point.
One recent article warned of a “superweapon trap”, where nuclear weapons could seem almost like a simple answer to complex security problems. There is not even a consensus about whether the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to end the Second World War. Some historians argue that the expectation that the USSR would join the war against Japan had already led the Japanese emperor to start preparing for defeat before the atomic bomb was dropped. This interpretation was mentioned a few times during my visit to Hiroshima.
Perhaps everyone involved in nuclear decision-making should visit Hiroshima, meet the survivors, and confront the reality of what using these weapons means. People say Reagan worked for arms control after watching a film about a post-nuclear apocalypse, The Day After. Others might stare the horror in the face and think that their enemies deserve it. To them, it might look like power in action.
Germany and Japan were undeterred by the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo. This leaves a deep, uneasy question about whether some leaders might be prepared to keep fighting a war even after nuclear weapons have been deployed. A temporary exhibition at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall records the memories of child soldiers who had been signed up for suicide attacks in small boats but were sent to Hiroshima to help after the bombing instead. They found themselves in a hellscape, struggling to keep up the demand for cremation. One recounted telling his commander that the war was lost, only to be scolded for his weakness. In the video interviews I have seen, old men weep at these memories.
For eight decades no leader has crossed the nuclear threshold, and nuclear weapons have come to be seen as defensive deterrents only. But as the multilateral and normative order established over that 80-year period has come under strain, there is no certainty that the nuclear taboo will hold. Ahead of the UK election, the leaders of both major parties made a point of confirming their commitment to the nuclear deterrent. It is a key element of Britain’s defence and security policy. Yet there are anxieties around the edges. Confidence in the nuclear deterrent, and in the nuclear taboo, seems to be in question.
I ask Kasaoka, through her translator, what she would say to people who think they may need nuclear weapons to keep them safe from others who have them. Straight away she throws her arms up before her in a big cross, and flings them back to her side. She shakes her head emphatically, showing us exactly what she means before her words make their way via the interpreter: This. Is. Madness.
