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Hiroshima Survivors Warn Against Nuclear War 79 Years After US Bombing
"The world needs to stop nuclear war from ever happening again," said one hibakusha. "But when I turn on the news, I see politicians talk about deploying more weapons, more tanks. How could they?"
Aug 06, 2024
As the number of people who survived the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki rapidly dwindles 79 years after the attacks, hibakusha—the Japanese word for the survivors—and others are imploring humanity to do everything possible to avert another nuclear war.
"People still don't get it. The atomic bomb isn't a simple weapon. I speak as someone who suffers until this day: The world needs to stop nuclear war from ever happening again," Shigeaki Mori, who was an 8-year-old boy on his way to school on the morning of August 6, 1945,
toldThe New York Times. "But when I turn on the news, I see politicians talk about deploying more weapons, more tanks. How could they? I wish for the day they stop that."
Keiko Aguro was also 8 years old and standing on a road near her home in Hiroshima when a U.S. B-29 Superfortress dropped one bomb over Hiroshima that exploded with the force of 16 kilotons of TNT. The explosion destroyed nearly everything and everyone within about a 1-mile (1.62 km) radius. As many as 90,000 people died from the heat, blast wave, and ensuing inferno. Tens of thousands of others were injured, many of them mortally. Tens of thousands more would perish from radiation over the following weeks, months, and years.
"As survivors, we cannot do anything but tell our story," Aguro said. "'For we shall not repeat the evil'—this is the pledge of survivors. Until we die, we want to tell our story, because it's difficult to imagine."
"Now what survivors worry about is to die and meet our family in heaven," Aguro added. "I heard many survivors say, 'What shall I do? On this planet there are still many many nuclear weapons, and then I'll meet my daughter I couldn't save. I'll be asked: Mom, what did you do to abolish nuclear weapons?' There is no answer I can tell them."
Three days after Hiroshima, Nagasaki was obliterated in a 20-kiloton air burst that killed as many as 75,000 people that day, with a similar number of people wounded and tens of thousands more dying later from radiation.
The authors of the Times piece—Kathleen Kingsbury, W.J. Hennigan, and Spencer Cohen—wrote that "as another anniversary of August 6 passes, it is necessary for Americans—and the globe, really—to listen to the stories of the few human beings who can still speak to the horror nuclear weapons can inflict before this approach is taken again."
However, they note that "countries like the United States, China, and Russia are spending trillions of dollars to modernize their stockpiles," while "many of the safeguards that once lowered nuclear risk are unraveling and the diplomacy needed to restore them is not happening."
"The threat of another blast can't be relegated to history," the trio wrote. But they added that nearly eight decades later, many Americans still hail the bombings as "necessary and heroic acts that brought the war to an end."
But the prevailing U.S. historical narrative—which portrays the bombings as critical to ending the war—ignores the lack of consensus and grave misgivings among senior military commanders about dropping the bombs. Seven of the eight five-star generals and admirals at the time opposed its use. One of them, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, later said as president that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)—which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its work on the landmark Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—marked this year's ignominious anniversary with a report focusing on how children are affected by nuclear war and the threat thereof.
The report contains graphic descriptions of the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and of nuclear weapons testing on children around the world. It also explains how fear of thermonuclear annihilation affected children during the Cold War and how humanity can protect children by disarming.
"Today, several thousand nuclear weapons still exist in the arsenals of nine countries, posing a unique existential threat to people everywhere, especially children. Many have vastly greater explosive yields than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki," the ICAN report states.
"To protect humanity from the catastrophic harm that nuclear weapons are designed to inflict, governments must act with urgency to eliminate them completely—the only guarantee against their further use and testing," the publication continues. "This would be a great service to the current generation of children and to all future generations, who would grow up free from the threat of nuclear war."
"The alternative is to pass on to them a world still teetering on the brink of catastrophe," ICAN added. "Or, quite unthinkable, a world reeling from the horrors of another nuclear attack, perhaps with a death toll orders of magnitude greater than that of the atomic bombings of 1945."
Echoing ICAN, Hiroshima Gov. Hidehiko Yuzaki said during the annual commemoration of the bombing at Hiroshima Peace Park that "as long as nuclear weapons exist, they will surely be used again someday."
"Nuclear weapons abolition is not an ideal to achieve far in the future," Yuzaki stressed. "Instead, it is a pressing and real issue that we should desperately engage in at this moment since nuclear problems involve an imminent risk to human survival."
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Hundreds of Scientists Urge Biden to Cancel $100 Billion Nuclear Weapons Boondoggle
"There is no sound technical or strategic rationale for spending tens of billions of dollars building new nuclear weapons," an expert said.
Jul 08, 2024
More than 700 scientists on Monday called for an end to the United States' land-based nuclear weapons program that's set to be replaced, following a Pentagon decision to approve the program despite soaring costs.
In an open letter to President Joe Biden and Congress, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) argued that the new intercontinental-range ballistic missile system, known as Sentinel, was "expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary."
The Department of Defense on Monday certified the continuation of the project, releasing the results of a review that was legally required when the cost estimate ballooned to "at least" $131 billion earlier this year, which drew the scrutiny of some Democrats in Congress, according toThe Hill.
The Defense review found that Sentinel was "essential to national security," but the scientists disagreed with the assessment.
"There is no sound technical or strategic rationale for spending tens of billions of dollars building new nuclear weapons," Tara Drozdenko, director of UCS' global security program, said in a statement.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Barry Barish, a signatory to the letter, was also harshly critical of the Pentagon's approach.
"It is unconscionable to continue to develop nuclear weapons, like the Sentinel program," he said.
700+ scientists & experts are calling on President Biden & Congress to cancel the Sentinel program and retire the US land-based missile force. Doing so would save Americans more than $100 billion and make the world safer.
Learn more: https://t.co/5dQCOUKnQ3 pic.twitter.com/UxtHV9TSod
— Union of Concerned Scientists (@UCSUSA) July 8, 2024
The soaring costs of Sentinel, which is overseen by the defense contractor Northrup Grumman, have been the subject of media attention. The program will cost an estimated $214 million per missile, far more than originally expected, Bloombergreported on Friday.
However, the cost is hardly the only reason to cancel the program, UCS scientists argue. The silos that house the nuclear missiles, which are found in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska, are vulnerable to attack—in fact, they are designed to draw enemy weapons away other U.S. targets, according toScientific American. Such an attack would expose huge swaths of the American population to radioactive fallout.
Because they are a likely target, the siloed missiles are kept on "hair-trigger" alert so the U.S. president can launch them within minutes. This "increases the risk of nuclear war" that could start from false alarms, miscalculations, or misunderstandings, the UCS letter states.
The scientists further argue that there's no need for a land-based nuclear weapons system given the effectiveness of nuclear-armed submarines—one of the other parts of the nuclear triad, along with bomber jets. Such submarines are "hidden at sea" and "essentially invulnerable to attack," according to the letter. Moreover, the submarine missiles are just as accurate as land-based missiles, and already have "destructive capability than could ever be employed effectively," it states.
The submarine system is also being overhauled, as is the 'air' component of the nuclear triad. In total, the U.S. military plans to spend more than $1 trillion over 30 years on renewing the nuclear arsenal, according to the Arms Control Association.
The U.S. leads the way in a surge of global spending on nuclear arms, according to two studies published last month, one of which found that nearly $3,000 per second was spent in 2023.
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'The Abyss Is Beckoning': Global Nuke Spending Surged to $2,898 a Second in 2023
Two new reports detail how the world's nine nuclear-armed countries are spending aggressively to modernize and deploy weapons that pose an existential threat to civilization.
Jun 17, 2024
A pair of reports published Monday show that global spending on nuclear arms surged to nearly $3,000 a second last year as nations expanded and modernized their potentially civilization-destroying arsenals of atomic weaponry.
The United States, the first and only country to ever use an atomic weapon in war, spent $51.5 billion on its vast nuclear arsenal in 2023—more than every other nuclear-armed country combined, according to an analysis by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). The U.S. also accounted for 80% of the $10.7 billion global increase in spending last year compared to 2022.
ICAN found that total spending on nuclear weapons globally rose to a record $91.4 billion last year—$173,884 per minute—as countries worked to modernize their arsenals and flaunt new nuclear capabilities.
"By comparison, the World Food Program executive director stated in 2021 that to end world hunger, countries could spend $40 billion per year through 2030, which is a total of $360 billion over nine years," ICAN's new report reads. "That is $27 billion less than what these nine countries spent on their nuclear arsenals in just five years."
Growing nuclear weapons spending has been a major boon for military contractors such as Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. According to ICAN, "nuclear-armed countries have ongoing contracts with companies to produce nuclear weapons worth a total of at least $387 billion, continuing in some cases through 2040."
🚨NEW REPORT ALERT🚨
Can you believe global spending on nuclear weapons surged to $91.4 billion in 2023? That’s $2,898 a second on weapons that should never be used. Learn more in ICAN’s report “Surge: 2023 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending”🔗➡️https://t.co/svIeAKarmF#NuclearBan pic.twitter.com/2MCMJSJapo
— ICAN (@nuclearban) June 17, 2024
A separate report published Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated that 3,904 nuclear warheads were deployed across the globe as of January 2024—60 more than were deployed at the start of last year.
SIPRI said that the world's nine nuclear-armed countries—the U.S., Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel—"continued to modernize their nuclear arsenals and several deployed new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapon systems in 2023."
"While the global total of nuclear warheads continues to fall as Cold War-era weapons are gradually dismantled, regrettably we continue to see year-on-year increases in the number of operational nuclear warheads," SIPRI director Dan Smith said in a statement. "This trend seems likely to continue and probably accelerate in the coming years and is extremely concerning."
"We are now in one of the most dangerous periods in human history," Smith added. "There are numerous sources of instability—political rivalries, economic inequalities, ecological disruption, an accelerating arms race. The abyss is beckoning and it is time for the great powers to step back and reflect. Preferably together."
The alarming new reports were published hours after NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg toldThe Telegraph that the Western military alliance is considering mobilizing more nuclear weapons in an effort to counter China and Russia, respectively the second- and third-largest nuclear spenders last year behind the U.S., according to ICAN.
"I won't go into operational details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues," said Stoltenberg. "That's exactly what we're doing."
The Kremlin, which has faced condemnation from ICAN and other groups over its recent nuclear threats amid the war in Ukraine, swiftly denounced Stoltenberg's comments as "nothing else but an escalation."
ICAN said Monday that while its findings and ongoing nuclear threats "paint a bleak picture," progress toward a world without atomic weapons remains possible and worth fighting for.
"While the nine nuclear-armed governments have steadily increased their investments in nuclear weapons, in 2023, 101 cities and municipalities joined the ICAN cities appeal, including Durham and Leicester from the United Kingdom and Lyon and Montpellier from France, calling on their government to join the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of nuclear weapons," the group's report notes. "These cities join international capitals like Washington, Paris, and Berlin which have already adopted the appeal."
"While they continue to make massive profits from contracts to produce and maintain weapons of mass destruction, the number of companies that recognize that nuclear weapons are problematic and that their increasing obligations under human rights reviews and investor scrutiny require them to step away from the industry is growing," the report adds. "It is clear that pressure from the public, investors, and governments is having an effect."
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