The survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have had to live through several stages of trauma. First came the horrors of August 6th and August 9th 1945: the blinding flash, the ferocious force, the flesh-melting heat; plus the black rain, the flattened buildings, the charred corpses. “It was a real hell,” recalls Tanaka Shigemitsu, who was just four years old in Nagasaki when the bomb dropped there. Then came decades of quiet suffering, as radiation ate away
The survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have had to live through several stages of trauma. First came the horrors of August 6th and August 9th 1945: the blinding flash, the ferocious force, the flesh-melting heat; plus the black rain, the flattened buildings, the charred corpses. “It was a real hell,” recalls Tanaka Shigemitsu, who was just four years old in Nagasaki when the bomb dropped there. Then came decades of quiet suffering, as radiation ate away at victims’ bodies and stigma at their souls. Finally there have been the frustrations of recent years, as the hope of a world without nuclear weapons has receded ever farther into the distance.
This year’s anniversaries, the 80th, come at an especially worrying time. As recently as 2009, nuclear weapons seemed increasingly anachronistic. Barack Obama, then America’s newly elected president, spoke seriously of a nuclear-free world. Instead, the world has entered what strategists call a “third nuclear age”, messier and more combustible than ever before. “The danger of nuclear weapons being used has never been as imminent at any time during the past 80 years,” laments Mr Tanaka, the co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, an association of hibakusha, as the atomic-bomb survivors are known in Japan.
Read our original reporting on the atomic bombings in Archive 1945
Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine helped usher in this new era, but the underlying developments are deeper. The arms-control architecture of the cold war has broken down. The New START treaty, the last remaining pact between America and Russia limiting nuclear arms, is due to expire next year. Existing nuclear states are building up and modernising arsenals. America’s nuclear umbrella, which offers assurances of protection to vulnerable allies, is fraying, prompting discussions about nuclear armament in countries such as Poland, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. Even in Japan, talk of acquiring a bomb is no longer beyond the pale.
Around the world, the “nuclear taboo”, the shared moral revulsion that has helped control the use of nuclear weapons, seems to be weakening. Threats have become ever more overt. Just last week, as hibakusha prepared for ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America’s president and the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council traded nuclear barbs on social media in the manner of internet trolls.
The dawn of this new nuclear age is not for lack of effort on the part of the hibakusha. Achieving political miracles was always an unfair burden to place upon them, but for decades survivors like Mr Tanaka have been telling their stories across Japan and around the world, hoping to bring about disarmament. Nihon Hidankyo received last year’s Nobel peace prize for “demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”; hibakusha have also been central to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a network that won the peace prize in 2017 for pushing the United Nations to adopt a treaty barring the development, acquisition, stockpiling or use of nuclear weapons. Unsurprisingly, none of the world’s nuclear states has signed up.
For the Japanese government, the new nuclear age heightens a long-standing tension. Japan believes it has a special responsibility, as the only country to have been attacked with nuclear weapons, to advocate for disarmament. But it also depends on nuclear deterrence to ensure its security in a dangerous neighbourhood, facing three nuclear-armed states: China, Russia and North Korea. At a ceremony in Hiroshima on August 6th, Ishiba Shigeru, the prime minister, promised to “work with all our might” to realise a “world without nuclear weapons”. Much to the chagrin of the hibakusha, Japan has also refused to sign the new UN treaty.
Yet the hibakusha will not be around to speak out much longer. “We are approaching an era when hibakusha are no longer with us,” notes Suzuki Shiro, Nagasaki’s mayor. Efforts are under way in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to keep their memories alive for future generations. Both cities have been training scores of “atomic-bomb legacy successors”—memory keepers tasked with inheriting a specific hibakusha story.
But fewer than 100,000 officially recognised hibakusha are now alive, down from a peak of nearly 400,000. Many of those still around were quite young at the time, like Mr Tanaka: the average age of the remaining survivors is 86. It is no coincidence that a new nuclear era is dawning just as the hibakusha’ s voices are growing quieter.
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