We all need to listen to the survivors of nuclear war, and support their struggle to convince all nuclear states to give up their arsenals.
Melissa Parke* | Al Jazeera, opinion
When United States President Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev met in Geneva in 1985 they agreed “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” It was the prelude to the beginning of the end of the Cold War nuclear arms race and subsequent deep cuts in American and Soviet – later Russian – arsenals.
Since then, the original five nuclear weapons states have reaffirmed this statement, most recently in 2022.
But some disagree and hark back to the military strategies of the 1950s that envisaged the use of nuclear weapons by troops on the battlefield to win wars. A recent example is former Trump administration official, David Lasseter, who argued “the Department of Defense (DoD) is not doing nearly enough to ensure the American warfighter is able to fight, survive, and win on a nuclear battlefield”.
The timing of such comments could not be more inopportune: as the Nobel Peace Prize is about to be awarded to Nihon Hidankyo – an organisation of hibakusha, the survivors of the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – for their lifelong campaigning for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
The 1945 atomic bombs that killed more than 200,000 people in Japan would today be called “tactical” nuclear weapons. The survivors of those “tactical” nuclear weapons are the real experts on what nuclear war means. They crawled through the rubble of the world’s first, and thankfully only, nuclear war. It is cynical indeed for armchair warriors, particularly those with ties to the companies building nuclear weapons, to advocate strategies based on unproven theories, not real-life experience.
The hibakusha alive today were children when their cities were devastated by American atomic bombs 80 years ago. Their average age is now 86.
Umiteru Taniguchi, who died in 2017, was 16 years old when Nagasaki was attacked. At the time of the explosion, he was riding his bicycle. “In the flash of the explosion,” he recounted, “I was blown off the bicycle from behind and slapped down against the ground.” When he lifted his head, he saw that the children who had been playing all around him just moments before were dead.
He suffered severe burns and his wounds quickly became infected. He spent almost four years in hospital recovering from his injuries, including 21 months lying on his stomach. He had to have 10 surgeries later in life to remove growths from the scarred areas of his body. The pain and discomfort from the injuries never went away.
It is estimated that 38,000 children were killed in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fact that so many children were killed, maimed and harmed in other lingering ways in the attacks motivated the survivors, like Taniguchi, who served as chair of the Nagasaki Council of A-Bomb Sufferers for many years, to devote their lives to working to ensure no one ever again has to suffer as they did.
The testimony of thesurvivors graphically shows that the idea that nuclear war can be fought and won on the battlefield is dangerous, grotesque nonsense that makes nuclear war more likely. As Annie Jocobsen’s recent book Nuclear War: A Scenario made clear, the use of a nuclear weapon would quickly escalate and result in a major exchange that would not just kill tens or hundreds of thousands near the explosions, but would end the world as we know it in a matter of minutes. It would cause a nuclear winter that would lead to the collapse of food production, famine and the deaths of billions of people. The impact on global biodiversity and the economy is nearly impossible to imagine.
In response to nuclear threats that Russia has made during the Ukraine conflict, the co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, Terumi Tanaka, who was 13 when Nagasaki was bombed, says the use of nuclear weapons would spell “the end of the human race” and that leaders like President Putin “don’t realise the extent of the damage that can be done”.
The leaders of all the nuclear-armed countries need to ignore the siren voices that tell them nuclear war can be fought and won and instead listen to the hibakusha who are urging them to eliminate their arsenals before it is too late.
After Nihon Hidankyo was told it had won the Peace Prize, another of its co-chairs, Toshiyuki Mimaki, from Hiroshima, said the award would help bring the end of nuclear weapons closer, saying, “It would be a great force to appeal to the world that the abolition of nuclear weapons can be achieved … Nuclear weapons should absolutely be abolished.”
The hibakusha achieved a major step towards this goal when they played a leading role in the creation of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the TPNW. The treaty bans nuclear weapons and all activities associated with them outright. It came into force in 2021 and half of all countries have already signed or ratified it.
The TPNW provides the pathway under international law for all nuclear-armed states to get rid of their weapons. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize underlines that the governments of these countries have no more excuses – they should listen to Nihon Hidankyo and the hibakusha, join the treaty and eliminate their arsenals.
* Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Melissa Parke is Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. She formerly worked for the United Nations in Gaza, Kosovo, New York and Lebanon and served as Australia’s Minister for International Development.
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