We looked like ghosts." Chiyoko Kuwabara thus recounted, between bewilderment and horror, her experience when the first atomic bomb exploded in her city as a child: Hiroshima, exactly 78 years ago today. Three days later it was Nagasaki. The consequences were devastating: the death of more than 240,000 people (in 1945 alone), destroyed cities, and serious health problems that the radiation released caused for decades.
The United States researched for years how to build an atomic bomb for fear that the Nazis would get it first. But in 1945 its use was justified to achieve the surrender of Japan in World War II.
Neither one nor the other was entirely true: the allies knew at the time that the Nazi regime did not have a nuclear weapon and Japan would probably have surrendered anyway.
The will to achieve uncontested power on a global scale weighed much more. And the subsequent struggle for hegemony led the powers to a runaway arms race.
Surely, many scientists would not have been involved in the Manhattan project, which served to create the atomic bomb, if they were aware that the lust for power, and not the fight against Nazism, was the determining factor.
In any case, nuclear weapons opened up an unprecedented perspective: the scientific capacity placed at the service of destruction made the decline of the human experience possible.
The end of the cold war created the feeling that the nuclear danger had disappeared. Nothing is further from reality.
In the first place, because, despite the successive commitments to disarmament, most of the arms control agreements (which agreed on equilibrium situations) have been fading away and, with this, the risk has increased. Secondly, because today there are still 12,500 nuclear weapons (whose destructive force, much higher than that of 1945, could put an end to life on the planet). As if that were not enough, in recent years most of the nuclear powers have been promoting programs to modernize their arsenals. Putin's insinuations to use them, in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine, have suddenly brought back consciousness: yes, the danger of nuclear war exists.
When unfortunately – and recurringly – a massacre occurs in a school in the United States, the solution proposed by the gun lobby (“if the teachers had guns they would have prevented the massacre”) makes us laugh at its absurdity and scandalizes us for its irresponsibility. But we don't realize that, on nuclear weapons and security, many of the arguments used resemble those of the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Recently, in many areas and forums, it is said that, if Ukraine had kept the nuclear weapons it possessed, it would not have suffered the attack from Russia. No, Ukraine – and any other country – would not be safer by possessing nuclear weapons. What would really give them more security would be a world free of them.
On the other hand, there is no limited use of nuclear weapons: any use would unleash an unaffordable cycle of destruction and devastation. Not only of death in the present, but also of impossible food security and ecological viability in the future.
The only way to avoid nuclear war is disarmament. That was one of the objectives of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), systematically boycotted by the same powers that promoted it. It is serious that the nuclear powers ignore their commitments, but even more so the acquiescence of so many other countries.
As the recently released Oppenheimer film reminds us, some scientists refused to collaborate with the atomic bomb and several of those who participated, seeing its terrible consequences, regretted it. But rather than regret when it's too late, we must act now. This was done by civil society, such as the ICAN campaign and the Red Cross, which promoted the Nuclear Weapons Prohibition Treaty (TPAN). This is what the 92 countries that already support it do. Or the United Nations, which demands its universalization. The nuclear powers and their allies must act conscientiously and responsibly.
More than 100 medical journals around the world (among which The Lancet, The British Medical Journal, The New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA) remember him. They have just warned in a joint editorial that the nuclear danger exists and is growing. And they conclude that "states with nuclear weapons must eliminate their arsenals before they eliminate us."
