We looked like ghosts." Chiyoko Kuwabara explained, between bewilderment and horror, her experience when, as a child, the first atomic bomb exploded in her city: Hiroshima, exactly 78 years ago today. Three days later it was Nagasaki. The consequences were disastrous: the death of more than 240,000 people (in 1945 alone), the destroyed cities and the serious health problems that the released radiation caused for decades.
The United States spent years researching how to build an atomic bomb out of fear that the Nazis would get it sooner. But in 1945 its use was justified to achieve the surrender of Japan in the Second World War.
Neither was entirely true: the Allies knew at the time that the Nazi regime did not have a nuclear weapon and that 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 was used to create the atomic bomb, if they were aware that the desire for power, and not the fight against Nazism, was the determining factor.
In any case, nuclear weapons opened up an unprecedented perspective: scientific capacity put at the service of destruction made possible the demise of human experience.
The end of the cold war created the feeling that the nuclear danger was disappearing. Nothing could be further from the truth.
First of all, because, despite successive disarmament commitments, most arms control agreements (which agreed on situations of balance) have faded away and, therefore, the risk has increased. Secondly, because today there are still 12,500 nuclear weapons (with a destructive force, much higher than that of 1945, which could end life on the planet). As if that were not enough, in recent years most of the nuclear powers have promoted programs to modernize their arsenals. Putin's insinuations of using them, following the war in Ukraine, have suddenly brought awareness back to life: yes, the danger of a nuclear war exists.
When sadly – and recurrently – there is a school shooting in the United States, the solution proposed by the gun lobby (“if the teachers had guns, they would have prevented the shooting”) makes us laugh at its absurdity and shock us at his irresponsibility. But we fail to realize that, on nuclear weapons and security, many 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 had, it would not have suffered the attack from Russia. No, Ukraine – and any other country – would not be safer with nuclear weapons. What would really give them more security would be a world free of nuclear weapons.
There is, on the other hand, no limited use of nuclear weapons: any use would trigger an unacceptable 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 a nuclear war is disarmament. It was one of the objectives of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, systematically boycotted by the same powers that promoted it. It's sad that the nuclear powers are reneging on their commitments, but even more so is the acquiescence of so many other countries.
As the recently released film Oppenheimer reminds us, some scientists refused to collaborate with the atomic bomb, and some of those who participated, once they saw the terrible consequences, regretted it. But rather than regret when it is too late, we must act now. So did civil society, such as the ICAN campaign and the Red Cross, which pushed for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). So do the 92 countries that already support it. Or the United Nations, which calls for its universalization. The nuclear powers and their allies must act with awareness and responsibility.
More than 100 medical journals from around the world (The Lancet, The, The New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA) remember it. 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."
