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THERE were several sources of angst in Japan back in June, when Donald Trump likened the massive US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “That hit ended the war,” he declared.
The mayor of Nagasaki politely described the US president’s statement as “regrettable”. Mimaki Toshiyuki, a survivor of the 1945 attack and co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, the advocacy group that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, called the comments “unacceptable”. Various members of the group expressed their anger, and a demonstration in Hiroshima led by others who experienced the catastrophe as children called on Trump to retract his remarks.
Fat chance. Trump, like all too many Americans, was brought up to believe that his nation ended World War II with its nuclear thrashing of Japan. They are seldom taught that their Asian adversary was prepared to surrender. Japanese military leaders wanted the US only to concede that the emperor would remain in place. The US insisted on an unconditional surrender. Once it was achieved in mid-August, Hirohito, a suspected war criminal, remained in the imperial palace.
Controversy surrounds the question of whether the atomic devastation of Hiroshima 80 years ago today, and Nagasaki three days later, entailing a largely civilian death toll of over 200,000 in the short term (and far more in the years and decades that followed), was warranted by strategic considerations. It is widely (but not universally) accepted today that the uranium and plutonium bombs dropped on the two cities were the opening shots of the Cold War rather than the culminating factor of the Pacific war.
US and Japanese interests coincided in staving off a Soviet invasion, which may have put paid to an imperial order in which the emperor was deified. In the immediate aftermath of the surrender, though, the effective emperor was US general Douglas MacArthur; 80 years on, Okinawa remains a US base.
We can’t live with nuclear weapons.
Barely three weeks after the Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico, the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as warnings to the Soviets. MacArthur toyed with the idea of using nuclear weapons during the Korean War, but by 1949, the USSR — partly thanks to a spy network that infiltrated the Manhattan Project — had an atomic bomb of its own. Some saw that as a blessing, a balance of power that reduced the likelihood of a nuclear clash on the basis of mutual assured destruction.
The US and the Soviets came close to that during the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis, but wiser heads prevailed. These days, wisdom tends to be excluded from the White House and Kremlin. Moscow’s caution in responding to Trump’s repositioning of nuclear submarines was welcome, notwithstanding its stupidly retrograde designs on Ukraine. Little can be expected from Trump envoy Steve Witkoff’s arrival in Moscow today, but no clash is likely in the imminent future between the two biggest nuclear powers.
What might come next is hard to predict. Two nuclear powers jointly attacked an aspiring one in June, which was preceded by a clash between the subcontinent’s stalwart nations, both of them sadly nuclear states. That was halted, possibly by intervention from higher powers, although it remains unclear.
One of the worst aspects of the world today is that nuclear proliferation might be little more than academic, given the forthcoming planetary destruction based on a broad refusal to heed the challenges of climate change. Trump’s strategy to exacerbate it merely makes the trend towards global self-immolation more obvious. It’s anyone’s guess whether natural destruction or nuclear armageddon will seal humanity’s fate, but one or the other will be instrumental.
The carpet-bombing of Dresden and fire-bombing of Tokyo testify to the fact that considerable damage and loss of life can be achieved without the nuclear option. Gaza — reminiscent in some ways of what Hiroshima looked like on the day of its evisceration and beyond — serves as yet another reminder of the damage that ‘conventional’ weapons can accomplish. Going back to World War II, though, the starvation in Gaza today is being compared to what civilians endured during the siege of Leningrad. And, like so many other victims of the war, civilians in Japan too were familiar with hunger.
For Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America’s atomic experiments were an unprecedented travesty, and the diminishing survivors of that holocaust are determined that it must never be repeated. It hasn’t been so far, despite the US threats during the Korean and Vietnam wars. But that’s no guarantee for a future in which the likes of Trump, Putin and Modi trample the global stage.
Perhaps Tom Lehrer, the Harvard mathematician and satirist who died last month at 97, was right when he informed us in the 1950s that “we will all go together when we go”.
Published in Dawn, August 6th, 2025
