80 Years After the Bomb, How Much Longer Will Our Luck Last?

The Diplomat

a day ago

In 2024, Nihon Hidankyo – officially the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, a Japanese organization of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki – was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Eighty years ago this week, when U.S. President Harry Truman announced the first use of an atomic bomb, he called it 'the greatest achievement of organized science in history.'
Truman warned that more powerful bombs were in development and that the United States was prepared to 'rapidly and completely' destroy 'every productive enterprise the Japanese have in any city.' If Japan did not accept U.S. terms, he said, they could expect 'a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.'
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 killed up to an estimated 210,000 civilians and wounded tens of thousands more. Today, the world still lives in the shadow of the bomb. This year the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' symbolic Doomsday Clock was moved forward to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to apocalypse as nine nations develop, expand, and threaten to use their nuclear weapons.
Standing between civilization and nuclear catastrophe for the last eight decades has been a series of arms control agreements, treaties, and other diplomatic instruments. But beginning with U.S. President George W. Bush's 2002 withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the United States has been drawing back from such agreements. Under Donald Trump the U.S. pulled out of several key agreements, including the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, and others.
Today, arms control has been deeply eroded. In 2023, Russia unilaterally suspended its participation in the last remaining Russia-U.S. bilateral arms control treaty (New START) which formally expires next February.
Since the 1961 Antarctic Treaty prohibited nuclear explosions and radioactive waste in Antarctica, more than 30 international treaties and agreements have been forged to regulate and reduce the risk of nuclear weapons. But ask experts in the field, and many will tell you that more than anything, one of the main reasons the world hasn't abruptly ended in a nuclear conflagration comes down to just dumb luck.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the nonpartisan Arms Control Association, said that 80 years into the nuclear age, the risk of testing, use, and a new nuclear arms race continues to grow – largely because of the failure of major nuclear armed countries to engage in arms control and disarmament diplomacy for over a decade. Furthermore, worsening relations between the U.S. and Russia as well as the U.S. and China, and chronic festering disagreements between India and Pakistan, all heighten nuclear risk.
Increased spending on nuclear weapons, greater reliance on nuclear arsenals, and multinational efforts to upgrade, modernize, or expand nuclear weapons, have put humanity in a position that U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres described as 'just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.'
According to Kimball, 'Strong presidential leadership can be influenced by strong congressional and public pressure to reduce nuclear risks,' but he said those things don't exist right now.
And despite Trump's comments earlier this year – saying, 'there's no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many you could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over' – Kimball noted that the Trump administration has offered no signs that it has plans for talks to renew or replace New START.
The NPT's Grand Bargain
Since it entered into force in 1970, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) has been considered the cornerstone of nuclear arms control and claims the largest number of states parties – 191 countries. Only South Sudan and nuclear-armed Israel, India, and Pakistan are not party to the treaty. North Korea announced its withdrawal in 2003.
With its three pillars of nuclear disarmament, nonproliferation, and the peaceful use of nuclear technology, the NPT is credited with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to what U.S. President John F. Kennedy famously warned might eventually include 25 nations.
Central to the NPT is Article VI, which requires states parties to 'pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.'
The treaty calls for a review conference every five years to assess implementation, develop future action plans, and to conclude a consensus document, something that hasn't been successfully done since 2010. This has caused some in the arms control community to express concern over the lack of progress in fulfilling Article VI obligations. In fact, most experts agree that the nine nuclear armed states (in particular the five official Nuclear Weapon States) are moving in the opposite direction.
Last year, the nine nuclear armed states spent over $100 billion on nuclear weapons. For its part, the United States spent nearly $57 billion on nuclear weapons in 2024 (more than the other eight nations combined) and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is on track to spend $946 billion on nuclear weapons over the next decade.
Furthermore, each of the nine nuclear armed states is modernizing its arsenals, not preparing to disarm. The U.S. is currently pursuing seven nuclear modernization programs, building two new plutonium pit production facilities in New Mexico and South Carolina, and replacing the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles with a program called Sentinel that, as of 2024, was estimated to be 81 percent over budget.
Kimball said that the U.S. Congress is failing to do its due diligence and is not asking hard questions. There is very little action or attention being paid to arms control, which he identified as one of the key reasons the world is headed toward an unconstrained three-way arms race between the U.S., Russia, and China.
Pointing to the strong connection between the absence of effective arms control negotiations and the nuclear arms buildup between the U.S., Russia, and China, Kimball said 'If we had a much more energetic and effective arms control and disarmament effort underway, the need for this spending… would likely be eliminated… Why are we pursuing all of this? It's because we have adversaries pursuing capabilities that the nuclear arms establishment is worried about.'
The Future We Choose
Reflecting on the Cold War, Alexandra Bell, CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said that the nuclear threat never went away but has only grown more complex. She recalled how after World War II, Albert Einstein noted that everyone was aware of the nuclear threat, but only a few acted accordingly. Today, we're in a worse position, she said, because almost no one is fully thinking about the threat posed by nuclear war and even fewer people are taking suitable actions.
Bell contended that even with its shortcomings, the NPT has been largely successful in what it set out to do: offer stability, prevent nuclear proliferation, and eventually roll back nuclear threats. Looking ahead to the next NPT meetings in 2026, she said the world can't afford to lose the treaty.
But Bell sees reason for concern. 'Basically, everything in the nuclear space that could be going wrong is going wrong right now,' she says, pointing to the weakening of international structures, proliferation threats, and the expansion of investments in nuclear arsenals as tipping the world to a new arms race. But, she added, even our biggest nuclear problems – for example the absence of U.S. and Russian nuclear negotiations – are 'eminently solvable.'
Bell called it 'supremely frustrating' that nuclear threats are something we are needlessly doing to ourselves, when what's at stake is no less than the survival of humanity. Rather than assuming the status quo will hold, Bell said we must work to find solutions now – because the longer we delay, the greater the odds are that a nuclear weapon will be used again.
'This isn't theoretical debate to be had around windowless conference rooms in capital cities.' Bell says. 'When you're talking about nuclear war, you're talking about death on an unimaginable scale and potentially the end of human existence… and it needs more attention from more people, more leaders, and more members of the public asking difficult questions.'
To that end, last month on the 80th anniversary of the world's first nuclear detonation at the Trinity test site in New Mexico, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the University of Chicago, and others convened a three-day series of meetings to create a concise document of practical, actionable steps that can be taken now to reduce the risk of nuclear war. The assembly, which included over a dozen Nobel laureates and around 60 nuclear experts, presented its recommendations to the public at the University of Chicago, which has played a central role in the development of nuclear technology, including the Manhattan Project.
Among suggested steps such as engaging in bilateral and multilateral nuclear dialogues, forgoing massive investments in strategic missile defense, and continuing to honor the moratorium on nuclear explosive testing, the declaration (currently signed by 127 Nobel laureates and at least 44 nuclear experts), also called on scientists, academics, communities of faith, and civil society to 'help create the necessary pressure on global leaders to implement nuclear risk reduction measures.'
Bell said that having been lucky enough to make it this far, today the world faces a reckoning. She believes a three-way arms race between the U.S., Russia, and China would be our inevitable future only if we choose it.
Banning the Bomb
As frustration has grown over the lack of progress to rid the world of nuclear weapons, a global movement for an all-out ban yielded results in 2017 when 122 nations voted in favor of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Since entering into force in 2022, the TPNW now claims effectively half of all U.N. member states as parties or signatories to the treaty.
In 2017, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which championed the TPNW. In a lecture jointly delivered with Hiroshima native and atomic bomb survivor Setsuko Thurlow, ICAN representative Beatrice Fihn said that nuclear weapons were immoral, and now like other weapons of mass destruction, they were illegal.
Speaking at the United Nations in March during the Third Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW, ICAN Executive Director Melissa Parke said that for decades the nuclear debate has been controlled by a small minority, which advances a narrative that nuclear weapons provide security and stability. That, Parke said, wrongly overshadows the true humanitarian and environmental consequences of nuclear weapons.
Through the lens of the TPNW, Parke argued against nuclear deterrence. which she sees as an obstacle to disarmament that encourages nuclear proliferation: 'for as long as nuclear armed states insist that nuclear weapons are essential to their security, others will want them.'
'I think the world is really at a tipping point,' Parke said. 'We can continue to go down the path of confrontation, militarization, and proliferation or we can take the path of dialogue, diplomacy, and disarmament.' She called the TPNW an 'investment in multilateralism and international law' at a time when they are increasingly under threat.
Parke argued that the TPNW democratizes the debate, taking it out of the hands of the Security Council Permanent Five (P5) Nuclear Weapon States and bringing it to the general assembly where every country has an equal vote, opening up the debate to civil society, scientists, academics, nuclear impacted communities, and countries in the Global South that, she said, under the NPT, are sidelined and disenfranchised.
Parke stressed the importance of raising public consciousness and encouraging a new generation to see nuclear weapons not as a solution, but as a problem that can and must be resolved.
Imploring world leaders to discuss nuclear disarmament, Parke said, 'Of course we want to see action, not just words.'
Focusing on Common Ground
There are those in the arms control and disarmament community who understand the sentiment behind the TPNW and see it as a worthy end goal but nevertheless have concerns with specific aspects of the treaty. Alexandra Bell described the treaty as 'legally flawed' and lacking an effective verification structure, saying bluntly that 'nuclear armed states are not going to join.'
Although there have been attempts by some TPNW opponents to divide NPT and TPNW supporters, rather than focusing on disagreements over process, Bell said the emphasis should be on the shared goal of reducing nuclear threats and achieving peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.
'So how can we work on that together? I think that's what countries should really focus on rather than saying it's my way or no way.'
Testing the Limits
In 1996, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) was opened for signature with the aim of preventing new nuclear weapons or upgrading existing ones. Its primary goal is to permanently maintain a global moratorium on explosive nuclear testing.
While the treaty has been signed by 187 nations and ratified by 178, currently, the CTBT has not been ratified by China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, and the United States, with Russia revoking its ratification in 2023. India, Pakistan, and North Korea have yet to sign the treaty. As of August 2025, the CTBT has not entered into force, an outcome that would require eight of the above countries to sign and ratify the treaty.
In an email, Robert Floyd, executive secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) said that 'bringing the CTBT into force would be a truly historic achievement for international peace and security. It would send a clear message that the world is united in its commitment to ending nuclear testing once and for all.'
Prior to the treaty, nuclear-armed nations conducted over 2,000 explosive nuclear tests, but in the nearly three decades since the treaty opened for signatures, explosive nuclear testing has been almost completely halted. Since 1996, only three countries (India, Pakistan, North Korea) have carried out nuclear explosive tests, six of them by Pyongyang, most recently in 2017.
CTBTO's International Monitoring System maintains over 300 detection facilities that are able to detect nuclear explosive tests anywhere in the world.
Any future nuclear test 'would be deeply concerning and highly destabilizing,' Floyd said, adding, 'a return to nuclear testing would take us backwards. We must do everything we can to keep moving forward.'
Looking Ahead to 2045
While the world's attention has turned to the 80th anniversary of the bomb, Ivana Nikolić Hughes, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a senior lecturer of chemistry at Columbia University, is looking ahead to 2045, a symbolic date that will mark 100 years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
'We quite simply have to wake up in 2045 to a world free of nuclear weapons,' Nikolić Hughes urged. 'The question is, what can each person do to make that happen?' Whether through education, art, music, or writing, she encourages the public to educate themselves about the threat of nuclear weapons. She wants both politicians and the public to be better informed about what's at stake and more engaged in finding solutions.
'The way that we're going to fail and end up in a nuclear war is if we never try to get rid of the weapons.' Something must be done, she said. 'Eighty years is a long time to be playing roulette with the fate of the Earth.'
According to John Tierney, executive director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation, today there is a tremendous lack of political leadership in pursuing arms control.
He said it's important to insist on a return to arms control in the face of an existential nuclear threat – which he notes, unlike a global pandemic, economic upheaval, or climate change, could lead to unimaginable catastrophe that would unfold not in months or years, but in mere minutes. 'If you have a problem whose immediacy goes to the top, it would be the nuclear issue,' Tierney said.
At a time of international rancor, conflict, and an absence of trust, when nuclear arsenals are controlled by what Tierney describes as 'authoritarians and dictators,' he understands why ordinary people may feel discouraged and without agency, but he pointed to the CTBT and Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones as important vehicles for applying pressure on nuclear armed states.
And while it may prove more difficult than some had imagined, he sees value in the TPNW as a forum for non-nuclear states to tell the nuclear armed states that not only are they failing to meet their disarmament obligations, but they are headed in the wrong direction. 'We're not going to put up with this anymore,' Tierney said should be the message to nuclear powers. 'Whatever you do is going to affect us.'
Paul Dean, vice president of the global nuclear policy program at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, said ordinary citizens should demand nuclear weapon states engage in constructive negotiations to prevent nuclear war. 'I think there's a real role for a broad, diverse range of stakeholders.'
Dean urged non-nuclear countries to prioritize reducing nuclear risk as one of their top demands when conducting bilateral talks with nuclear armed states.
The fact that in the first six months of 2025 there have been three armed conflicts involving five nuclear armed nations demonstrates the urgent need to act now to avoid mistakes or unintentional escalation, said Dean. 'If left unregulated, unnegotiated, we are exposing ourselves to far more risk than I think most people appreciate and that anyone would want to bear.'
Dean argued that while nuclear risk may not be simple or easy to address, that doesn't mean a solution is impossible, adding, 'this is not a problem that will solve itself.'
Born Beneath the Cloud
Hamasumi Jiro's mother was three months pregnant on the day Hiroshima was destroyed.
'I'm one of the in utero hibakusha,' said Hamasumi. 'Among people like me whose mother was exposed to the atomic bomb during early pregnancy at a close distance to the hypocenter, their children have suffered from physical and intellectual developmental delays.' Other in utero hibakusha have suffered from 'A-bomb microcephaly,' a condition marked by tumors and severely stunted development, impacting whole families.
He supports the TPNW because it embodies the longstanding wishes of hibakusha to achieve the greatest level of safety by having no nuclear weapons. Hamasumi said when he thinks about his father, who was killed by the bomb before he was born, the idea that today 80 years later, there are still over 12,000 nuclear weapons is unthinkable. That's the equivalent of 146,600 Hiroshima-sized bombs.
Hamasumi, who serves as secretary general for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize winning Nihon Hidankyo, sees great importance in the fact that the TPNW's preamble specifically mentions the disproportionate impact of nuclear weapons on women and girls.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first places to suffer the humanitarian and environmental consequences of nuclear blasts, but they were far from the last. Subsequent nuclear development and testing has impacted communities around the world from Kazakhstan and Kiribati to Algeria and Australia, the deserts of China and the United States, and multiple Pacific islands and atolls.
Benetick Kabua Maddison, executive director of the Marshallese Educational Initiative, described how the 67 nuclear explosive tests the U.S. conducted in the Marshall Islands drastically and permanently disfigured the environment and upended the lives of his people. He condemned what he called 'bloated defense budgets and the false narrative of nuclear security.'
'As a nuclear frontline community member, I can attest that nuclear weapons do not maintain security and do not keep us safe,' Kabua Maddison said, calling for citizens of nuclear-armed states to educate themselves about the real dangers of nuclear weapons production and use. 'We must either end this madness,' he concluded, 'or it will ultimately end us.'
Another nuclear-impacted community is French Polynesia, home to Hinamoeura Morgant-Cross, a representative of the French Polynesia Assembly. Like many of those who bear the cost of colonial nuclear testing, Morgant-Cross strongly supports the TPNW. In an email, she said that 'now, more than ever, in today's fragile geopolitical climate, the world must take a clear stand for nuclear disarmament.'
Morgant-Cross, who has lived with chronic myeloid leukemia since 2013, said her sister, mother, grandmother, and aunt have all experienced either thyroid diseases or breast cancer, ailments they attribute to the 193 nuclear tests conducted by the French government between 1966-1996 at Fangataufa and Moruroa atolls.
'Nuclear weapons do not bring peace. They bring fear, inequality, and long-term suffering,' Morgant-Cross wrote via email. She said it is essential 'to seek truth, justice, and recognition for victims, and to challenge the dangerous myth that nuclear deterrence brings security.'
'True peace,' Morgant-Cross wrote, 'can never be built on the threat of mass destruction.'