Flashpoints | Security | East Asia

When the World Stops Fearing the Bomb

On the 81st anniversary of the bombing of Japan, the hibakusha are disappearing just as fast as the world is becoming numb to their cause

The wrecked framework of the Museum of Science and Industry in Hiroshima, Japan, shortly after the dropping of the first atomic bomb, on Aug. 6, 1945.

Terumi Tanaka was 13 when on one fine day the sky above Nagasaki was suddenly flooded with blinding white glare; “a blazing inferno” he would recall years later. At 97 now, he still carries memories of sitting next to the window. His home was hit suddenly by a flash, then thunder, followed by an unbearable silence. Within moments, his city was reduced to ash. 

“It was literally hell,” he said in his eyewitness account.

With the average age of the hibakusha (atomic bombing survivors) reaching 87, there will soon be no one left to provide such first-person testimony.

As humanity loses these eyewitnesses — 91,105 left as of March 2026 — we are also losing our moral compass. As the world commemorates the 81st anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, a cruel irony is fast unfolding in front of our eyes. The generation that witnessed the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings is fading away just as the world rediscovers the strategic significance of nuclear weapons — and loses sight of the human suffering such weapons embody.

For decades, the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had imposed an invisible restraint on policymakers. Nuclear weapons were tolerated, but never celebrated. The nuclear taboo — non-possession, non-transfer, and non-use of nuclear weapons — was assumed to be universal and robust. Today, deterrence has displaced disarmament as the dominant concern. Even before the last hibakusha leave this earth, the world is turning its back on their warnings.

The Return of the Bomb

The nine nuclear-armed states possess 12,241 nuclear warheads, with nearly 9,614 retained in military stockpiles. This is certainly better than 70,300 warheads in 1986 when Russia and the United States possessed more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear bombs. Driven by their detente of 1970s and the end of Cold War from late 1980s, the Soviet-U.S. (and later Russia-U.S.) arms control agreements had really shrunk their arsenals. But with all nuclear-armed states now busy with modernizing their nuclear weapons, that trajectory of arms control has begun to reverse.

China has expanded its stockpile the fastest: from 350 warheads in 2022 to 620 in January 2026. The United States and Russia are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in next-generation delivery systems. Britain plans to raise its warhead ceiling, while France is upgrading its sea-based deterrent. More worrying still, nuclear doctrines are lowering the threshold for potential use. In India, where it was long assumed that its warheads stayed de-coupled from their launchers, SIPRI this year reported that 12 nuclear warheads had been actively deployed as its sea-based deterrent. Nuclear weapons are no longer regarded as weapons of last resort; they are steadily becoming instruments of routine statecraft. 

This transformation marks the collapse of the post-Cold War belief that nuclear weapons were gradually becoming politically less valuable. Instead, great power rivalry, especially since the start of the Ukraine war, has revived the centrality of deterrence discourse. With the expiry of the New START Treaty on February 5, 2026, the United States and Russia no longer have any legally binding bilateral nuclear arms control treaty limiting their nuclear arsenals.

Equally revealing is what has happened to disarmament discourse. The Chemical Weapons Convention, negotiated in the early 1990s, was the last disarmament treaty successfully concluded through traditional inter-state mechanisms. Since then, the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva — the world’s sole standing multilateral negotiating forum on arms control — has remained paralyzed. 

Civil society organizations have since stepped in to fill the vacuum. Their efforts produced the Ottawa Convention banning anti-personnel landmines, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, Arms Trade Treaty and, eventually, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. However, this last........

© The Diplomat