The Paradox of Hiroshima

In her screenplay for the 1959 film Hiroshima, Mon Amour, French author Marguerite Duras wrote that Hiroshima was perhaps the only place where two people, otherwise estranged by philosophy, history, economics, and race, could find common ground.

Duras was not alone in finding something universal in the place where a flash of light birthed the nuclear age. When then-U.S. President Barack Obama visited the city in 2016, he described the iconic mushroom cloud as a stark reminder of “humanity’s core contradiction”—that our ingenuity and capacity for creation could also destroy us.

At 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped a new and terrible weapon on the city of Hiroshima. According to the U.S. military, roughly 70,000 people died in the blast and ensuing firestorm; independent studies put the number closer to 140,000. Three days later, the United States dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, killing another 40,000 to 70,000 people.

Experts estimate that since 1945, more than 125,000 nuclear warheads have been built, most of them by the United States and the Soviet Union. And yet, no one has used a nuclear weapon in war for nearly 78 years. This means that Hiroshima remains one of the few places where the consequences of nuclear weapons are more concrete than theoretical.

The city’s status as the first example of wartime nuclear use has spawned a somewhat unusual tourism industry. Every year, more than a million people traverse the somber halls of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, fold origami cranes for the Children’s Peace Monument, and pass beneath the skeletal shadow of the Genbaku Dome. This week, U.S. President Joe Biden and the other G-7 leaders are among them.

The symbolism of holding this year’s G-7 summit in Hiroshima is readily apparent. Russia’s war in Ukraine—and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling—have imbued fears of nuclear use with a new urgency. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has repeatedly stated that he hopes the setting will encourage leaders to grapple with the dangers of nuclear weapons. Scholars and commentators have likewise encouraged leaders to use the opportunity to reassert their commitment to nuclear risk reduction and to affirm the moral taboo against the use of such incomprehensibly destructive weapons.

Yet the summit also highlights the paradox of Hiroshima, a city whose history is both singular and situated. After 1945, Hiroshima positioned itself at the forefront of the global campaign for nuclear disarmament—even as Japan’s security architecture became increasingly reliant on the U.S. nuclear umbrella. At various points in time, the city’s status as a global symbol has coexisted more or less easily with the country’s security and defense posture. Today, as relations with China and North Korea continue to deteriorate, and as Beijing expands and modernizes its conventional and nuclear arsenals, these distinct imperatives are newly apparent.

Yet if this particular brand of pacifism has been a throughline in Kishida’s political career, his tenure as prime minister illustrates other dynamics that are simultaneously transforming Japan’s security posture. Although Kishida belongs to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s more “dovish” wing, he is overseeing a dramatic expansion of Japan’s military capabilities. In December 2022, he unveiled a new national security and defense strategy, which many commentators consider a sharp departure from Japanese policy since World War II. Although its constitution formally outlaws war, Tokyo plans to double its military budget over the next five years. This would put it behind only the United States and China in defense spending. It is also developing and procuring new military capabilities, including “counterstrike” missiles, unmanned systems, and more advanced capabilities in space and cyberspace.

These national-level policies are not necessarily incompatible with Hiroshima’s message of global peace. Although Tokyo is embracing new conventional capabilities to bolster deterrence, its position on nuclear weapons remains unique. Here the comparison with South Korea is instructive. Both states have historically developed a security architecture around the promise of U.S. extended deterrence; and more recently, both have begun to question the reliability and robustness of Washington’s commitments. Japan and South Korea also possess latent nuclear capabilities, meaning that they already have many of the technical ingredients of a nuclear weapons program. Japan, in particular, is often described as a nuclear threshold state. It is currently the only non-weapons state to reprocess spent fuel from its nuclear reactors, and it has a massive stockpile of separated plutonium, one of the key fissile materials needed for a bomb.

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In South Korea, China’s rise, the increasing sophistication of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, and mounting concerns about the United States’ commitment to Seoul’s security have precipitated a heated domestic debate over nuclear weapons acquisition. This has led some experts to warn about the risk of allied proliferation on the Korean Peninsula. In Japan, however, opposition to nuclear weapons is more consistent. Although some politicians, including former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in July 2022, have periodically expressed skepticism about Japan’s three “Non-Nuclear Principles,” which prohibit it from producing, possessing, or hosting nuclear weapons, the domestic barriers to proliferation remain significant.

Kishida is committed to nuclear abstention, and he has flatly rejected Abe’s suggestion of a nuclear-sharing agreement with the United States. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has only deepened his concerns about the broader erosion of nuclear norms. Last August, he outlined the “Hiroshima Action Plan,” a five-pillar strategy to reduce nuclear risks, which will likely feature in this weekend’s conversations among the G-7.

But if a nuclear-armed Japan is implausible in the near future, there are real tensions between Hiroshima’s message, and the country’s—and the world’s—current trajectory, especially on the question of disarmament. Although quiet nuclear ambivalence has long characterized aspects of Japan’s security posture, its commitment to disarmament has been reasonably non-contentious for several decades. This is because, since the mid-1980s, global nuclear arsenals have been shrinking. There are approximately 12,500 nuclear warheads in the world today—far more than in 1945, but far less than in 1985. At this point, however, further reductions seem unlikely. In fact, China is on track to significantly expand its nuclear arsenal, and some experts believe that the United States and Russia may do the same, or at least increase their deployed nuclear forces.

We have already seen some of these differences play out in debates over the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (or TPNW). The treaty, which entered into force in January 2021, bans the development, testing, production, stockpiling, and stationing of nuclear weapons, as well as any threats to use them. The hibakusha played a key role in generating momentum for it and highlighting the humanitarian consequences of nuclear use. Public opinion polls suggest that the Japanese public overwhelmingly supports the TPNW, and the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have encouraged the government to adopt it, but Japan has conspicuously refrained from doing so.

This is not the first time the city’s national context has complicated its status as a global peace symbol. Hiroshima is situated at both the beginning of the nuclear age and the end of World War II. Although the victims of the atomic bombing were overwhelmingly civilians, Japan’s wartime legacy makes this history fraught for many of its neighbors, and for many Americans. Chinese and South Korean leaders have criticized Tokyo for using the memory of Hiroshima to whitewash other wartime atrocities. And even today, the bomb’s role in ending the war remains hotly contested in U.S. universities and policy circles.

Acknowledging these complexities does not diminish the significance or resonance of what happened in Hiroshima. To the contrary, the entanglement of humanitarian interests and existential risks with more quotidian questions of history and national security is intrinsic to the nuclear age.

As we move toward a world that will likely feature more nuclear weapons, less transparency, and fewer guardrails, Hiroshima is, in fact, more important than ever. In a period of escalating nuclear risks, it presents a grim reminder of what nuclear use actually means. But eliding the paradox of this city—a universal message embedded in a particular national context—would be a disservice. Although balancing competing priorities is difficult, honoring the memory of Hiroshima entails a ceaseless effort, to, as Kishida put it in a 2022 speech—and the G-7 reiterated today—“find a path to leading from the harsh reality to the ideal.”