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No more Hiroshimas

 August 6, 2025 by beyondnuclearinternational

Why is our response to atomic horror to arm up and ignore other atrocities, asks Linda Pentz Gunter.

For 80 years, the Hibakusha (survivors) of the United States atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have been warning the world  — “never again”. Never again should such weapons of terror be used, on civilians or on anyone. Never again should human beings treat other human beings as sacrificial and expendable. Peace is the only way forward, they plead.

Now it is 80 years since those two terrible days on August 6 and 9, 1945, when the United States chose to end the lives of what would eventually become at least 200,000 people in a callous public relations exercise to prove its might to the Soviet Union. Today, those Hibakusha still alive must surely be asking: “why haven’t you been listening?”

Even though the world has not used nuclear weapons again in war, the nine official nuclear-armed nations went on to “test” their nuclear weapons more than 2,000 times on other innocent communities mostly far away from their own — including in the Pacific, Australia, the Sahara and Kazakhstan — and even, in the case of the US, on its own people in Nevada. The very first atomic victims were of course those downwind of the July 16, 1945 Trinity test in New Mexico that launched the atomic age and the nuclear arms race.

Thanks to luck or grace but certainly not wisdom, we have not yet arrived at the finish line of nuclear annihilation. But we have not won the race to eliminate nuclear weapons, either. Despite international efforts, first with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968 and then the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that entered into force in 2021, nuclear weapon nations are arming up, not drawing down. 

The United States already has 5,428 nuclear weapons but is looking at spending around $95 billion a year on the euphemistically named “modernization” of its nuclear arsenal, code for “expansion”. For example, the US has ordered the development of a new B61-13 nuclear gravity bomb, just one part of a significant rebuild.

The Russian arsenal remains the world’s largest with 5,580 nuclear weapons. Russia claims to have tested new nuclear weapons, including undetectable ones, and the US has accused Russia of planning to develop a space-based anti-satellite nuclear weapon, something the Russians deny. China has also increased the number of its nuclear warheads from the low 200s to approximately 500.

France, which possesses 290 operational nuclear warheads – the fourth largest inventory in the world – is also “modernizing” its nuclear weapons systems. This year, it chose to allocate at least 14 percent of its defense budget to nuclear “deterrence” operations, up from 12.5 percent in 2020.

The UK government announced in June 2025 that it would purchase twelve nuclear-capable F-35A fighter jets from the US and raise its spending on defence to 5 percent of the national GDP by 2035. The UK is also replacing its Vanguard nuclear-armed submarines with a new class of Dreadnought submarines equipped with Trident II D-5 missiles, at an estimated cost of at least $42 billion. 

By July 2025, there were clear indications that US nuclear weapons, specifically the B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bomb, were already back in Britain at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, actually a US Air Force base despite its misleading name.

North Korea, India and Pakistan show no intention of abandoning their nuclear weapon programs. Israel, the only undeclared nuclear weapon state, endowed with a unique status by the United Nations of having to neither confirm nor deny the existence of its atomic arsenal, has anywhere between 80 to 200 nuclear weapons.(South Africa remains the only country ever to develop and then dismantle its nuclear weapons.)

Other countries aspire to join the Nuclear Club, but they disguise their plans under the pretext of civil nuclear power programs. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Before long, most of the Hibakusha will be gone. They will join the other ancestors from past and now present atrocities, who stare back at us with horror, asking us “why are you still letting this happen?” https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/08/06/no-more-hiroshimas/

August 9, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized