Hiroshima’s hibakusha, nuclear taboo & Iran

TWO anniversaries bookend the global nuclear domain which is currently in a state of uneasy flux, animated as it is by a complex set of security and strategic challenges beginning with the Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022. The major powers represented by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, who have accorded unto themselves the responsibility to manage this domain in a safe and equitable manner, have been found lacking in their ability to deal with the steadily increasing geopolitical and techno-strategic turbulence.

The 80th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9) by the US will be observed early next month and it is estimated that currently, there are about 99,000 officially recognised ‘hibakusha‘ (atomic survivors) in Japan. The average age of these survivors is 86 years and all of them were little children who survived the 1945 mushroom cloud that killed more than 1,20,000 people and permanently scarred thousands more.

The other anniversary is that of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, that was finalised on July 14, 2015, between Iran and the P5+1 (the US, Russia, France, China, the UK plus Germany). This was seen as a major achievement of the Obama presidency and provided a reasonably equitable template to address the Iranian nuclear imbroglio through negotiations.

However, this ‘deal’ was rejected by US President Donald Trump in his first term in May 2018. Hence, the 10th anniversary in July 2025 was observed against the debris of the Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and a visible sense of triumphalism, both in the US and Israel, that Iran had been successfully ‘de-nuclearised’ and its uranium enrichment programme set back by decades.

Anniversaries are either celebrated — if the occasion is joyous — or observed in a sombre manner — if the recall is one of sadness or mourning. The latter are often imbued with rich historical significance and the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima-Nagasaki is among the most distinctive of such events for it recalls the only time in history that the atomic weapon was used militarily to defeat an adversary.

After the enormity of this apocalyptic tragedy was slowly comprehended in all its manifestations — human, ethical and environmental — the world adopted a solemn pledge: that Nagasaki would be the last time that this capability was used in anger and, progressively, the nuclear taboo was born. Public intellectuals and civil society played an important role in shaping the dominant discourse about averting a nuclear holocaust. Consequently, the first two decades after August 1945 saw an attempt to quarantine nuclear power to peaceful uses and nuclear weapons to their pristine role of deterrence. The core mission: only to deter the use of a similar capability by an adversary.

India at the time was in the vanguard of this effort to stigmatise the nuclear arms race between the superpowers —the USA and the former USSR — and advocated total disarmament as the Holy Grail for the world. Then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was recognised for his zealotry even though India was a modest nuclear power at the time.

Has the nuclear taboo now become passe and a red line whose sanctity has since expired? The tenth anniversary of the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) would seem to suggest that this is now a work in progress. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a significant punctuation, for it broke many shibboleths — the foremost being that conventional war in Europe was a thing of the past. The past has come back to haunt Europe even as this war festers.

The more serious transgression was that a nuclear-capable Russia — that had encouraged Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons (which Kiev had acquired as part of the former Soviet Union) at the end of the Cold War (December 1991) by assuring it of security guarantees — violated the territorial integrity of a non-nuclear weapon state with impunity.

The 1975 Helsinki treaty was in tatters. Furthermore, in the early stages of the Ukraine war, Moscow rattled the nuclear sabre — the first time in the post-Cold War period that a permanent member of the UN Security Council was adopting such a shrill posture.

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) had been imposed by the five major nuclear weapon powers in 1970 to regulate the nuclear domain. Under the NPT, the world was divided into the NWS (nuclear weapon states) and the less capable non-NWS (the latter were persuaded/compelled to renounce their weapon capability in perpetuity) who were promised cast-iron security guarantees and civilian nuclear cooperation, subject to compliance protocols.

Iran, which is a signatory to the NPT as an NNWS, has been accused by the US of secretly trying to acquire a nuclear weapon and while there was no smoking gun, the perception gained strength and, finally, the JCPOA was agreed to in July 2015. Diplomacy and patient negotiations had yielded potentially positive results and a signal to the world that some kind of consensus was still possible in a seemingly intractable nuclear impasse.

Regrettably, the Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the US support for this act of aggression has not only gutted the JCPOA but also further weakened the credibility of the NPT. A nuclear-capable Israel, which is a non-signatory to the NPT, has attacked an NNWS nation that is a signatory to the NPT with impunity.

With both Russia and the US having differently sullied the credibility of the NPT and the rectitude that underpinned global nuclear governance, 2025 could well become a defining year, where two anniversaries point to the perils ahead. If the world can no longer negotiate with patience and principled prudence to assuage insecurities over the nuclear issue — as the detritus of the JCPOA demonstrates — then the probability that the nuclear taboo, represented by the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, could soon be broken becomes more likely.

Listen to the ‘hibakusha‘ and heed their caution: in their elegiac recall, the living envied the dead.

C Uday Bhaskar is Director, Society for Policy Studies.

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