Eighty Years with the Bomb: How long can our luck continue?

Remarks to Hiroshima Prefecture Roundtable 2025, Hiroshima, Japan, 1 September 2025

It cannot be said too often that it is only sheer dumb luck that has enabled the world to avoid for 80 years a repeat of the indescribable horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not because nuclear deterrence is a recipe for peace, not because systems are failsafe, not because of wise statesmanship. Just because our incredibly good fortune in having enough operational-level cool heads in the right place and at the right time to hit the pause, not the launch, button on every one of those multiple occasions over the decades when human error or system error generated false alarms.

The deliberate first use of nuclear weapons cannot be ruled out, despite all the well-known risks involved. It simply cannot be assumed that calm, considered rationality will always prevail in the enormous stress of a real-time crisis. But the bigger risk remains stumbling into a catastrophe through accident, miscalculation, human error or system error. Mishaps of the kind which occurred on multiple occasions through the Cold War, and since, and have been recently comprehensively documented by the Federation of American Scientists in the Washington Post. How can anyone rationally assume that the world’s good luck will be avoided indefinitely?

After a post-Cold War period in which it was possible to dream that the elimination of the most indiscriminately inhumane weapons ever devised might ultimately be achievable, the world is now again awash with nuclear weapons, and states with the capability to build and use them. And perhaps the will, as the longstanding taboo against the aggressive first use of nuclear weapons appears to be weakening – with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in particular talking up this prospect in the Ukraine war in language not heard since the height of the Cold War.

In this desolate environment, what can be done by those of us in government or civil society around the world to advance the cause of global zero, or at least nuclear risk reduction? There are no short or easy answers, but to me the enterprise has always had two dimensions – rational and emotional.

The rational arguments for non-reliance on nuclear weapons, either to deter war or in actual warfighting, are strong and persuasive, and must continue to be made by every civil society organisation that cares, and every half-way decent government that understands the stakes. Among the many other books and reports making that case, I can’t help but mention the Australia-Japan sponsored International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), which I co-chaired in 2010 with Yoriko Kawaguchi, and to which our colleague Nobu Abe was an important contributor. Our report systematically addressed and countered all the familiar arguments made for the utility of nuclear deterrence, in the context not only of rivalry between great and major powers, but also that of smaller states feeling themselves vulnerable to attack without some super-weapon of their own. And it set out a credible multi-stage strategy for getting ultimately to elimination through a step-by-step process of nuclear risk reduction, one of the most crucial elements in which would be a universal doctrinal commitment to No First Use.

But the reality is that while rational arguments are a necessary condition for moving towards a nuclear-weapons free world, they are unlikely to be sufficient. The biggest hurdles to effective nuclear arms control will always be psychological, emotional and political. Nuclear weapons, for all the immense risks associated with their possession, seem to be an irresistible source of comfort to governments and publics feeling a sense of vulnerability. And for most, if not all, of the present nuclear armed states, the testosterone factor – considerations of status, prestige, and nuclear bragging rights – continue to be in play.

Somehow, we need to capture, or recapture, among policymakers and publics, a sense of total revulsion at the indefensible horror associated with any use, deliberate or inadvertent, of these weapons: the emotion, as I have said to you before, that I certainly experienced, with a force that has stayed with me for six decades, when I first visited the Hiroshima bomb site in 1964. Grass roots movements are struggling for traction. The Global Zero-sponsored film Countdown to Zero, produced by the team responsible for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and hoping for the same global impact, disappeared almost without trace. And the Oppenheimer movie, which many of us had hoped would be a circuit breaker, graphically showed us the Hiroshima explosion, but none of the gruesome reality of the scores of thousands of men, women and children, who were vaporised, crushed, baked, boiled or irradiated to death by its impact. Sometimes I fear that the world will be shocked into action only if, God help us, a nuclear catastrophe actually occurs.

Every political leader who visits the Hiroshima Peace Park Museum seems to come away with the same traumatised sense of urgency that I experienced as a young student 60 years ago, and I think it is crucial that the Prefecture, among all its other impressive efforts, under the outstanding leadership of Governor Hidehiko Yuzaki, to keep the cause of nuclear sanity alive, continue to encourage many more global political leaders to have that experience. As Hide said in a recently interview, ‘humanity is now risking something even more terrible than what happened here. Hiroshima is not the past. It’s the present.’ Those are memorable words, and we must all try to ensure that they continue to resonate.