When the World Stops Fearing the Bomb

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 one is neither signed nor ratified by any one of the nine nuclear weapon possessing nations.

Proliferation in Plain Sight

Few regions illustrate this reversal more starkly than Europe. During the Cold War, millions marched in streets under the banners of the Nuclear Freeze Movement and the European Nuclear Disarmament campaign. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, abolitionist optimism inspired initiatives ranging from the Canberra Commission to the Global Zero movement. Europe was seen as the moral custodian of arms control and strategic restraint.

Today, strategic anxieties have displaced that moral conviction. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and growing uncertainty over the United States’ long-term security guarantees have transformed Europe’s strategic imagination. Britain and France, Europe’s two nuclear states, are modernizing their arsenals. French President Emmanuel Macron has openly proposed extending France’s nuclear umbrella to European partners, while Germany and several NATO members are actively debating expanded nuclear-sharing arrangements. 

Europe — the intellectual birthplace of post-war arms control and confidence building measures — is quietly reinventing itself as the laboratory of nuclear reassurance. The Hague summit of NATO last year pledging all members raising their defense budgets to 5 percent of GDP has further accelerated the process of militarization.

Europe’s trajectory is concerning, but Washington’s approval of a long-term civilian nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia marks the most recent profound shift in global non-proliferation politics. By contemplating uranium enrichment capabilities on Saudi soil while accepting less-than-ideal bilateral safeguards, the agreement blurs the distinction between civilian nuclear cooperation and latent weapons capability. 

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has already declared that his Kingdom would pursue nuclear weapons should Iran acquire them. Riyadh recently signed a mutual defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan, whose defense minister is on record saying that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal “will be made available” to Saudi Arabia if needed. 

This is proliferation in the 21st century. It advances not through clandestine enrichment facilities hidden beneath mountains – the model pursued by North Korea and Iran – but through carefully drafted agreements, strategic partnerships, and diplomatic communiqués. The world’s nuclear future is being negotiated in conference rooms, with the results announced proudly in public. 

The Last Witnesses

What makes this transition dangerous is not merely the growth of nuclear arsenals but the shrinking of public alarm. Stockpile expansions, modernization programs, and shifting nuclear doctrines now receive less global attention than financial turbulence or celebrity controversies. The bomb has not become safer; the world has become numb to its dangers. That is precisely what the hibakusha spent eight decades warning against. 

The terrifying testimonies of hibakusha nursed humanity’s moral immune system for the past 81 years. They reminded governments that behind every discussion of deterrence and doctrines lie families and generations that will be erased in seconds. Their lived memories restrained policymakers more effectively than treaties ever can. Yet they will soon be gone.

As Terumi Tanaka’s generation walks into the horizon, another generation is learning about Hiroshima and Nagasaki as two modern metropolises. If the 20th century taught humanity how terrifying nuclear weapons could be, the 21st risks teaching us something even more dangerous – that Hiroshima and Nagasaki survived, even came to thrive. The implication is that nuclear weapons are no more than instruments of statecraft. 

A repeat of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained unthinkable all this time not because the world commemorated it as an annual ritual, but because the presence of hibakusha reminded us why it should never happen again. Those witnesses are running out of time. But the world may already have stopped paying attention.