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 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 “modernisation” 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 is also reported to have 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 “modernising” its nuclear weapons systems. This year, it chose to allocate at least 14 per cent of its defence budget to nuclear “deterrence” operations, up from 12.5 per cent in 2020.

The British government announced in June 2025 that it would purchase 12 nuclear-capable F-35A fighter jets from the US and raise its spending on defence to 5 per cent of the national GDP by 2035. Britain 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 £31 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 weapons programmes.

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 programmes. However, once in possession of the materials, technology and nuclear knowhow to develop a civil programme, the transition to nuclear weapons is, while not straightforward, eminently possible. Indeed, this is precisely how India came to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran’s civil nuclear programme was bombed last month by the US and Israel, despite Iran being a signatory to the NPT, and even though the International Atomic Energy Agency said there were no active signs that it was developing nuclear weapons. The bombings happened for one reason only — because Iran’s civil nuclear programme gave it the capacity to transition to nuclear weapons production.

The bellicose rhetoric around Iran has abated somewhat, particularly in light of revelations that, despite Trump’s claims that Iran’s entire nuclear operation had been “obliterated,” this was almost certainly not the case.

Instead, the bluster ramped up in other quarters, most notably just days before the 80th commemoration of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. That was when Trump, easily provoked, rose to the bait after the largely powerless former Russian leader, Dmitri Medvedev, admonished him for putting a deadline on a Russian ceasefire with Ukraine.

Medvedev even referenced Russia’s Cold War era “Dead Hand,” which can allegedly automatically launch a nuclear attack in response to detecting an incoming one.

Trump called Medvedev’s remarks “foolish,” which should have been an end to the matter. But Trump does not like to be told off or languish in anyone’s shadow. Consequently, he announced that he had moved two of the country’s nuclear-armed submarines closer to Moscow.

The threat was meaningless, of course, because the 14 US Trident missile-armed submarines, at least eight of which are at sea at all times, have a massive firing range of 4,600 miles, already easily within striking distance of Russia. Unless Trump is unaware of this (eminently possible), moving them closer didn’t change anything.

Nevertheless, this verbal volley served as a reminder of what an actual nuclear exchange would mean, conjuring images of what it looked like the first time.

Except that the next time will not look like the first time, and no-one even saw the images from that first time for more than two decades. US authorities assiduously suppressed photos and film footage captured in the horrific aftermath of the atomic bombings in Japan. The American public did not see newsreel footage of the carnage for another 25 years or official military footage until 40 years later.

Meanwhile, the plane used to drop the bomb on Hiroshima — the Enola Gay — is displayed in the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center, in Virginia, part of Washington DC’s National Air and Space Museum, a proud monument to one of humankind’s greatest depravities.

By contrast, pictures taken when the Nazi death camps were finally liberated, beginning in 1944, went into immediate circulation. The photos provoked rightful revulsion and provided crucial evidence during the ensuing trials of the perpetrators for war crimes and crimes against humanity. No such trials for the crimes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ever held.

Today, we are awash in photos and film clips of horrifying carnage and cruelty on a daily basis — especially from Gaza, but also from the Congo, Sudan and elsewhere.

The authorities who were afraid of public reaction to the US atomic atrocities in Japan now have no way to suppress the tsunami of news footage available on the internet and the airwaves 24 hours a day.

And yet, even these shocking images have failed to spur our elected leaders into action to stop these atrocities.

It would be simplistic to argue that we have arrived at a place where we have lost all empathy.

Clearly, empathy was already absent when the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Empathy was not there either in the extermination of Native Americans, in the Nazi death camps or the rice paddies of Vietnam, in the killing fields of Cambodia or the Soviet (now Russian) gulags. And it is not there now in Gaza.

How, then, do we continue to sound the warning of the Hibakusha ever more urgently, that the harbouring of weapons capable of exterminating all of life is an abomination we cannot accept?

And how do we heed the words of the late Japanese-American US senator, Daniel Inouye, inscribed on the National Japanese-American Memorial in Washington, DC, also a monument to the Japanese-Americans interned during World War II: “The lessons learned must remain a grave reminder of what we must not allow to happen again to any group.”

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?”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland and the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear.