World Pressenza
Eighty-One Years of Evidence and the World Continues to Accept Nuclear Weapons
On 10 December 2024, Terumi Tanaka, a Nagasaki survivor, stood in Oslo to deliver the Nobel lecture on behalf of Nihon Hidankyo, the confederation of Japanese atomic bomb survivors that had won that y
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On 10 December 2024, Terumi Tanaka, a Nagasaki survivor, stood in Oslo to deliver the Nobel lecture on behalf of Nihon Hidankyo, the confederation of Japanese atomic bomb survivors that had won that year’s Peace Prize. Tanaka asserted that the possession of even a single nuclear weapon should not be permitted. Yet the following morning, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, stated at a press conference that the government’s position will remain unchanged, as deterrence, including nuclear deterrence, is the foundation of Japan’s security.
It would be wrong to read this as a government indifferent to the prize. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba called the prize extremely significant when it was announced, and on the day of the ceremony, Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya congratulated the laureates in a formal statement pledging “practical and realistic” efforts towards a world without nuclear weapons. Ishiba nonetheless told the laureates, in his congratulatory call, that nuclear deterrence was a practical necessity. A government, in other words, can honour its witnesses and leave its policy untouched, which suggests that testimony alone is not what has been missing. The more useful question is what the bomb does for the governments that keep it, and the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee pointed the same way when he noted that none of the nine nuclear-armed states seemed interested in disarmament.
What Governments Already Know
The number of survivors is dwindling rapidly. In March 2026, Japan’s health ministry counted 91,105 certificate holders, with an average age of 87. Their testimony is irreplaceable, yet the case against nuclear weapons no longer rests on testimony alone. The Radiation Effects Research Foundation estimates that between 150,000 and 246,000 people died in the two cities within two to four months, and its Life Span Study of some 120,000 people, begun in 1950, remains the main basis for international radiation-risk estimates.
Governments have examined all of this. They met on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons in Oslo, Nayarit and Vienna in 2013 and 2014, and in 2017 a vote of 122 states adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which entered into force in January 2021. By late September 2026, according to the UN Treaty Collection, 75 states were parties, having ratified or acceded, and a further 26 had signed without ratifying, for a total of 101. But still, none of the nine nuclear-armed states is among them. Thus, governments have been repeatedly informed, and ignorance cannot serve as their defence.
What Governments Have Done
What they did with that knowledge was visible in May 2026, when the eleventh Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) ended without a consensus, the third review in a row to fail. The president of the conference, Do Hung Viet of Viet Nam, concluded that consensus was out of reach over the topic of Iran and did not put the draft forward. According to Arms Control Today, he acknowledged difficulties in other sections as well but called the Iran paragraph a very important reason for the deadlock.
The dilution of the draft was a separate matter and, in some ways, the more telling one. According to the UN’s summary, the final text had dropped or weakened references to the urgency of disarmament, to the modernisation and expansion of arsenals, and to a successor to New START. Chatham House noted that nuclear-weapon states struck out even mild requests for transparency about their own arsenals. A text so modest would have asked little of them had it been adopted, and a conference that could not agree even on that offers scant restraint on the modernisation now under way.
That modernisation is well documented. The SIPRI Yearbook estimates that the nine nuclear-armed states held about 12,187 warheads in January 2026. That figure is the total inventory, which includes some 2,442 retired warheads awaiting dismantlement, and it is slightly below the 12,241 in January 2025, mainly because dismantling continues. The military stockpile, which counts the warheads available for potential use, moved the other way, from 9,614 to 9,745, as the Yearbook’s chapter on nuclear forces sets out. Meanwhile, New START, the last treaty limiting American and Russian strategic arsenals, expired in February 2026 with nothing to replace it.
Why the Bomb Persists
Eighty-one years of testimony, evidence and advocacy have not removed the weapons, and explaining why requires some precision about what has been accepted and by whom. Tilman Ruff, a co-founder of ICAN, puts the puzzle plainly: “If nuclear weapons must never be used, then why are we not finally getting rid of them?” The first half of that question describes a position governments have stated repeatedly. Use, then, has not been accepted; possession has. The governments that hold nuclear weapons, and those that shelter under them, keep nuclear weapons in existence, and none of the nine is pursuing elimination.
The reasons for that persistence concern different factors. They begin with governments that believe possession keeps the peace, move to the companies and financiers paid to maintain arsenals, then to the leaders who draw prestige and political advantage from them, and finally to the publics whose opposition seldom becomes policy. The last concern is what the state says it owes survivors for harm already done.
1. Deterrence: A Theory, Not a Law
Governments treat deterrence—the idea that the threat of nuclear retaliation keeps the peace—as fact, and Japan shows how firmly. Japan has attended none of the three meetings of TPNW states parties, even as an observer, and its foreign minister said in February 2025 that observer status could send the wrong message about nuclear deterrence. Governments can, therefore, condemn use and still defend possession, so long as possession is presented as the means of preventing use.
The claim is nonetheless hard to test. Ward Wilson, the executive director of RealistRevolt, argues that deterrence works, if it works at all, in the minds of leaders who must perceive a threat, believe it and decide accordingly, and he has noted that too little data exists to judge how often it does. Proponents, of course, argue that the absence of major power conflict since 1945 serves as evidence, but that claim faces the same obstacle: a war that never happened cannot be counted.
2. Industry Has Money at Stake
This kind of belief is sustained by money, which is easier to trace than doctrine. ICAN, whose figures are estimates drawn from public records, calculates that the nine nuclear-armed states spent just under $119 billion on their arsenals in 2025, 19 per cent more than the year before, and that the United States, at $69.2 billion, spent more than the other eight combined. Much of it reaches private firms: according to the full report, at least 25 companies hold at least $401 billion in outstanding contracts and paid over $138 million to lobbyists in France and the United States. Contracts that sometimes run for decades plausibly give workers, suppliers and lobbyists a standing interest in keeping these programmes alive.
Banks and funds supply the capital. The 2025 edition of Don’t Bank on the Bomb found 301 financial institutions with significant ties to these producers, up from 260 in the previous edition. Institutions that avoid such investments manage over $4 trillion, which shows that avoidance is possible.
3. Arsenals Bring Status and Domestic Gains
Money is not the only reward. The political scientist Scott Sagan argued in International Security that security concerns alone do not account for state acquisition of nuclear weapons. These weapons also serve bureaucratic and political interests and function as symbols of modernity and identity. While Sagan focused on acquisition, his analysis applies equally to retention: arsenals that provide employment, enhance leadership prestige, and signal international status also resist moral arguments for disarmament.
4. Public Opinion Does Not Reach Policy
If belief, money and status keep arsenals in place, one might expect publics to push back, and in Japan they do, but to little effect. A poll in 2021 found 71 per cent of people in favour of joining the TPNW and 27 per cent opposed it, while only 28 per cent of Diet members supported joining. When Nihon Hidankyo surveyed the Diet before the February 2026 election, 117 lawmakers said Japan should sign and ratify, but only about one-fifth of members replied, and none came from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who studied Hiroshima survivors for Death in Life (1967), coined the term “psychic numbing” to describe a diminished emotional response. He first observed it among survivors and later applied the concept to societies coexisting with nuclear weapons. Put simply, survivors had to overcome this numbing to share their experiences, but most people removed from such events have never had to. As a result, society seamlessly normalises the nuclear threat and acceptance of arms.
We cannot say that testimony has no effect however, and the TPNW itself shows why. It emerged from the three Humanitarian Consequences conferences in 2013 and 2014 and its preamble acknowledges the suffering of the hibakusha; the final draft of the 2026 NPT Review Conference called on states to share the experiences of communities affected by nuclear use and testing, and Japan’s own delegate welcomed a joint statement by 116 states parties on disarmament and non-proliferation education. Testimony therefore reaches governments indirectly and unevenly. What it has not done is change the policy of states that defend deterrence.
5. The State Offers Support but Not Compensation
That view is the fifth reason, and it sits in the part of the Oslo lecture that has had the least analysis. Tanaka recorded that the government had never provided state compensation for the hundreds of thousands of deaths and had confined its measures to radiation-related harm, a limit that Vasileva and Kawano describe in their study of hibakusha research. On 11 December 2024, Hayashi placed the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki alongside every other civilian who died in the war, to whom he said the government gives no benefits.
The state does provide support, and the distinction matters. Laws of 1957 and 1968 gave certified survivors medical care and allowances, and the 1994 Atomic Bomb Survivors Support Law, which merged them, was enacted under “the responsibility of the state”. The government reads that phrase as describing the state’s role in carrying out the programmes, not as an admission that it must pay compensation. Survivors press their claims against their own government because the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty waived Japan’s right to claim war damages from the Allied powers, which ostensibly closed the route to reparations from the United States. For Nihon Hidankyo, state compensation is therefore an acknowledgement of the state’s responsibility.
The doctrine behind the refusal is older than that law. In 1980, an advisory panel to the health ministry, the Fundamental Problems Conference, reported that the sacrifices of total war must be borne equally by all citizens. It proposed special measures for those exposed to radiation, without admitting a duty to compensate, and turned down condolence money for the dead. The minutes of its first meeting record the then health minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto, saying that the government feared that compensating atomic bomb victims would lead other general war victims to demand compensation too. Nihon Hidankyo has rejected this doctrine of endurance ever since.
Endurance and deterrence can be read as sharing a premise: catastrophic harm in war is a cost the population is expected to absorb, not a wrong the state must remedy. Deterrence plans for the possibility of such harm and presents the plan as prudence, and endurance states what follows if the harm comes. On this reading, a government that accepted liability for harm already done would find it harder to describe the next instance as a calculable risk.
What Japan Could Do
If that is the case, then the pattern seen in Oslo is unlikely to change through testimony alone. It is more likely to change when acknowledging survivors carries a cost in policy, and for Japan the first cost is small. Germany, Norway and Australia, among others, have attended meetings of TPNW states parties as observers while remaining under the nuclear umbrella, and Japan can do the same when the treaty’s first Review Conference meets in New York from 30 November to 4 December 2026. Abe Nobuyasu pairs the observer status with two further steps that do not require signing: raising awareness of what Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed and joining the effort to implement the treaty’s provisions on victim assistance and environmental remediation.
The harder step is the one the fifth reason identifies, and it differs from victim assistance. Scholars of transitional justice distinguish assistance, which meets present needs, from reparations, which acknowledge responsibility, and the TPNW has been criticised for placing primary responsibility for assistance and remediation on affected states rather than on those that used or tested nuclear weapons. What Nihon Hidankyo has demanded since 1984 is state compensation, paired in that year’s basic demands with a call for a treaty banning nuclear weapons completely.
The movement itself presents compensation as serving abolition: redress for past harm, support for present needs and a guarantee against recurrence. Recognising that the state owes survivors compensation would treat the harm of 1945 as a wrong to be remedied and not a cost to be borne, the very premise on which both endurance and deterrence rest.
Taking both steps would narrow the gap between the ceremony in Oslo and the policy announced the next morning; declining them would leave it as it is. The witnesses have supplied what witnesses can. What remains is for states to act. Or must we wait until another nuclear weapon is used in war, unleashing catastrophic death and destruction, before the world finally acts on what it already knows?