80 years on: Hiroshima, Geneva and the global struggle to ban the bomb

Nuclear weapons: deterrents, or recipes for disaster? Illustration: SWI swissinfo.ch / Helen James

Eighty years after the devastating nuclear attack on Hiroshima, global spending on atomic weapons is surging. As disarmament stalls, one survivor reminds the world what’s at stake.

Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. Seven-year-old Michiko Kodama was standing close to her desk near the classroom window, torn between going outside or staying put and taking cover under an air raid hood. Then came the flash – “yellow, orange, silver” –something beyond description. The windows shattered. She dived under her desk and blacked out.

Her school was just over four kilometres from ground zero; her home even closer. As her father carried her through a city in flames, they passed scorched bodies.

“That scene is still burned into my memory,” she says in a video interview with Swissinfo. “People were grabbing at our legs and begging: ‘please help me, please give me some water.’”

One encounter was particularly traumatic: a girl about her age, likely separated from her family, came running toward them. Half her face and body burned, she pleaded with her eyes as they passed her, unable to help. Kodama looked back. “She had already collapsed to the ground,” she says. “I think she died.”

*This video contains graphic and potentially disturbing content, including scenes of violence. It is intended for informational purposes and may not be suitable for all audiences. 

Eighty years on, Kodama’s testimony is a prescient reminder of the devastation unleashed by a single nuclear weapon – the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare destroyed around ten square kilometers of Hiroshima and killed an estimated 135,000 people. Her story also serves as a warning to a fractured world entering a new nuclear arms race, one that experts warn could lead to catastrophe.

From Geneva’s stalled disarmament talks to soaring military budgets, the momentum is no longer toward abolition but rearmament. Global spending on atomic weapons has risen sharply over the past five years and the world has had more close calls with atomic conflict since 1945 than most people realize. 

“The risk of use of nuclear weapons is higher now than it has ever been,” says Melissa Parke, executive director of ICAN, a Geneva-based organisation that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its role in advancing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the first international accord to comprehensively ban nuclear arms.

Parke’s concern is widely shared. In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward by one second to just 89 seconds to midnight – its starkest warning yet of the existential threat to the world from dangerous technologies. The change in part reflected fears that Russia’s war in Ukraine could spiral into nuclear conflict through miscalculation or accident. That was before May’s flare-up between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan and the attacks in June by atomic powers Israel and the US on Iran, which is developing nuclear capabilities but insists these are for peaceful uses like energy provision rather than nuclear weapons.

+ Threat of nuclear war paralyses Geneva

What alarms Héloïse Fayet, head of the deterrence and proliferation program at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), is “the return of nuclear weapons as a tool of statecraft and coercion… alongside the global crumbling of the international order – especially the norms and regulations around nuclear weapons.” These raise the risk of miscommunication and catastrophic mistakes, she said.

A new arms race

Spending on nuclear weapons has surged in recent years. Since 2019, all nine nuclear-armed states – the US, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea – have increased their annual investments. The US leads the pack, with Russia and China following closely behind.

China, in particular, has significantly expanded its arsenal from around 200 warheads in the early 2000s to an estimated 600 as of last year, according to the US Defense Department,External link which estimates the figure will rise to more than 1,000 by 2030. That’s still only about one-tenth the size of the US and Russian stockpiles.

While Beijing officially upholds a “no first use” nuclear policy –pledging not to use nuclear weapons unless first attacked – some Western analysts question how firmly that stance would hold in the event of a major conflict.

“This growing interest in nuclear weapons by existing nuclear states gives ideas to countries that don’t have them,” says Fayet. She lists South Korea, Japan, Ukraine, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia among the countries developing a more favorable attitude to nuclear weapons. “They see it as a useful tool of statecraft.”

The modernisation of nuclear arsenals brings new dangers. Many nuclear powers are developing hypersonic missiles and AI-driven targeting systems. Parke is especially concerned about AI creeping into nuclear command and control systems and that modernisation will make these systems even more liable to cyber-attacks.

Today’s warheads are smaller but exponentially more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was bombed by the US three days later. The US’s Castle Bravo test in 1954 was a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb – 15 megatons versus 15 kilotons. Multiplying that kind of destructive force by today’s 12,000 warheads gives a sense of the potential devastation. “With 12,000 warheads, the Earth could be destroyed twice over,” notes Kodama.

Kai Reusser / SWI swissinfo.ch

Treaties in crisis, norms in retreat

The architecture of nuclear restraint, painstakingly built since Hiroshima, is faltering. 

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), negotiated in Geneva in the 1960s, faces a crisis of credibility. Its last review conference in 2022 collapsed without consensus, and prospects are bleak for the upcoming 2026 round.  

Review conferences, held every five years in New York, are intended to assess progress on the treaty’s three pillars – non-proliferation, disarmament, and the peaceful use of nuclear energy – and to strengthen commitments among signatories.   

“We’ve got an almost complete breakdown in arms control agreements and a new nuclear arms race underway,” says Parke. “It’s very serious. This is a moment when world leaders should be talking to each other to dial down mistrust… and talk about disarmament seriously for the first time in a long time.”  

Geneva, which is hosting multiple events to mark the 80^th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been a natural choice for countries seeking to deal with nuclear issues given Switzerland’s reputation for neutrality and the city’s position as host to key UN agencies, including the United Nations Institute for Disarmament ResearchExternal link.   

The nuclear accident at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine in 1986 triggered strong anti-nuclear movements in Switzerland, significantly influencing public opinion and long-term energy policy. Geneva became a hub for international coordination on nuclear safety and disaster response in the aftermath of the disaster. 

The city plays a symbolically central role in nuclear diplomacy, serving as a trusted venue for back-channel negotiations. One key example is the Iran nuclear deal – the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which required Iran to significantly limit its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.   

It is also home to the United Nations’ Conference on Disarmament. But this multilateral negotiating forum, which meets in three sessions each year, hasn’t produced a new treaty in decades. The last major one – the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty – was signed in 1996 but never came into force as it failed to gain the requisite ratifications. Key states including the US, China, and India never ratified the treaty and Russia formally de-ratified it in 2023.  

The TPNW, which entered into force in 2021, continues to be ignored by all nuclear-armed states. Even neutral Switzerland has passed on signing it, despite its humanitarian appeal. In its latest assessment in March 2024, the Federal Council reaffirmed that Switzerland’s commitment to nuclear restraint is best pursued through the existing NPT, which includes all nuclear powers. 

 

Conflict zones raise nuclear risks  

The world has come dangerously close to nuclear catastrophe more times than most realize – from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to false radar alerts. The world has survived thanks to “sheer dumb luck,” Parke says, echoing the views of experts including Gareth Evans, a former co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, and UN General Secretary António Guterres.   

Most close calls involved the US and former Soviet Union, which built up vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, when each held tens of thousands of warheads. The US and Russia still control about 90% of the global total, with each country possessing more than 5,000.  

Today’s most volatile geopolitical conflicts involve nuclear states – or those on the threshold of acquiring such weapons. 

+ How Switzerland is preparing for nuclear escalation

“We’ve got currently major conflicts involving nuclear-armed states, nuclear threats, and an increase in nuclear rhetoric, even from very senior political leaders,” notes Parke. “Nuclear weapons are being used by countries that have them to be bullies, nuclear bullies, to carry out actions in a way that shows that they feel they have no accountability.”  

The recent strikes on Iran by the US and Israel highlight the double standards of global nuclear policy, she says. Still, she takes hope from the growing support for the TPNW, which is nearing majority backing at the UN, with nearly 100 countries having signed or ratified it. More, including Kyrgyzstan, are expected to come on board this year. 

Lessons of the past ignored 

For survivors like Michiko Kodama, the nuclear threat is painfully real and all too present. She carries a haunting legacy, one that drives her to speak out from a sense of duty and concern that the world is forgetting the horrors of Hiroshima.  

That concern is understandable. In 2018, Kodama met with diplomats from five nuclear-armed states, urging them to fulfil their disarmament obligations under the NPT. But when she returned to Geneva in 2024, during the ongoing war in Ukraine, no representatives from those countries agreed to meet with her, only those from non-nuclear states did so. 

Footage from Ukraine – especially of children killed in the conflict being placed in body bags – has been especially difficult for her to watch. “In Hiroshima, we did not even have plastic bags then,” she recalls. “Burned bodies with no hands or no feet, unrecognisable as male or female, were loaded onto carts and treated like garbage. They had no dignity left at all as humans.” 

Kodama is also disappointed with Tokyo’s current position. Despite being the only country to have experienced a nuclear attack, Japan has not signed the TPNW. The treaty entered into force in 2021—the same year her younger brother, who was five at the time of the bombing, died of multiple cancers linked to radiation exposure.  

“We hibakusha are still alive,” she says using the Japanese term for survivors of the 1945 atomic bombing. “We are angry… I hope for a world without nuclear weapons.”  

Additional reporting by Akiko Uehara  

Edited by Nerys Avery/vm