This week marks 80 years since the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the few remaining witnesses tell of incinerated, melted and obliterated families. Soon there will be none left to remember. Survivors’ graphic accounts of “the noiseless flash” were captured by John Hersey in his book Hiroshima, read by my generation with shock and fear. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach taught us every gut-wrenching detail of the radiation sickness I fully expected to die of. Civil defence leaflets told families how to hide under the stairs with a radio and torch.
I grew up expecting early death by nuclear war. My father was a 1957 founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament who didn’t expect us to survive inevitable nuclear holocaust. He carried a large bottle of suicide pills, enough to kill us all when the bomb fell, to save us from slowly perishing by strontium-90. When he left the jar behind driving on holiday to Wales, he had to turn back halfway there to fetch it. We lived under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. We knew that the three white geodesic domes of the Fylingdales early warning system would give us exactly four minutes, enough to boil an egg or run a very fast mile.
I set off with him aged 11 on the first Aldermaston march (though after speaking in Trafalgar Square, my alcoholic father got no further than the Bunch of Grapes in Knightsbridge). But every year afterwards I went with friends on that four-day Easter march to the atomic weapons research establishment in Berkshire: it was the high social event of the year, the Glastonbury of our generation, though our fear and outrage were real too.
What let that sense of imminent doom fade? The Vietnam war took over most protesting energies, and now the climate crisis is evident, desperate and immediate. The nuclear threat fell down the league table of fear, though it’s as great or greater. The US and Russia show alarming readiness to use nuclear weapons as a sabre-rattling threat. “I have ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,” Donald Trump announced in response to former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev tweeting that he would be ready to launch a nuclear strike over the war in Ukraine.
In the cold war standoff, mutually assured destruction seemed to make the use of them pretty unthinkable, though neither side could gauge the other’s willingness to end the world. There were close calls, over the Cuban missile crisis and the 1980s deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Now neither Trump nor Putin may be rational, nor think each other rational, and either might twitch their finger on the button. To talk nuclear threat suggests first use is not taboo. Trident, our US-dependent nuclear-armed submarines, are our “weapon of last resort”.
New designs can be deployed on a battlefield. Are these a more plausible deterrent or a more dangerously “usable” weapon? The non-proliferation treaty has not prevented Pakistan, North Korea, India or Israel becoming nuclear states: Iran may soon follow. Disarmament and world peace made no progress: 61 armed conflicts in 2024 were the most since the second world war.
Nato has fallen apart, never again certain that the US will defend its allies, whoever is president. With Russia more threatening than ever, Europe must defend itself, pulling the continent together with joint French, British and, they hope, German nuclear capacity. Unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain does not look a good proposition. Nuclear weapons are as terrifying and as mad as ever they were, but getting rid of them and burying the knowledge to make them looks ever harder in a more dangerous world.
“Don’t make us a target” is CND’s current campaign slogan. But Europe abandoning these weapons would make us Russian vassals. Jeremy Corbyn, a CND vice-president, who is in Hiroshima this week for the commemoration, said: “As we reflect on 80 years since the criminal bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we must ask where is the leadership in pursuing the urgent need for nuclear disarmament?”
Criminal? The inconvenient truth is that most historians think fewer people died in those bombings than would have perished in a prolonged invasion of Japan. That doesn’t diminish the horror.
Corbyn this week called on Britain to “rethink its disastrous nuclear expansion”. But unilateral disarmament always blighted Labour’s chances, as Nye Bevan knew when he urged the party not to send a Labour foreign secretary “naked into the conference chamber”. Unilateralism, and a pledge to leave the common market, made Michael Foot’s 1983 manifesto the “longest suicide note in history”. Neil Kinnock, once a CND supporter, persuaded his party to abandon unilateralism ahead of the 1992 election.
That Kinnock journey is one many of us took. But old Aldermaston songs stay embedded: “Don’t you hear the H-bombs’ thunder / Echo like the crack of doom? / While they rend the skies asunder / Fallout makes the Earth a tomb”, with its rousing refrain, “Ban the bomb, forever more!” It was a walking political education under multitudinous banners for anarchists, young communists, Quakers, the ANC and 57 varieties of socialist splinters, Trotskyite, Maoist and Stalinist.
Traitors, terrorists? Bertrand Russell, aged 89, led direct action, causing mass traffic obstruction with Whitehall sit-ins: would they now be called “terrorists”, following Labour’s draconian and provocative ban on Palestine Action? Whatever their causes, atrocities from Hiroshima to Gaza deserve the right to public expression of plain, Quaker-style revulsion at monstrous inhumanity.
The mayor of Hiroshima at Wednesday’s memorial ceremony linked the Ukraine and Gaza wars to a growing acceptance of nuclear weapons: their perpetrators “flagrantly disregard the lessons the international community should have learned from the tragedies of history”. The white doves released didn’t really suggest hope. He was right to call for a renewed urgency of a bygone age to remind those grown complacent of the reality of nuclear warfare. Forgetting that debate these days makes the unthinkable possible. Human idiocy has many ways to end the world.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 7 August 2025. Neil Kinnock’s Labour abandoned unilateralism in 1989, not in 1992, which was the year of the next general election.
