View in browser
Isabel Fattal: Even though I knew that only one country on Earth has actually lived with the tragedies of nuclear war, your story clarified that point for me in a new way. What surprised you most about the way the 1945 atomic bombing is still felt and remembered in Hiroshima?
Ross Andersen: One interesting thing about Hiroshima is that the city has been totally rebuilt. Through one lens, it’s an ordinary modern city where you can duck into a sushi restaurant on a random block and not know that you are in a place where this really terrible thing has happened. But then there’s the Peace Memorial Park, a kind of open-air museum where you can dwell on the reality of nuclear war.
For the story, I spent some time with the governor of Hiroshima, Hidehiko Yuzaki, and he told me that nearly everyone who goes sees something that hits them particularly hard. For me, it was seeing the burned clothes of very small children in the museum and thinking about what happened to them and also what happened to 20,000 other children. The enormity of that suffering is hard to even hold in your mind. But in light of that, what’s remarkable—and what surprised me—is that among the city’s leaders, there isn’t a sense of bitterness over what happened there. Instead, going all the way back to just a few years after the attacks, when the wounds were still raw, they sought to make Hiroshima a mecca for global disarmament and peace.
Isabel: How does that attitude play a role in Japan’s longtime refusal to participate in a nuclear-armed world? And how is that national opinion starting to shift now?
Ross: In Japan, there’s been this taboo on nuclear weapons. But you also have, speaking of historical memory, this long-standing antagonism between South Korea and Japan, and that plays out in an interesting way.
The Japanese are already on edge about their neighbors having nukes. Right in their backyard, China is engaged in the fastest nuclear buildup since the peak of the Cold War. North Korea, which is a sworn enemy of Japan, is also engaged in this nuclear buildup. So Japan and South Korea have these similar nuclear-security concerns, but what’s so ironic is that it’s South Korea getting nuclear weapons that would really tip Japan over, at least based on what I heard from people on the ground there. They just could not abide a world in which South Korea had nuclear weapons and they did not. And so clearly, even though we’re a couple generations removed from Japan’s brutal colonization of South Korea, that history is alive today.
Isabel: One subtheme of your article is how U.S. presidents, their specific temperaments and philosophies, have shaped progress on global disarmament, or lack thereof. Did you come away with any lessons on what sort of president is best suited for making disarmament a reality?
Ross: My view is that historical conditions matter more than personalities when it comes to disarmament. One thing to celebrate is that throughout U.S. presidencies, including Donald Trump’s, there’s been a remarkably bipartisan record of pushing for nonproliferation. And of course, different presidents have pursued that goal in different ways. It was interesting to hear the defense intelligentsia in South Korea weigh in on Trump’s attempts to engage Kim Jong Un at these grand summits in his first term.
It wasn’t that these South Korean strategists and defense experts were opposed to summits with North Korea on principle. They just know that Kim is a pretty wily character, so if you want to have a diplomatic breakthrough with him, you have to have a sophisticated strategy for what you’re going to accomplish. You have to have the chessboard laid out. There was a feeling that Trump wasn’t all that prepared, and that he thought doing this was like doing a real-estate deal, and that that’s why he failed.
Isabel: The possibility of nuclear war feels so far away for many people. Do you think citizens will ever care on a more personal level?
Ross: It is removed from most people’s daily lives, and of course, I hope it stays that way forever. A chilling thought I’ve had that you’re hinting at in your question is that we’d never see the abolition of these weapons, or meaningful disarmament, unless there was a major exchange that was so awful that it led to an international taboo. But you could also imagine scenarios where a major exchange made people cling to these weapons even more tightly, because it would lead to global political instability on a scale that we have not seen in the modern era.
Either way, I really hope that we can get serious arms control or disarmament without something like that happening. But at the very least, it’s going to take a very different global security environment than the one we have now, where major powers are once again at one another’s throats and people are making open nuclear threats. Historically, you tend to see disarmament when people feel like a lasting peace has taken hold, like in those years immediately after the Cold War. The key is to get toward peace and then have the ideas set up in advance so that you can take advantage of those windows, because as we’ve learned, they can be brief.
Related:
Today’s News
- A federal judge implemented a new nationwide block on President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship.
- An Israeli strike in Gaza killed at least 15 people, including at least eight children, who were waiting for nutritional supplements at a clinic, according to a Gazan hospital.
- Trump announced yesterday that the U.S. will levy a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods starting on August 1. The move, he wrote on Truth Social, was influenced by the country’s legal action against former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a longtime Trump ally, and American tech firms.
Dispatches
Explore all of our newsletters here.
More From The Atlantic
