Is a World Without Nuclear Weapons a Dream? — Between Abolition and Deterrence

Since 1938, when the phenomenon of the atom’s nucleus splitting was discovered, humanity has lived for some eighty years with the ‘fire of the sun’ it took into its own hands. The first flash in the desert, the bombs that fell on two cities, the endless arms race, the thirteen days when the world nearly perished, the quietly spreading unease of proliferation — what this series has traced is the figure of a humanity entranced by power, frightened by power, and yet unable to let power go. In this final chapter we face the very question this long story presses upon us. Is a world without nuclear weapons, after all, a dream? Or is it a reality that may one day be within reach?

One treaty, and one voice — the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

In July 2017, at the United Nations, one treaty was adopted: the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Seeking to broadly prohibit the development, possession, and use of nuclear weapons, as well as the threat to use them, this treaty is said to have been established with the support of 122 countries. And on January 22, 2021, having passed through the ratification of the necessary states, the treaty formally entered into force. As the first international treaty to render nuclear weapons wholly illegal, this is regarded as a great step.

Behind this treaty stood people who had long raised their voices. Among those said to have played an especially important role were the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The coalition of non-governmental organizations that worked toward the treaty’s establishment received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, and at the award ceremony a woman said to have been exposed to the bombing in Hiroshima at the age of thirteen stood to give a speech. The words of people able to speak, as their own experience, of what happened beneath a single bomb have been delivered to the world with a weight unlike that of abstract security argument.

Yet this treaty also comes with a great reality. The states that possess nuclear weapons are all said not to have joined it. The states that entrust their own security to the nuclear power of an ally — those under the so-called ‘nuclear umbrella’ — have also held back from joining. Japan, said to be the only country to have suffered nuclear attack in war, has likewise not joined this treaty. A treaty that raises an ideal, and the absence of the very states that ought to sustain it — this gap, more eloquently than anything, tells of the difficulty of the nuclear question in our time.

Two ways of thinking that do not meet — deterrence and abolition

Over nuclear weapons, two broad ways of thinking have long faced each other: nuclear deterrence and nuclear abolition. This series takes neither side. Yet to set the two logics fairly side by side is indispensable if we are to think this problem through with our own minds.

Deterrence theory takes the view that it is precisely because nuclear weapons exist that all-out war between great powers has been avoided. If both sides know that they will face a devastating counterstrike, neither can make the first move — this ‘balance of terror,’ it is argued, has as a result prevented great wars. To let go of nuclear weapons one-sidedly might therefore create a vacuum of power and increase the danger instead. From this standpoint, nuclear weapons exist not in order to be used, but in order not to be used.

Against this, abolition theory points out that the balance itself is far too precarious. Deterrence holds only when one presumes that every party will always remain calm and will never commit a miscalculation or an accident — yet error is inseparable from both humans and machines. As this series has traced, the world has in fact stood at the brink of an accidental nuclear war. Since a single catastrophe would bring an irreversible result, the core of abolition theory is that as long as humanity continues to rely on nuclear weapons, it cannot escape the danger. Many of the people who know the reality of the bombing are said to have deeply shared this standpoint.

Where is the humanity that stole the sun headed?

In myth, it is told that humanity stole fire from the heavens and so came into possession of civilization. That fire lit the darkness, drove back the cold, transformed our food, and made us richer. Yet that the same fire could become a power to burn everything away, humanity came to know most clearly through nuclear weapons. The immense energy locked within the atom’s nucleus can erase a city in an instant, and can also generate electricity, diagnose disease, and save human lives. What we stole was, quite literally, the ‘sun.’

In these eighty years, humanity has not once used that fire in a second war. Some see this as the working of deterrence; others see it as merely having been lucky. By treaty nuclear weapons have been reduced, yet even now the world is said to hold enough of them to destroy humanity many times over. A treaty that raises an ideal, and states that in reality do not let go of nuclear weapons. People who keep raising their voices, and the heavy reality of security. All of it coexists, even now, on the same ground.

At the end of the series, we do not rush to a conclusion. Are nuclear weapons a necessary evil, or an absolute evil? Should we rely on deterrence, or aim for abolition? The answer is left quietly within you, who have read this story to its end. What is certain is that, having stolen the sun, we can no longer return to the time when we did not know it. How to live with this fire — that is a question turned not toward any particular someone, but toward all of us who live in the same age, a question that does not end.

Thank you for reading to the very end. If this long journey has become a small step toward thinking, in your own words, about the subject of nuclear weapons, nothing would make us happier.

【The Nuclear Age: Humanity That Stole the Sun — End】