At home I have a book telling stories of Dutch WW2 survivors still living today. One of them was an eye witness account of the Hiroshima bomb. He was a POW and worked in a quarry or mine on the outskirts of town. He saw a single plane fly over. A bomb dropped with a parachute attached. Moments later he was flung to the back of the quarry and the city was gone. I would never have guessed there were eyewitnesses like this, let alone coutrymen of mine.
The book Hiroshima by John Hersey has many accounts like this. It’s a short read and follows six people and covers the first year after the bombing. I’d highly recommend reading it if such accounts are interesting to you.
This is indeed a very timely award. I sometimes feel like the world has forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist and are still on hair-trigger alert to obliterate major cities. Maybe the end of atmospheric testing and the success of (now defunct) weapons reduction treaties has blunted public perception to the ongoing threat that they represent, and to the need to tread carefully where nuclear powers are involved.
If I put a hammer over your head that can fall any minute you'll be worrying, but if you're born with the hammer over your head and your parents before you as well, it becomes less of a thing.
On an individual level, we all have a variety of hammers over our heads. Cancer has killed far more people prematurely than nuclear weapons. Something like 500,000 people a year are murdered. Traffic/bicycle/pedestrian accidents also kill more than nuclear weapons. Even compared to a once-in-a-century nuclear war that perhaps kills a billion people, cancer will kill roughly a billion in the next century anyway. So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about.
While this apathy is an important coping mechanism to some degree, it's important not to become complacent. It's precisely this apathy and hopelessness that authoritarian regimes cultivate to prevent action.
I'd like to think of myself as a rational person, yet I worry about it. Because it's not just a matter of math; the effects of a billion people dying at once would be far more detrimental than the deaths from cancer over a century.
(One might think this line of reasoning that some people apply is a coping mechanism to ignore the reality, but that might be a different conversation)
But it is not just about coping. We as society, can make policies to decrease chance of getting a cancer and decrease traffic deaths. We just chose not to out of convenience and profit.
If I fall 1 feet one hundred times, I'll probably be Ok
If I fall 100 feet once, I won't.
1m people dying in 1 day is not the same as 1M people dying over a decade.
Also. People generally dont fear death itself. This is expressed by people in pallitative care. Its the chaos and uncertainty preceding death that is really feared
> So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about.
Until you have children and future generations to worry about. Then it suddenly seems quite a bit more pressing that their world could be obliterated at a moment's notice by a small handful of decision makers.
I once knew an academic who would not fly in an airplane. He was invited to a distinguished conference across the country, but complained to me that he was too scared to fly. "Why?" I ask.. "Terrorists" he replied.. "it is too serious. I just can't do it". so a year or two pass and then I see this Academic again. While talking he mentions that he just returned from a great conference far away. "What? I thought you were afraid to fly in an airplane!" .. He replies "that was true, I was scared of someone carrying a bomb on the flight. But, I calculated the statistical odds of there being TWO bombs on a single plane, and it was infinitesimal..."
Does your risk assessment methodology also account for near misses? Agency? Morality? Source of risk? Costs of mitigation? Benefits? Something like actuary tables?
Mitigation of bike and pedestrian deaths is cheap. Just reform land use, advantage people over vehicles. Oops, now you're into culture and values.
Mitigation of cancer deaths is very expensive. Though we didn't invent cancer, we feel the moral imperative to "cure" it. And yet, while we're mitigating it, we're also making it worse. Cross purposes. What's your balance sheet for this conundrum?
Drugs kill lots of people. We own that one, right? How's the War on Drugs working out?
In conclusion, I wish I could wave away these dilemmas with a cute nominator and denominator. But I can barely reason about them before my head explodes. So I'm not buying what you're selling. Life's a bit more complicated, a bit more empirical, a bit less rational, than your tidy equations.
Why does that figure looks really suspicious to me. So in nuclear exchange there is either already fully setup blocks or the responding party will pull in others in?
The entire purpose of nuclear armaments is to make certain wars too nasty to fathom engaging in. If their organization didn't exist at all, we'd still have exactly the same number of nuclear war casualties since the 1940s.
Totally agree this is very relevant today. We have heads of state in the EU and to some degree people in the USG with very cavalier approaches to the ideological war between the West and the BRICS.
I really don't know what the F* they are thinking but they keep pushing further and further and hope there is no elastic snap. It's like they forgot about diplomacy with enemies --at the height of the cold war, at its Apex in the Cuba Missile Crisis, we had communication with the enemy --it was inconceivable we would not have communications with them but now it's a wild west of bluster and provocation. I'm not saying were not right in tamping down aggression, but you have to be cognizant of the perils that exist.
Quite striking is strident opponents of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki decision have few qualms about the prospects of current escalation. It's insane.
I'm not sure why this got downvoted. The point is not to bow to Putin in all matters, but to treat the matter with extreme seriousness: Take time to do proper background research, evaluate your sources, give serious consideration to the Russian narrative -- without necessarily agreeing of course, allow for a margin of error both in your own judgement and for stray missiles entering the detection radius, etc. If it still seems like a good idea to take a stand afterwards, OK. But let's please not cause a nuclear war over Facebook likes and political brownie points.
I haven't downvoted it, but one issue with parent's post is that it applies double standards to our nations' responses to those of the Cold War. During the 20th century, the public impression of diplomacy was the very same 'wild west of bluster and provocation' - only nowadays, we get to see more behind the scenes of the Cold War as files are declassified and then-current affairs become history. The propaganda from the American and Soviet leadership was no more nuanced historically than it is now from contemporary leaders like Putin and Trump (and since parent mentioned the EU, we could include European figures such as von der Leyen here as well).
I predict that future history books will observe a certain amount of care and diplomatic engagement in our era that isn't visible from the press releases and the ways in which politicians want to be seen.
I don't know why you're bringing BRICS into this. Brazil and South Africa aren't nuclear powers (at least not anymore, and South Africa is an irrelevant failed state anyway). India isn't engaged in any sort of ideological war with the West. Their nukes are purely defensive to deter China and Pakistan.
That leaves China and Russia. We learned during the Cold War that a policy of aggressive containment is effective and this should continue. Don't give them an inch.
I recently went to the Hiroshima museum. I had originally thought that people simply vaporized when the bomb hit, but that is not the case. The museum shows how people's skin simply sloughed off and some were holding parts in their hands as they walked around to find their loved ones.
But the worst part was radiation poisoning. Many that did not initially get hit and burned directly went towards the center of the city to find their families and over the course of days, months and years, they almost always died a slow, painful death, with their teeth falling out and their skin and organs becoming necrotic.
Truly, everyone should visit Hiroshima or Nagasaki at some point, if only to understand what true horrors nuclear weapons create. And those are only atomic weapons of the 1940s, the hydrogen bombs we have today that fuse instead of fiss are orders of magnitude more powerful, but at least those under their effects (near the epicenter) will die a quick vaporized death instantaneously.
As an addition (and correction) to this, powerful thermonuclear weapons don't vaporize anyone either. They are targeted for high-altitude airbursts and kill through a combination of burns and building collapse, plus secondary fires, infection and breakdown of emergency services. The majority of the victims would not die an instant death.
I had a similar experience, looking at the contorted metal lunchboxes and other household items was more terrifying, I always used to think things just go poof.
Phenomenal choice. While 80 years is nice- it's a blip on the timescale of history.
I personally think we're a button click away from going back to the stone age. I know others will disagree, but it's not something you wanna take a gamble on.
I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
And also why wars or proxy wars between nuclear powers are extremely foolish and should be stopped with great urgency.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this is a very naive take.
* We can't really live on another planet in the solar system.
* Look at how far the next star is and realise that we won't get there anytime soon (probably at all).
* What's the point of surviving on another planet, without any other species?
* Without considering the risk of nuclear war, we are in the process of destroying life on Earth.
The resources we put on that project are mostly wasted. We should try to live on Earth, I hear it's a nice place.
I don't personally believe we should colonize other heavenly bodies because of a potential nuclear apocalypse, but the negation of that is no reason to abandon space travel either. Every time we have launched a mission into deep space we have learnt more as a species about what makes Earth 'tick'. We can also do a lot without actual space travel - maybe if more people had heeded the observations of the greenhouse effect on Venus in the 60s, for instance, we would have less of an issue cleaning up our own atmosphere now.
I'm not confident that our place is in the stars, but it would be narrow-minded not to give living out there a go.
>> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
This is not a joke. But every time anybody brings it up a mob shows up saying that we must make it work here on Earth, and we should all go to hell if we can't. But we only need a few madmen in power for the rest of us to not matter.
> Point is that if we can not behave on Earth how can we do it in other place.
If we have a 90% chance of behaving in any given century, we are doomed on earth. If we have a 10% chance of behaving in any given century, a continuous heritage is possible in a galaxy (re-)populated by slowships.
it's an open question as to how interplanetary politics will actually go. it's possible that ancient squabbles between countries will carryover, but hopefully they won't, which means that a terrorist's nuclear bomb causing MAD on Earth wouldn't necessarily carryover to MAD on a terraformed Mars and Lunar colonies, as we saw with the Russians who boarded the ISS in blue and yellow. But even if it doesn't, Earth being hit by an asteroid is another scenario that being a multi-planetary species would prevent our extinction in.
Obviously the invader is not going to stop the war and say "this was foolish". So it is up to all other nations to bow down and let them have their piece of the world.
I am more worried that we do not have that many attempts at rebuilding, because coal and oil are finite. OTOH a slower 2nd iteration might actually work better than this one.
If we lost access to electricity, we'd be completely screwed; we can't even get drinkable water in many places without electricity.
For example where I live there is water around 10-20m depth, but it's polluted (it may be usable for agriculture but not for human consumption); you'd have to dig a well over 100m below the surface.
So like usual I offer up "what's your alternative" ? Is it to ignore Russian's invasion of countries? Ignore Iran's chaos it wants to sew constantly in the Middle East? It's easy to say "just be peaceful" but history shows that countries are not peaceful towards one another, they constantly want to take other's resources, or force their way of life on others, or settle some vague issue they have with another country (or people there). I think most people would love if countries would just stop attacking others. right now we don't have the tech to live on "other bodies", that is pie in the sky. I would love if nation-states just stopped the nonsense and were good to one another and their inhabitants, but that has never been the case.
> I personally think we're a button click away from going back to the stone age.
One reason to use less oil now is to perhaps preserve it in case we need to 'reboot' civilization in the future in case of a future cataclysm.
We were only able to reach beyond (near-)subsistence living because of cheap energy, first coal and later petroleum. All the easily accessible stuff is now kind of gone, so if there's another collapse (which may be more likely to be global in nature: see pandemics), then depending on how much knowledge we lose it could be hard to get back to the say level without the previously cheap/easy energy.
In past collapses (Europe: Western Roman Empire, Black Death) we were able to eventually recover because we at a simply technological level that could keep going even with the loss of a lot of knowledge.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this will be impossible given advanced countries can't even be self-sufficient on Earth.
Is there oil on those heavenly bodies? Probably no, so you're importing your lubricants and seals/o-rings. Advanced fabs? No? Well you're importing your electronics. What kind of silica is there, because if you don't have the right kind of sand, you're mot making your own solar panels. How much radioactive material (uranium, plutonium, thorium, etc) is around if you want to try nuclear power.
Humanity en masse are superficial ignorant pretentious idiots. They are so pretentious that they pretend they are not pretentious and they care a lot ('It is utmost important for us [arbitrary lie here]'). Except Trump kind of people. They honestly and proudly announce that they give no fuck about anyone but themselves.
>Humanity en masse are superficial ignorant pretentious idiots.
Oh I see how I can perfectly fit this role sure, I tell you so as the most humble entity that universe ever spawned.
It was of the outmost importance for me to deliver this lie: I don't care about anyone, humanity can go extinct, self included, and it doesn't trigger any emotion in me.
Yeah, this is also a big concern of mine. Nuclear weapons haven’t been used since ww2, but there also hasn’t ever been total war between two nuclear powers.
The current climate in Russia and the Middle East may change that.
In "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes, a poignant point was made, originating from people like Bohr, who were definitely on the peaceful side: without demonstrating the effect of the atomic bomb, the "nuclear taboo" would not have come into existence, and the first large conflict between nuclear powers would have seen a terrible outcome. The use of the bomb was inevitable, so it was sadly better to use it in a restricted war, before the US and the CCCP would use them against each other and the rest of the world.
Japan was better off in the long run being occupied solely by the US instead of a split occupation with the Soviets like Germany. If we hadn’t dropped the two bombs, the Soviets were set to invade northern Japan.
Does it matter? It was probably obvious to the scientists working on the bomb that other countries would get it too sooner or later, including countries at odds with each other.
Could Hirohito (Suzuki, etc.) have been convinced by bombs dropped elsewhere?
(our physicists were able to back-of-the-envelope; should their physicists have needed hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths to calculate what an A-bomb could do?)
So I think it's not obvious (multiple books have been written on the subject) what could or should have been done or not done back then; now, from my point of view, those cards have been dealt, for good or for ill.
Hirohito was apparently convinced after the bomb on Hiroshima, the cabinet and military staff still wanted to fight on after the bomb on Nagasaki. They even tried to block his radio speech.
Personally, I think it was tragic, but there was not much choice. Forcing Japan to its knees by conventional means would have been a prolonged bloodbath (with the Soviets getting in the game as well), with probably a higher death toll.
But was it really obvious? From what I can tell, much of the nuclear arms race happened thanks to espionage. Had information on warheads and the like been properly contained, maybe other countries would not have so easily developed the bomb.
Not so easily, but they would have done it. Once it was known, there wouldn't have been any way to stop Stalin. His paranoia knew no limits. And then there would have been dozens, hundreds when the war would break out, nobody would be scared to use them.
I, too, was shocked to learn this. I only learned about it fairly recently, from my older brother who read a book from the school library on it as a child:
Nine Who Survived Hiroshima & Nagasaki Hardcover – January 1, 1957
> A resident of Nagasaki, Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business for his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the city was bombed at 8:15 AM, on 6 August 1945. He returned to Nagasaki the following day and, despite his wounds, returned to work on 9 August, the day of the second atomic bombing. That morning, while he was being told by his supervisor that he was "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated.
> That morning, while he was being told by his supervisor that he was "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated.
That is one way to win an argument. Not that anyone would prefer that "win".
The Wikipedia article says there were at least 165 survivors of both bombings: "[Yamaguchi] was invited to take part in a 2006 documentary about 165 double A-bomb survivors".
As said in the announcement, even 80 years after those bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we still need to highlight the dangers of nuclear weapons.
The threat and use of such weapons is still allowed by customary international law. Maybe movements like this will help change this sad fact. There has been progress in this direction. However, of course, nuclear-weapon states have been vehemently opposed to that, although they are obliged to negotiate a general and complete nuclear disarmament.
"Customary international law" is written by countries that can win a huge wae that are countries that have nuclear weapons, so they will not forbid themself the use of nuclear weapons.
As the name says, customary international law is not written. It arises from international practices that have become so widespread that states begin to recognize they have a legal obligation to continue them (opinio juris).
Current literature says that the non-usage of nuclear weapons has become a widespread international practice, but that the resistance of nuclear powers has prevented the formation of an “opinio juris” thus far. What is at stake is whether an international custom can be formed despite the opposition of certain states — as long as several other states acknowledge the custom.
Doesn't the history of war in the twentieth century (because we've got to start somewhere) suggest that "international law" means absolutely fucking nothing at fucking all when it comes to major wars?
Why bother?
What are you going to do to enforce it, invade the guy who just nuked/invaded you/your friends?
I visited the Hiroshima museum last year. They've got a set of stone steps, a person was sat there when the bomb went off and they were simply vaporised. The stone steps bear the residue of the person, almost like a shadow.
The atomic bombs weren't close enough to vaporize anyone since they were detonated in the air, what you see is disintegration which is a little bit different and instead of turning the human body into what could be considered "nothing" the materials are torn apart and get embedded into the surrounding environment. Some vaporization did occur, but only on plants and the skin tissue of humans.
> instead of turning the human body into what could be considered "nothing"
You can't turn material into "nothing". At best you can turn it into equivalent amount of energy if you collide it with antimatter.
That being said I don't really feel the difference between "vaporisation" and "disintegration". In both cases you stop being biology and start being physics in a subjective instant. (at least from the perspective of your own central nervous system, which has not enough time to even detect that something has happened)
In both cases you go from a living, breathing, laughing, thinking human being into contaminants in the air or surfaces around you.
What do you feel is the difference between "vaporisation" and "disintegration"? Is it about how big your largest continuous chunk is? Where do you draw the line?
By "nothing" is that there isn't a piece of you that is still you. Disintegration means that we can still find pieces of "you" in the environment. Not sure if there's any recoverable DNA left thought, that was most likely destroyed by the other waves of the atomic bomb.
the specific definition is that vaporization turns solids and liquids into gas or plasma, while disintegration means being broken into pieces. the difference between a gas and a solid, and also fine solids suspended in a gas, is fairly well defined.
At that distance you wouldn't be vaporized, but burned. What you see on the steps is not vapor deposits, but rather they are shadows.
The immense heat and light from the detonation burned/discolored the stones, but not in the shadow of the person sitting on the steps. Hence why you can see these 'permanent shadows' in various places in the city. Some caused by humans, but most are just shadows of structures. For example bridge railings: https://www.atomicarchive.com/media/photographs/hiroshima/im...
Visited Hiroshima over a decade ago during a school trip, and had a local guide that was a survivor. Very powerful.
As a teenager we also visited concentration camps on a school trip, and a survivor joined the trip from Norway to Germany. We got to know him a bit during the week long trip, and there was a session where he told his story. I'll never forget this, and I think it affects me to this day.
Soon we will have no Time Witnesses left.
Edit: I remembered a very specific anecdote he told, about how him randomly having learned to knit helped when in a concentration camp, as some officer wanted something to be made, and he then could sit inside and do that instead of working himself to death in the quarry. Based on this I managed to find his name again now.
Of course the reminder of the impact there and the ongoing risk is nice but is this really a relevant and current choice? Why not last year? Why not ten years ago? What success have they even had? Considering where we are right now.
This isn't a group making an impact on the ground anywhere right now. Many of the winners in recent years have been civil & human rights activists in real fights on the ground in their countries/regions. The public will take the reminder but mostly shrug the news off.
Nuclear weapons are the biggest cause of the last 80 years of peace between major world powers.
The best way to stop nuclear weapons from ever being used again, is to keep lots of them, in as many countries as possible (mutually assured destruction).
It is, as so often the case, a classic prisoner's dilemma problem [0]: "no nukes" is pretty clearly superior to "any nukes at all", but "they have nukes but we don't" is game over, so... nukes for all (major world powers)!
It's awful, but that's the prisoner's dilemma for you. I have a hard time respecting any anti-nuclear activist who doesn't at least acknowledge this facet of things, even if "no one has nukes and no one can easily get them" really would be best for the world.
[0]: if anyone hasn't seen it before, the interactive https://ncase.me/trust/ on the iterated prisoner's dilemma is excellent
Define "hot war". There have been plenty of fighting in border regions of India and Pakistan in recent years, and both have nukes. India since 1974 and Pakistan since 1998.
If the past 8 years have shown us anything, it's that we are capable of electing incredibly stupid people who likely would get us into war if being blown back into the stone age weren't a possibility. I like nuclear weapons for that reason. It scares tyrants into complacency on the larger scale.
I'm also of the opinion that MAD has been the largest single greatest cause of peace in the past 80 years, but I disagree that this award is bad. The reason we haven't seen a single use of nuclear weapons since then, not even relatively small ones, is because of the nuclear taboo that organizations like this have engendered
Nuclear weapons have not prevented major world powers from engaging in proxy wars. As we can see today in the Middle East, proxy wars can make things dangerous and more likely to lead to an unwanted escalation.
Mutually assured destruction works best when the number of involved parties is limited. If every state were to have a warhead of its own, many risks would increase: those of miscalculation, nuclear proliferation to non-state actors, etc.
I wonder if that Timnit Gebru will come out of the woodwork again on this because of whatever, or more importantly as some "look at me instead I'm loudly aggrieved about very little" play for PR and funding.
I watched the film “Threads” last night, anyone in any doubt about the horrific consequences of a nuclear exchange should watch it. The speed at which society falls apart is simply terrifying. Those poor souls unlucky to be in a war zone will understand better than I ever will. The world needs a new order.
The Hibakusha's firsthand accounts and efforts have kept the horrors of nuclear war alive in the world's consciousness, helping to build a lasting taboo against the use of such weapons.
Nice to see they do somehow recognize the whole association of people and not push to much about a single person. But the committee is trapped with the rules that push for this ridiculous individual centric point of view which is so out of touch with measurable realities considering what forces actually come at play to anything with large social impact.
Also on a side note:
>the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen.
Well, first thing, this is a quite restrictive anthropocentric and restrictive POV for what count for a weapon. Putting appart all things that triggered previous mass extinction as they might not really fit the expectation of weapon and "ever witnessed as implied agent", ok. But let's consider European invasion of America: while this was not intended and per design, it somehow greatly leveraged on bacteriological weapons.
Currently humanity is also at war with biodiversity, and the scale is massive and worldwide, using a large panel of tools.
Of course we are more prone to empathy to our fellow humans, and nuclear weapons are abominations.
As some other commenters have pointed out:
It is lamentable that the focus is almost always on the atomic bombing itself instead of why it came to that point at all.
Many Asian countries feel scant sympathy toward Japan. From Indonesia to Malaysia to the Philipipines or even worse and for much longer, in Korea and China. In each of these countries the Japanese perpetrated massacre, forced labour, gang rape and forced prostitution in the millions. Even European women who were stranded in their former colonies were not spared. In fact their diaries are the foremost historical sources.
Their brutality is such that the hatred towards colonialist European nations were ameliorated and pretty much forgotten these days. It's sickening to me that outside East and Southeast Asia itself, most of the world only remember Nagasaki and Hiroshima when it comes to casualties in the Pacific theatre of WW2.
This sympathy felt even more misplaced considering even to this very day, unlike Germany, Japanese historiograpy deliberately downplays Japan brutality during occupation or that there was any aggression on their part at all. Most Japanese college mates in the US that I've talked to were not even aware that Japan occupied my country for years resulting in millions of casualties.
There are also well-maintained shrines (like Yasukuni) to the Japanese war criminals frequented even by high-level politicians (former PM went there, current ministers went there). Imagine that in current Germany!
The Yasukuni situation is more complex than "the shrine for war criminals". A lot more people are enshrined there, the war criminals are a tiny fraction (and were only added in 1978, while the shrine was established 109 years earlier). To give you an example of an important and less controversial figure enshrined there: Sakamoto Ryōma. There are 2+ millions souls enshrined there.
Nuclear weapons are not used not because they are morally unacceptable, but rather because of MAD and their limited efficiency when used against armies.
If you wanted to give a Nobel Prize to someone for preventing nuclear wars, give it to Nuclear Winter researchers and military analysts.
It's a bit unclear to me why you need an organization that advocates against nuclear weapons. I'd argue the “nuclear taboo” is just the product of.. I don't just seeing one nuclear test video? It doesn't take the cataloging of witness testimony to see it's terror (though that may be important in its own right)
I'm not intimately familiar with Japanese self-perceptions - but from the outside it seems like post-WW2 the country really leaned into a view that "nuclear weapons are terrible" to the point of distraction - instead of a more self-reflective "nationalism is terrible" or something along those lines. There seems to be much less anxiety about preventing getting into a similar situations that triggered WW2: neo-colonial military bullying and domination of neighbors, xenaphobic oppression of ethnic groups, sycophantic following of cultural leaders etc. and an intense worry about the more tangeable use of nuclear weapons - which I'd argue is something that even if it were to come to pass would almost certainly never involve the Japanese people.
I wonder how this seeming diversion of public attention is perceived in Japan itself.
As I understand it, the anti-nationalist narrative was repressed due to anti-communist agendas of the occupation forces (ex: freeing of nationalist war criminals)
Would be curious to hear from anyone Japanese on the topic
The general human tendency to focus on single short term events seems to be the main cause.
Let's compare using Wikipedia as a source:
Atomic bombings in Japan:
50,000–246,000 casualties.
Air Raids in Japan:
241,000–900,000 killed,
213,000–1,300,000 wounded,
8,500,000 rendered homeless.
Mass killings of large civilian populations should not happen. I don't personally see nuclear weapons as worse than incendiary bombs or artillery. It's the number of casualties that makes it horrible.
* one early bomb is more or less equivilant to one conventional HE + incendiary raid.
* 2,000+ other bombs have since been detonated, a good number of which were orders of magnitudes more destructive than the early "first gen" bombs used on Japan.
Nuclear war with the larger weapons that followed would be considerably worse than incendiary bombs, in physical destruction, in immediate deaths, and in injuries and following mortalities.
I agree. I've been to the Hiroshima Peace Park or whatever it's called in English numerous times, but I can't say I've been anymore moved by it than any other demonstration of human brutality.
I can't register a difference between a nuclear bomb and, say, a GBU-12 Paveway conventional bomb. They both destroy and kill brutally, the magnitude is irrelevant and it would be great if we never have to use either of them.
The Hiroshima museum, while advocating for a nuclear free world, has an interesting take on why the US dropped the bomb on them.
According to them, the US dropped the bomb because they wanted to show their strengths against the Soviets. It makes little to no mention of the bloody battles in the Pacific.
> instead of a more self-reflective "nationalism is terrible" or something along those lines.
It used to bother me a lot, until I realized that
- the US purposefully left the Emperor in place with only a slap on the fingers ("you're not a god anymore...except for those who still believe you are")
- all surrounding countries have incentives to to keep distances from Japan (in particular as long as the US are there, Japan and China will never be allies, same for Russia), Taiwan being the exception.
I see no future where Japan nationalism is truly solved, short of these two things also getting solved. And boy is there no end in sight to this.
>the US purposefully left the Emperor in place with only a slap on the fingers
This was a deliberate political decision in an effort to not repeat the grave mistake of how post-WW1 Germany was handled which essentially led to WW2. Denying Japan of their identity and dignity would have risked an eventual WW3, and the US did not want to even entertain the possibility.
It also didn't help that practically all of Japan were not going to see their Emperor deposed or worse; Japan was willing to compromise on literally everything but the Emperor in making peace with the US and the west, and the extended Imperial family along with all the other nobles thereof lost their titles and powers in the post-war occupation and restructuring.
I think we're mostly in agreement. It was a strategic move and it might have helped a lot letting Japan get back on its feet. And it's also the move that left the deep deep nationalism in place and it's still here today.
Perhaps there was no way to have one without the other, but at least I want to look at it as a series of cause and consequences.
Crazy popular anime girl representations of WW2 battleships is the most funniest form of that reality IMHO.
> I'd argue the “nuclear taboo” is just the product of.. I don't just seeing one nuclear test video?
And yet some high ranking military planers were seriously pushing for employing nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Do you think they just haven't seen any nuclear test videos?
> It's a bit unclear to me why you need an organization that advocates against nuclear weapons.
Because humans keep building, and fielding nuclear weapons. Not sure where you live, but chances are good your taxes are used to build, and maintain nuclear weapons and the means to carry them.
I'm Japanese-American, so I can throw two cents in your hat.
Post-war Japan is against nuclear weapons to an absolute, but it must be admitted that the response to nukes in particular is just as much a kneejerk reaction. NHK literally spams the entirety of August with anti-nuclear propaganda every year. Japan's anti-nuclear stance is also hypocritically at odds with relying on the US nuclear umbrella for national security.
More rationally, post-war Japan is against wars of any and all kinds to an absolute. This goes as far as refusing to defend the US in the event of an attack on the US-Japan alliance; this was only changed recently in the last decade or so after strong pressure from the US to reciprocate the US's defense commitments to Japan.
Nationalism is a... complex topic. You will be considered a crazy person if you wave the Japanese flag or put up a flagpole on or around your house, but at the same time loyalty and reverence to the Emperor still remains strong and the country is politically and culturally very conservative/liberal with a very interesting mix of individualism and conformity. Most Japanese ex-pats actually leave Japan because they are more progressive and can't stand the conservative culture.
Japan is actually quite welcoming of foreigners, but there is a hard gentlemen's agreement that if you're in Japan you do as the Japanese do. Those who can adapt are welcomed, those who can't/don't are excluded and ejected sooner or later.
I have no issue with this laureate, but it is sad that the comittee could not find someone deserving that is working on a more current conflict. I guess this is not a positive outlook for the current state international conflicts.
At a time when Russia threatens the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Israel and Iran escalate tensions, North Korea tests missiles and warheads… it is hard not to relate the award to these circumstances.
Perhaps the committee thought it was best to express its opinion on current conflicts indirectly, as it has done so in the past.
Obama is by far the most vapid recipient of the award, but I wonder if he is also the best representative for the lack of peace given his legacy of "Yes we can, (but we don't)."
The reason we seemingly can't have peace is because we deliberately refuse it.
Since over 2 years, we again live now under the constant real threat of a nuclear war. Or this is at least what Russia is regularly claiming. This is very current as long as Putin doesn't get his s** together.
Of course there are other current candidates who would also deserve it, but I think it might be also a matter of how hot and current the problem is, and how much political impact this message would have. Russia and their threats are cooling down for the moment, so it's "safer" to send this message, instead of anything related to the Middle East, for example.
One of the reasons I like Trump is he’s one of the few modern politicians to talk about the threat of nuclear war all the time. I feel like most people have gotten complacent about it.
Genuinely interested: if Trump talking nukes is 'one of the reasons (for liking him), what are the others, and do they include his talking about soldiers and generals?
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
"Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation. Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony"
The peace prize is being awarded to a Japanese organization that advocates nuclear non-proliferation, as the committee emphasizes its urgent importance amid two ongoing wars, in which one belligerent threatens to use nuclear weapons while in another one probably has.
Japan's national security policy is hypocritical given that it relies solely on the US nuclear umbrella for security despite disavowing anything to do with nuclear weapons, but unfortunately reality is not ideality.
Ukraine is the perfect example of what actually happens when a country discards its nuclear arsenal.
So yes, Japan is absolutely hypocritical and the Nobel Peace Prize has been the most vapid of all the Nobel Prizes, but for once this Peace Prize is actually trying to say something meaningful in an ever violent human world.
> Ukraine is the perfect example of what actually happens when a country discards its nuclear arsenal.
That's silly. Ukraine never had a nuclear arsenal. Ukraine had nuclear weapons on their soil, but they were managed, and controlled by forces loyal to Moscow. Had forces loyal to Kyiv tried to force their way into the silos they would have been repelled and a war would have broken out there and then.
Ukraine had a nuclear arsenal as much as Turkey has a nuclear arsenal because the USA stores nuclear warheads in Incirlik.
I agree that Ukraine was not a nuclear power even while they had warheads on their territory after the USSR fell apart, but I believe it was very feasible for them to become one.
Posession is nine tenths of the law, after all-- it would've been quite possible to just lock down a few silos and refuse to hand the weapons over. Russia as a state was highly disrupted at that point, and would've had a hard time opposing this effectively.
I'm not disputing that this would've been a very costly move for an already poor nation (in potential economical sanctions and also maintenance of the arsenal itself). Maybe the external political/economical pressure resulting from this would've ripped Ukraine apart some other way.
But I'm highly confident that Russia would not have risked annexing territory from an country with a few nuclear ICBM silos. No need even to have full control/launch capability, as long as there is sufficient doubt (on Russias side).
As a matter of fact Japan has no other choice than being under US protection.
I can't imagine a chain of event that would lead the US to get out of Japan volunteerly [0], nor Japan being able to kick the US out forcibly. It's just outside of the realm of possibility right now.
[0] they won't even move out of Okinawa as the whole island loathes the US base and gives the middle finger to their own gov to get them out.
At home I have a book telling stories of Dutch WW2 survivors still living today. One of them was an eye witness account of the Hiroshima bomb. He was a POW and worked in a quarry or mine on the outskirts of town. He saw a single plane fly over. A bomb dropped with a parachute attached. Moments later he was flung to the back of the quarry and the city was gone. I would never have guessed there were eyewitnesses like this, let alone coutrymen of mine.
The book Hiroshima by John Hersey has many accounts like this. It’s a short read and follows six people and covers the first year after the bombing. I’d highly recommend reading it if such accounts are interesting to you.
It was published in New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
Fun fact the cover image if this edition was kind of a decoy (perhaps to accentuate the shock): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31
Wow, brutal!
As an aside I would never had guessed this artstyle was a 40s cover.
Little Boy didn't have a parachute. Maybe he was mis-remembering that.
There were instruments dropped by parachute.
IIRC those were dropped by a second plane accompanying the Enola Gay.
Just how widespread the effects of World War II were
Which book is it?
This is indeed a very timely award. I sometimes feel like the world has forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist and are still on hair-trigger alert to obliterate major cities. Maybe the end of atmospheric testing and the success of (now defunct) weapons reduction treaties has blunted public perception to the ongoing threat that they represent, and to the need to tread carefully where nuclear powers are involved.
If I put a hammer over your head that can fall any minute you'll be worrying, but if you're born with the hammer over your head and your parents before you as well, it becomes less of a thing.
On an individual level, we all have a variety of hammers over our heads. Cancer has killed far more people prematurely than nuclear weapons. Something like 500,000 people a year are murdered. Traffic/bicycle/pedestrian accidents also kill more than nuclear weapons. Even compared to a once-in-a-century nuclear war that perhaps kills a billion people, cancer will kill roughly a billion in the next century anyway. So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about.
I think for a lot of people, myself included, you try not to worry about things you can't control.
"Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere. Write that down." - Van Wilder
While this apathy is an important coping mechanism to some degree, it's important not to become complacent. It's precisely this apathy and hopelessness that authoritarian regimes cultivate to prevent action.
I'd like to think of myself as a rational person, yet I worry about it. Because it's not just a matter of math; the effects of a billion people dying at once would be far more detrimental than the deaths from cancer over a century.
(One might think this line of reasoning that some people apply is a coping mechanism to ignore the reality, but that might be a different conversation)
But it is not just about coping. We as society, can make policies to decrease chance of getting a cancer and decrease traffic deaths. We just chose not to out of convenience and profit.
If I fall 1 feet one hundred times, I'll probably be Ok
If I fall 100 feet once, I won't.
1m people dying in 1 day is not the same as 1M people dying over a decade.
Also. People generally dont fear death itself. This is expressed by people in pallitative care. Its the chaos and uncertainty preceding death that is really feared
If that one million people dying is followed by 3649 days of no one dying from that cause, yes it is.
> So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about.
Until you have children and future generations to worry about. Then it suddenly seems quite a bit more pressing that their world could be obliterated at a moment's notice by a small handful of decision makers.
I once knew an academic who would not fly in an airplane. He was invited to a distinguished conference across the country, but complained to me that he was too scared to fly. "Why?" I ask.. "Terrorists" he replied.. "it is too serious. I just can't do it". so a year or two pass and then I see this Academic again. While talking he mentions that he just returned from a great conference far away. "What? I thought you were afraid to fly in an airplane!" .. He replies "that was true, I was scared of someone carrying a bomb on the flight. But, I calculated the statistical odds of there being TWO bombs on a single plane, and it was infinitesimal..."
"So now I carry my own!"
Those other things are also worth worrying about too.
Gee, I hope the people in charge don't think "the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about"
That depends on where you live. There are people right now in certain places who are terrified of the nuclear threat.
Extrapolating from two samples to "once-in-a-century" does not strike me as rational.
Does your risk assessment methodology also account for near misses? Agency? Morality? Source of risk? Costs of mitigation? Benefits? Something like actuary tables?
Mitigation of bike and pedestrian deaths is cheap. Just reform land use, advantage people over vehicles. Oops, now you're into culture and values.
Mitigation of cancer deaths is very expensive. Though we didn't invent cancer, we feel the moral imperative to "cure" it. And yet, while we're mitigating it, we're also making it worse. Cross purposes. What's your balance sheet for this conundrum?
Drugs kill lots of people. We own that one, right? How's the War on Drugs working out?
In conclusion, I wish I could wave away these dilemmas with a cute nominator and denominator. But I can barely reason about them before my head explodes. So I'm not buying what you're selling. Life's a bit more complicated, a bit more empirical, a bit less rational, than your tidy equations.
Everybody dies so there's nothing to fear from war?
Chaos , without death.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. 2 billion people will die in the first 70 minutes of a peer nuclear exchange.
Why does that figure looks really suspicious to me. So in nuclear exchange there is either already fully setup blocks or the responding party will pull in others in?
> I sometimes feel like the world has forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist
I don't understand this. Between Iran and the Russia/Ukraine conflict, they seem to be very top of mind for many.
I agree completely. The award serves as a crucial reminder of the ever-present threat of nuclear weapons
The entire purpose of nuclear armaments is to make certain wars too nasty to fathom engaging in. If their organization didn't exist at all, we'd still have exactly the same number of nuclear war casualties since the 1940s.
Totally agree this is very relevant today. We have heads of state in the EU and to some degree people in the USG with very cavalier approaches to the ideological war between the West and the BRICS.
I really don't know what the F* they are thinking but they keep pushing further and further and hope there is no elastic snap. It's like they forgot about diplomacy with enemies --at the height of the cold war, at its Apex in the Cuba Missile Crisis, we had communication with the enemy --it was inconceivable we would not have communications with them but now it's a wild west of bluster and provocation. I'm not saying were not right in tamping down aggression, but you have to be cognizant of the perils that exist.
Quite striking is strident opponents of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki decision have few qualms about the prospects of current escalation. It's insane.
I'm not sure why this got downvoted. The point is not to bow to Putin in all matters, but to treat the matter with extreme seriousness: Take time to do proper background research, evaluate your sources, give serious consideration to the Russian narrative -- without necessarily agreeing of course, allow for a margin of error both in your own judgement and for stray missiles entering the detection radius, etc. If it still seems like a good idea to take a stand afterwards, OK. But let's please not cause a nuclear war over Facebook likes and political brownie points.
I haven't downvoted it, but one issue with parent's post is that it applies double standards to our nations' responses to those of the Cold War. During the 20th century, the public impression of diplomacy was the very same 'wild west of bluster and provocation' - only nowadays, we get to see more behind the scenes of the Cold War as files are declassified and then-current affairs become history. The propaganda from the American and Soviet leadership was no more nuanced historically than it is now from contemporary leaders like Putin and Trump (and since parent mentioned the EU, we could include European figures such as von der Leyen here as well).
I predict that future history books will observe a certain amount of care and diplomatic engagement in our era that isn't visible from the press releases and the ways in which politicians want to be seen.
I don't know why you're bringing BRICS into this. Brazil and South Africa aren't nuclear powers (at least not anymore, and South Africa is an irrelevant failed state anyway). India isn't engaged in any sort of ideological war with the West. Their nukes are purely defensive to deter China and Pakistan.
That leaves China and Russia. We learned during the Cold War that a policy of aggressive containment is effective and this should continue. Don't give them an inch.
I recently went to the Hiroshima museum. I had originally thought that people simply vaporized when the bomb hit, but that is not the case. The museum shows how people's skin simply sloughed off and some were holding parts in their hands as they walked around to find their loved ones.
But the worst part was radiation poisoning. Many that did not initially get hit and burned directly went towards the center of the city to find their families and over the course of days, months and years, they almost always died a slow, painful death, with their teeth falling out and their skin and organs becoming necrotic.
Truly, everyone should visit Hiroshima or Nagasaki at some point, if only to understand what true horrors nuclear weapons create. And those are only atomic weapons of the 1940s, the hydrogen bombs we have today that fuse instead of fiss are orders of magnitude more powerful, but at least those under their effects (near the epicenter) will die a quick vaporized death instantaneously.
As an addition (and correction) to this, powerful thermonuclear weapons don't vaporize anyone either. They are targeted for high-altitude airbursts and kill through a combination of burns and building collapse, plus secondary fires, infection and breakdown of emergency services. The majority of the victims would not die an instant death.
For more information: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html
I had a similar experience, looking at the contorted metal lunchboxes and other household items was more terrifying, I always used to think things just go poof.
Phenomenal choice. While 80 years is nice- it's a blip on the timescale of history.
I personally think we're a button click away from going back to the stone age. I know others will disagree, but it's not something you wanna take a gamble on.
I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
And also why wars or proxy wars between nuclear powers are extremely foolish and should be stopped with great urgency.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this is a very naive take.
* We can't really live on another planet in the solar system. * Look at how far the next star is and realise that we won't get there anytime soon (probably at all). * What's the point of surviving on another planet, without any other species? * Without considering the risk of nuclear war, we are in the process of destroying life on Earth.
The resources we put on that project are mostly wasted. We should try to live on Earth, I hear it's a nice place.
I don't personally believe we should colonize other heavenly bodies because of a potential nuclear apocalypse, but the negation of that is no reason to abandon space travel either. Every time we have launched a mission into deep space we have learnt more as a species about what makes Earth 'tick'. We can also do a lot without actual space travel - maybe if more people had heeded the observations of the greenhouse effect on Venus in the 60s, for instance, we would have less of an issue cleaning up our own atmosphere now.
I'm not confident that our place is in the stars, but it would be narrow-minded not to give living out there a go.
>> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
This is not a joke. But every time anybody brings it up a mob shows up saying that we must make it work here on Earth, and we should all go to hell if we can't. But we only need a few madmen in power for the rest of us to not matter.
I imagine that if you can colonize other planets you can also target them with nuclear weapons.
It is like saying that the solution to all problems is colonizing Antarctica.
Point is that if we can not behave on Earth how can we do it in other place.
> Point is that if we can not behave on Earth how can we do it in other place.
If we have a 90% chance of behaving in any given century, we are doomed on earth. If we have a 10% chance of behaving in any given century, a continuous heritage is possible in a galaxy (re-)populated by slowships.
it's an open question as to how interplanetary politics will actually go. it's possible that ancient squabbles between countries will carryover, but hopefully they won't, which means that a terrorist's nuclear bomb causing MAD on Earth wouldn't necessarily carryover to MAD on a terraformed Mars and Lunar colonies, as we saw with the Russians who boarded the ISS in blue and yellow. But even if it doesn't, Earth being hit by an asteroid is another scenario that being a multi-planetary species would prevent our extinction in.
>as we saw with the Russians who boarded the ISS in blue and yellow
That's just the colors of one of the top Russian universities from which all three cosmonauts had graduated. [0]
[0] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Московский_государственный_тех...
> it's possible that ancient squabbles between countries
Don't forget with-in countries.
If another planet becomes another 'country', they'll have internal disagreements.
> And also why wars or proxy wars between nuclear powers is extremely foolish and should be stopped with great urgency.
The strict interpretation of that foreign policy is that any nuclear nation is free to invade any non-nuclear nation and abuse its citizens.
Where do you draw the line? If for example an ally is invaded by a nuclear nation. Should you intervene or just call peace?
Does the rule-of-law between countries have any relevance?
You're claiming "wars or proxy wars between nuclear powers" are not "extremely foolish" and should not "be stopped with great urgency"?
Yes but how?
Obviously the invader is not going to stop the war and say "this was foolish". So it is up to all other nations to bow down and let them have their piece of the world.
Stone age? Hardly. More like 18th century.
I am more worried that we do not have that many attempts at rebuilding, because coal and oil are finite. OTOH a slower 2nd iteration might actually work better than this one.
If we lost access to electricity, we'd be completely screwed; we can't even get drinkable water in many places without electricity.
For example where I live there is water around 10-20m depth, but it's polluted (it may be usable for agriculture but not for human consumption); you'd have to dig a well over 100m below the surface.
"I know others will disagree, but it's not something you wanna take a gamble on."
Far more important than 18th century vs stone age debate is the fact that there are people in charge that would lead us down either path.
> there are people in charge that would lead us down either path
Must you follow?
Would love not to. But I'm not the decider whether we head down the path of nuclear armageddon.
So like usual I offer up "what's your alternative" ? Is it to ignore Russian's invasion of countries? Ignore Iran's chaos it wants to sew constantly in the Middle East? It's easy to say "just be peaceful" but history shows that countries are not peaceful towards one another, they constantly want to take other's resources, or force their way of life on others, or settle some vague issue they have with another country (or people there). I think most people would love if countries would just stop attacking others. right now we don't have the tech to live on "other bodies", that is pie in the sky. I would love if nation-states just stopped the nonsense and were good to one another and their inhabitants, but that has never been the case.
> I personally think we're a button click away from going back to the stone age.
One reason to use less oil now is to perhaps preserve it in case we need to 'reboot' civilization in the future in case of a future cataclysm.
We were only able to reach beyond (near-)subsistence living because of cheap energy, first coal and later petroleum. All the easily accessible stuff is now kind of gone, so if there's another collapse (which may be more likely to be global in nature: see pandemics), then depending on how much knowledge we lose it could be hard to get back to the say level without the previously cheap/easy energy.
In past collapses (Europe: Western Roman Empire, Black Death) we were able to eventually recover because we at a simply technological level that could keep going even with the loss of a lot of knowledge.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this will be impossible given advanced countries can't even be self-sufficient on Earth.
Is there oil on those heavenly bodies? Probably no, so you're importing your lubricants and seals/o-rings. Advanced fabs? No? Well you're importing your electronics. What kind of silica is there, because if you don't have the right kind of sand, you're mot making your own solar panels. How much radioactive material (uranium, plutonium, thorium, etc) is around if you want to try nuclear power.
There is so much coal... I wouldn't worry about running out of that.
Humanity en masse are superficial ignorant pretentious idiots. They are so pretentious that they pretend they are not pretentious and they care a lot ('It is utmost important for us [arbitrary lie here]'). Except Trump kind of people. They honestly and proudly announce that they give no fuck about anyone but themselves.
>Humanity en masse are superficial ignorant pretentious idiots.
Oh I see how I can perfectly fit this role sure, I tell you so as the most humble entity that universe ever spawned.
It was of the outmost importance for me to deliver this lie: I don't care about anyone, humanity can go extinct, self included, and it doesn't trigger any emotion in me.
Yeah, this is also a big concern of mine. Nuclear weapons haven’t been used since ww2, but there also hasn’t ever been total war between two nuclear powers.
The current climate in Russia and the Middle East may change that.
This is the organisation that has won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize:
https://www.ne.jp/asahi/hidankyo/nihon/english/
In "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes, a poignant point was made, originating from people like Bohr, who were definitely on the peaceful side: without demonstrating the effect of the atomic bomb, the "nuclear taboo" would not have come into existence, and the first large conflict between nuclear powers would have seen a terrible outcome. The use of the bomb was inevitable, so it was sadly better to use it in a restricted war, before the US and the CCCP would use them against each other and the rest of the world.
That might have been a better argument if the USSR[0] had had the bomb in 1945[1]?
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw#t=15s
[0] first test: 29.08.1949
[1] a year in which the US and USSR were, however tenuously, still allied
Japan was better off in the long run being occupied solely by the US instead of a split occupation with the Soviets like Germany. If we hadn’t dropped the two bombs, the Soviets were set to invade northern Japan.
Does it matter? It was probably obvious to the scientists working on the bomb that other countries would get it too sooner or later, including countries at odds with each other.
I don't know.
Could Hirohito (Suzuki, etc.) have been convinced by bombs dropped elsewhere?
(our physicists were able to back-of-the-envelope; should their physicists have needed hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths to calculate what an A-bomb could do?)
So I think it's not obvious (multiple books have been written on the subject) what could or should have been done or not done back then; now, from my point of view, those cards have been dealt, for good or for ill.
Hirohito was apparently convinced after the bomb on Hiroshima, the cabinet and military staff still wanted to fight on after the bomb on Nagasaki. They even tried to block his radio speech.
Personally, I think it was tragic, but there was not much choice. Forcing Japan to its knees by conventional means would have been a prolonged bloodbath (with the Soviets getting in the game as well), with probably a higher death toll.
But was it really obvious? From what I can tell, much of the nuclear arms race happened thanks to espionage. Had information on warheads and the like been properly contained, maybe other countries would not have so easily developed the bomb.
> Had information on warheads and the like been properly contained, maybe other countries would not have so easily developed the bomb.
The Soviets had people inside the Manhattan Project / Los Alamos. As the US made progress that information was fed to the Soviets/Russians.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies
Not so easily, but they would have done it. Once it was known, there wouldn't have been any way to stop Stalin. His paranoia knew no limits. And then there would have been dozens, hundreds when the war would break out, nobody would be scared to use them.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Yamaguchi
a.k.a. Tsutomu "Wolverine" Yamaguchi
One of my friends grandmothers was an atomic bomb survivor - she was just a baby when the bomb hit and was blind the rest of her life.
One thing I was surprised by was the number of survivors and also that there was at least one person who survived both bombs [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Yamaguchi
I, too, was shocked to learn this. I only learned about it fairly recently, from my older brother who read a book from the school library on it as a child:
Nine Who Survived Hiroshima & Nagasaki Hardcover – January 1, 1957
https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Who-Survived-Hiroshima-Nagasaki/...
> A resident of Nagasaki, Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business for his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the city was bombed at 8:15 AM, on 6 August 1945. He returned to Nagasaki the following day and, despite his wounds, returned to work on 9 August, the day of the second atomic bombing. That morning, while he was being told by his supervisor that he was "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated.
> That morning, while he was being told by his supervisor that he was "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated.
That is one way to win an argument. Not that anyone would prefer that "win".
The Wikipedia article says there were at least 165 survivors of both bombings: "[Yamaguchi] was invited to take part in a 2006 documentary about 165 double A-bomb survivors".
Congratulations to Nihon Hidankyo!
As said in the announcement, even 80 years after those bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we still need to highlight the dangers of nuclear weapons.
The threat and use of such weapons is still allowed by customary international law. Maybe movements like this will help change this sad fact. There has been progress in this direction. However, of course, nuclear-weapon states have been vehemently opposed to that, although they are obliged to negotiate a general and complete nuclear disarmament.
"Customary international law" is written by countries that can win a huge wae that are countries that have nuclear weapons, so they will not forbid themself the use of nuclear weapons.
As the name says, customary international law is not written. It arises from international practices that have become so widespread that states begin to recognize they have a legal obligation to continue them (opinio juris).
Current literature says that the non-usage of nuclear weapons has become a widespread international practice, but that the resistance of nuclear powers has prevented the formation of an “opinio juris” thus far. What is at stake is whether an international custom can be formed despite the opposition of certain states — as long as several other states acknowledge the custom.
Doesn't the history of war in the twentieth century (because we've got to start somewhere) suggest that "international law" means absolutely fucking nothing at fucking all when it comes to major wars?
Why bother?
What are you going to do to enforce it, invade the guy who just nuked/invaded you/your friends?
But the several other states must have nuclear weapons to enforce the custom on a rogue country with nuclear weapons.
I visited the Hiroshima museum last year. They've got a set of stone steps, a person was sat there when the bomb went off and they were simply vaporised. The stone steps bear the residue of the person, almost like a shadow.
The atomic bombs weren't close enough to vaporize anyone since they were detonated in the air, what you see is disintegration which is a little bit different and instead of turning the human body into what could be considered "nothing" the materials are torn apart and get embedded into the surrounding environment. Some vaporization did occur, but only on plants and the skin tissue of humans.
> instead of turning the human body into what could be considered "nothing"
You can't turn material into "nothing". At best you can turn it into equivalent amount of energy if you collide it with antimatter.
That being said I don't really feel the difference between "vaporisation" and "disintegration". In both cases you stop being biology and start being physics in a subjective instant. (at least from the perspective of your own central nervous system, which has not enough time to even detect that something has happened)
In both cases you go from a living, breathing, laughing, thinking human being into contaminants in the air or surfaces around you.
What do you feel is the difference between "vaporisation" and "disintegration"? Is it about how big your largest continuous chunk is? Where do you draw the line?
By "nothing" is that there isn't a piece of you that is still you. Disintegration means that we can still find pieces of "you" in the environment. Not sure if there's any recoverable DNA left thought, that was most likely destroyed by the other waves of the atomic bomb.
the specific definition is that vaporization turns solids and liquids into gas or plasma, while disintegration means being broken into pieces. the difference between a gas and a solid, and also fine solids suspended in a gas, is fairly well defined.
That makes sense! Thank you. Gas or plasma vs solids is indeed a well defined difference.
Are you sure that's the explanation?
It could be (and I think it's more likely) that the rest of the stone was lightened, and the part in the shadow, wasn't.
No "residue of a person", just literally "shadow".
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone
At that distance you wouldn't be vaporized, but burned. What you see on the steps is not vapor deposits, but rather they are shadows.
The immense heat and light from the detonation burned/discolored the stones, but not in the shadow of the person sitting on the steps. Hence why you can see these 'permanent shadows' in various places in the city. Some caused by humans, but most are just shadows of structures. For example bridge railings: https://www.atomicarchive.com/media/photographs/hiroshima/im...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone
Visited Hiroshima over a decade ago during a school trip, and had a local guide that was a survivor. Very powerful.
As a teenager we also visited concentration camps on a school trip, and a survivor joined the trip from Norway to Germany. We got to know him a bit during the week long trip, and there was a session where he told his story. I'll never forget this, and I think it affects me to this day.
Soon we will have no Time Witnesses left.
Edit: I remembered a very specific anecdote he told, about how him randomly having learned to knit helped when in a concentration camp, as some officer wanted something to be made, and he then could sit inside and do that instead of working himself to death in the quarry. Based on this I managed to find his name again now.
Haakon Sørbye, thanks for telling us your story.
Of course the reminder of the impact there and the ongoing risk is nice but is this really a relevant and current choice? Why not last year? Why not ten years ago? What success have they even had? Considering where we are right now. This isn't a group making an impact on the ground anywhere right now. Many of the winners in recent years have been civil & human rights activists in real fights on the ground in their countries/regions. The public will take the reminder but mostly shrug the news off.
This is a bad choice.
Nuclear weapons are the biggest cause of the last 80 years of peace between major world powers.
The best way to stop nuclear weapons from ever being used again, is to keep lots of them, in as many countries as possible (mutually assured destruction).
It is, as so often the case, a classic prisoner's dilemma problem [0]: "no nukes" is pretty clearly superior to "any nukes at all", but "they have nukes but we don't" is game over, so... nukes for all (major world powers)!
It's awful, but that's the prisoner's dilemma for you. I have a hard time respecting any anti-nuclear activist who doesn't at least acknowledge this facet of things, even if "no one has nukes and no one can easily get them" really would be best for the world.
[0]: if anyone hasn't seen it before, the interactive https://ncase.me/trust/ on the iterated prisoner's dilemma is excellent
No, I disagree.
There hasn't been a hot war between nuclear powered states, ever.
This is pretty obviously superior compared with the previous "no nukes" era, that had plenty of hot wars...
Define "hot war". There have been plenty of fighting in border regions of India and Pakistan in recent years, and both have nukes. India since 1974 and Pakistan since 1998.
If the past 8 years have shown us anything, it's that we are capable of electing incredibly stupid people who likely would get us into war if being blown back into the stone age weren't a possibility. I like nuclear weapons for that reason. It scares tyrants into complacency on the larger scale.
I'm also of the opinion that MAD has been the largest single greatest cause of peace in the past 80 years, but I disagree that this award is bad. The reason we haven't seen a single use of nuclear weapons since then, not even relatively small ones, is because of the nuclear taboo that organizations like this have engendered
Nuclear weapons have not prevented major world powers from engaging in proxy wars. As we can see today in the Middle East, proxy wars can make things dangerous and more likely to lead to an unwanted escalation.
Mutually assured destruction works best when the number of involved parties is limited. If every state were to have a warhead of its own, many risks would increase: those of miscalculation, nuclear proliferation to non-state actors, etc.
What if a fanatical leader has them? Castro said he would have nuked the US if he could and didn't care if Cuba gets destroyed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtUfBc4qQMg
>What if a fanatical leader has them?
Like Nixon, you mean? [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory#Richard_Nixon
Not at all. A fanatic wouldn't feign it, they'd do it. Self destruction be damned.
The chances of a nuclear bomb being used in the next 30 years is at least 90%. That's an opinion so don't ask for a link.
Why? Purely because of the combinatorial math of proliferation, and the likelihood of either an accident or a crazy person getting control of a bomb.
I wish it weren't so, but eventually your luck runs out.
I wonder if that Timnit Gebru will come out of the woodwork again on this because of whatever, or more importantly as some "look at me instead I'm loudly aggrieved about very little" play for PR and funding.
I watched the film “Threads” last night, anyone in any doubt about the horrific consequences of a nuclear exchange should watch it. The speed at which society falls apart is simply terrifying. Those poor souls unlucky to be in a war zone will understand better than I ever will. The world needs a new order.
The Hibakusha's firsthand accounts and efforts have kept the horrors of nuclear war alive in the world's consciousness, helping to build a lasting taboo against the use of such weapons.
Nice to see they do somehow recognize the whole association of people and not push to much about a single person. But the committee is trapped with the rules that push for this ridiculous individual centric point of view which is so out of touch with measurable realities considering what forces actually come at play to anything with large social impact.
Also on a side note:
>the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen.
Well, first thing, this is a quite restrictive anthropocentric and restrictive POV for what count for a weapon. Putting appart all things that triggered previous mass extinction as they might not really fit the expectation of weapon and "ever witnessed as implied agent", ok. But let's consider European invasion of America: while this was not intended and per design, it somehow greatly leveraged on bacteriological weapons.
Currently humanity is also at war with biodiversity, and the scale is massive and worldwide, using a large panel of tools.
Of course we are more prone to empathy to our fellow humans, and nuclear weapons are abominations.
As some other commenters have pointed out: It is lamentable that the focus is almost always on the atomic bombing itself instead of why it came to that point at all.
Many Asian countries feel scant sympathy toward Japan. From Indonesia to Malaysia to the Philipipines or even worse and for much longer, in Korea and China. In each of these countries the Japanese perpetrated massacre, forced labour, gang rape and forced prostitution in the millions. Even European women who were stranded in their former colonies were not spared. In fact their diaries are the foremost historical sources.
Their brutality is such that the hatred towards colonialist European nations were ameliorated and pretty much forgotten these days. It's sickening to me that outside East and Southeast Asia itself, most of the world only remember Nagasaki and Hiroshima when it comes to casualties in the Pacific theatre of WW2.
This sympathy felt even more misplaced considering even to this very day, unlike Germany, Japanese historiograpy deliberately downplays Japan brutality during occupation or that there was any aggression on their part at all. Most Japanese college mates in the US that I've talked to were not even aware that Japan occupied my country for years resulting in millions of casualties.
There are also well-maintained shrines (like Yasukuni) to the Japanese war criminals frequented even by high-level politicians (former PM went there, current ministers went there). Imagine that in current Germany!
The Yasukuni situation is more complex than "the shrine for war criminals". A lot more people are enshrined there, the war criminals are a tiny fraction (and were only added in 1978, while the shrine was established 109 years earlier). To give you an example of an important and less controversial figure enshrined there: Sakamoto Ryōma. There are 2+ millions souls enshrined there.
Not sure if that organisation is making progress, sounds like a smoke bomb, to please people who care about these meaningless rewards
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/385216...
Nuclear weapons are not used not because they are morally unacceptable, but rather because of MAD and their limited efficiency when used against armies.
If you wanted to give a Nobel Prize to someone for preventing nuclear wars, give it to Nuclear Winter researchers and military analysts.
It's a bit unclear to me why you need an organization that advocates against nuclear weapons. I'd argue the “nuclear taboo” is just the product of.. I don't just seeing one nuclear test video? It doesn't take the cataloging of witness testimony to see it's terror (though that may be important in its own right)
I'm not intimately familiar with Japanese self-perceptions - but from the outside it seems like post-WW2 the country really leaned into a view that "nuclear weapons are terrible" to the point of distraction - instead of a more self-reflective "nationalism is terrible" or something along those lines. There seems to be much less anxiety about preventing getting into a similar situations that triggered WW2: neo-colonial military bullying and domination of neighbors, xenaphobic oppression of ethnic groups, sycophantic following of cultural leaders etc. and an intense worry about the more tangeable use of nuclear weapons - which I'd argue is something that even if it were to come to pass would almost certainly never involve the Japanese people.
I wonder how this seeming diversion of public attention is perceived in Japan itself.
As I understand it, the anti-nationalist narrative was repressed due to anti-communist agendas of the occupation forces (ex: freeing of nationalist war criminals)
Would be curious to hear from anyone Japanese on the topic
The general human tendency to focus on single short term events seems to be the main cause.
Let's compare using Wikipedia as a source:
Mass killings of large civilian populations should not happen. I don't personally see nuclear weapons as worse than incendiary bombs or artillery. It's the number of casualties that makes it horrible.The evidence we have is
* one early bomb is more or less equivilant to one conventional HE + incendiary raid.
* 2,000+ other bombs have since been detonated, a good number of which were orders of magnitudes more destructive than the early "first gen" bombs used on Japan.
Nuclear war with the larger weapons that followed would be considerably worse than incendiary bombs, in physical destruction, in immediate deaths, and in injuries and following mortalities.
It's all about scale. Not about the type weapons themselves. All the testifying of the horrors seems irrelevant.
Using nuclear weapons only tactically against counterforce targets would not be that horrifying.
I agree. I've been to the Hiroshima Peace Park or whatever it's called in English numerous times, but I can't say I've been anymore moved by it than any other demonstration of human brutality.
I can't register a difference between a nuclear bomb and, say, a GBU-12 Paveway conventional bomb. They both destroy and kill brutally, the magnitude is irrelevant and it would be great if we never have to use either of them.
A nuke and a pave way? That’s like comparing a 22lr to a 155mm HE shell.
The Hiroshima museum, while advocating for a nuclear free world, has an interesting take on why the US dropped the bomb on them.
According to them, the US dropped the bomb because they wanted to show their strengths against the Soviets. It makes little to no mention of the bloody battles in the Pacific.
> instead of a more self-reflective "nationalism is terrible" or something along those lines.
It used to bother me a lot, until I realized that
- the US purposefully left the Emperor in place with only a slap on the fingers ("you're not a god anymore...except for those who still believe you are")
- all surrounding countries have incentives to to keep distances from Japan (in particular as long as the US are there, Japan and China will never be allies, same for Russia), Taiwan being the exception.
I see no future where Japan nationalism is truly solved, short of these two things also getting solved. And boy is there no end in sight to this.
>the US purposefully left the Emperor in place with only a slap on the fingers
This was a deliberate political decision in an effort to not repeat the grave mistake of how post-WW1 Germany was handled which essentially led to WW2. Denying Japan of their identity and dignity would have risked an eventual WW3, and the US did not want to even entertain the possibility.
It also didn't help that practically all of Japan were not going to see their Emperor deposed or worse; Japan was willing to compromise on literally everything but the Emperor in making peace with the US and the west, and the extended Imperial family along with all the other nobles thereof lost their titles and powers in the post-war occupation and restructuring.
I think we're mostly in agreement. It was a strategic move and it might have helped a lot letting Japan get back on its feet. And it's also the move that left the deep deep nationalism in place and it's still here today.
Perhaps there was no way to have one without the other, but at least I want to look at it as a series of cause and consequences.
Crazy popular anime girl representations of WW2 battleships is the most funniest form of that reality IMHO.
> I'd argue the “nuclear taboo” is just the product of.. I don't just seeing one nuclear test video?
And yet some high ranking military planers were seriously pushing for employing nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Do you think they just haven't seen any nuclear test videos?
> It's a bit unclear to me why you need an organization that advocates against nuclear weapons.
Because humans keep building, and fielding nuclear weapons. Not sure where you live, but chances are good your taxes are used to build, and maintain nuclear weapons and the means to carry them.
I'm Japanese-American, so I can throw two cents in your hat.
Post-war Japan is against nuclear weapons to an absolute, but it must be admitted that the response to nukes in particular is just as much a kneejerk reaction. NHK literally spams the entirety of August with anti-nuclear propaganda every year. Japan's anti-nuclear stance is also hypocritically at odds with relying on the US nuclear umbrella for national security.
More rationally, post-war Japan is against wars of any and all kinds to an absolute. This goes as far as refusing to defend the US in the event of an attack on the US-Japan alliance; this was only changed recently in the last decade or so after strong pressure from the US to reciprocate the US's defense commitments to Japan.
Nationalism is a... complex topic. You will be considered a crazy person if you wave the Japanese flag or put up a flagpole on or around your house, but at the same time loyalty and reverence to the Emperor still remains strong and the country is politically and culturally very conservative/liberal with a very interesting mix of individualism and conformity. Most Japanese ex-pats actually leave Japan because they are more progressive and can't stand the conservative culture.
Japan is actually quite welcoming of foreigners, but there is a hard gentlemen's agreement that if you're in Japan you do as the Japanese do. Those who can adapt are welcomed, those who can't/don't are excluded and ejected sooner or later.
An excellent choice.
I have no issue with this laureate, but it is sad that the comittee could not find someone deserving that is working on a more current conflict. I guess this is not a positive outlook for the current state international conflicts.
At a time when Russia threatens the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Israel and Iran escalate tensions, North Korea tests missiles and warheads… it is hard not to relate the award to these circumstances.
Perhaps the committee thought it was best to express its opinion on current conflicts indirectly, as it has done so in the past.
> Perhaps the committee thought it was best to express its opinion on current conflicts indirectly, as it has done so in the past.
I do agree, and this is my point: this particular committee expressing concern rather than celebrating success is a source of lament to me.
I'm just glad it looks like a legitimately given out award this time, instead of giving it to e.g. Peres, Arafat, Obama, Aung San Suu Kyi, etc.
Obama is by far the most vapid recipient of the award, but I wonder if he is also the best representative for the lack of peace given his legacy of "Yes we can, (but we don't)."
The reason we seemingly can't have peace is because we deliberately refuse it.
Since over 2 years, we again live now under the constant real threat of a nuclear war. Or this is at least what Russia is regularly claiming. This is very current as long as Putin doesn't get his s** together.
Of course there are other current candidates who would also deserve it, but I think it might be also a matter of how hot and current the problem is, and how much political impact this message would have. Russia and their threats are cooling down for the moment, so it's "safer" to send this message, instead of anything related to the Middle East, for example.
A good one this year. Some past recipients, not so good...
One of the reasons I like Trump is he’s one of the few modern politicians to talk about the threat of nuclear war all the time. I feel like most people have gotten complacent about it.
That’s because he is manipulating you with scare tactics, much like virtually every other topic. Great Depression 2! Dog eaters! Rapists!
Every other sentence is an appeal to fear.
Genuinely interested: if Trump talking nukes is 'one of the reasons (for liking him), what are the others, and do they include his talking about soldiers and generals?
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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Can you please make your substantive points without name-calling and flamebait? We've had to ask you this before!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
while Iran has them,
Present tense, you say?
What about right wing dictatorships backed by the CIA?
Is there any right wing dictatorship backed by CIA that has nuclear weapons?
If I were a gambling man I'd put some money on a chinese professor getting the economics Nobel Prize
You might want to consider a little more carefully before putting money down. There is no economics Nobel Prize.
"Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation. Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony"
The peace prize is being awarded to a Japanese organization that advocates nuclear non-proliferation, as the committee emphasizes its urgent importance amid two ongoing wars, in which one belligerent threatens to use nuclear weapons while in another one probably has.
But the committee ostensibly fails to call out that nuclear weapons come in all shapes and sizes (they are not just big bad bombs), as the US, world's largest weapons manufacturer, both uses it and sells it to its allies: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7903104/ / https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2015-00348...
Depleted uranium ammunition is not a type of nuclear weapon since its method of dealing damage is kinetic, not a nuclear reaction.
Ironically enough you calling these "nuclear weapons" only serves to confuse people and soften the nuclear taboo.
Japan's national security policy is hypocritical given that it relies solely on the US nuclear umbrella for security despite disavowing anything to do with nuclear weapons, but unfortunately reality is not ideality.
Ukraine is the perfect example of what actually happens when a country discards its nuclear arsenal.
So yes, Japan is absolutely hypocritical and the Nobel Peace Prize has been the most vapid of all the Nobel Prizes, but for once this Peace Prize is actually trying to say something meaningful in an ever violent human world.
> Ukraine is the perfect example of what actually happens when a country discards its nuclear arsenal.
That's silly. Ukraine never had a nuclear arsenal. Ukraine had nuclear weapons on their soil, but they were managed, and controlled by forces loyal to Moscow. Had forces loyal to Kyiv tried to force their way into the silos they would have been repelled and a war would have broken out there and then.
Ukraine had a nuclear arsenal as much as Turkey has a nuclear arsenal because the USA stores nuclear warheads in Incirlik.
I agree that Ukraine was not a nuclear power even while they had warheads on their territory after the USSR fell apart, but I believe it was very feasible for them to become one.
Posession is nine tenths of the law, after all-- it would've been quite possible to just lock down a few silos and refuse to hand the weapons over. Russia as a state was highly disrupted at that point, and would've had a hard time opposing this effectively.
I'm not disputing that this would've been a very costly move for an already poor nation (in potential economical sanctions and also maintenance of the arsenal itself). Maybe the external political/economical pressure resulting from this would've ripped Ukraine apart some other way.
But I'm highly confident that Russia would not have risked annexing territory from an country with a few nuclear ICBM silos. No need even to have full control/launch capability, as long as there is sufficient doubt (on Russias side).
As a matter of fact Japan has no other choice than being under US protection.
I can't imagine a chain of event that would lead the US to get out of Japan volunteerly [0], nor Japan being able to kick the US out forcibly. It's just outside of the realm of possibility right now.
[0] they won't even move out of Okinawa as the whole island loathes the US base and gives the middle finger to their own gov to get them out.