The mayor of the only city still entitled to say never again used the 81st commemoration of the atomic bombing to attack the doctrine that is supposed to prevent it. Speaking at the Peace Park in Nagasaki on Sunday, Shiro Suzuki called nuclear weapons an absolute evil that can never coexist with humanity. He went further, calling the theory of nuclear deterrence extremely dangerous and fragile and arguing that the more a nation relies on it, the more it increases the risk of nuclear war.
The words were aimed at a specific audience. Suzuki addressed himself directly to the leaders of nuclear states and of nations that shelter under nuclear umbrellas, telling them that their own logic is the danger. More than 12,000 warheads still exist, he reminded them, and the nuclear states are modernizing their arsenals rather than reducing them. The last review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty ended in May without an agreed final text, the third straight review to fail that way, and the mayor said the modernization further fuels a vicious cycle of even greater mutual distrust, confrontation and division.
The warning landed in a year that makes it hard to dismiss as ceremony. Two conflicts are running in which nuclear-armed states are directly involved: Russia’s war on Ukraine and the American-led campaign against Iran. The United Nations secretary general, Antonio Guterres, said in a statement read at the ceremony that the danger of error, escalation and fighting rises every year, that this state of affairs is unacceptable, and that humanity should not have to live under permanent threat. He called security interdependent and said nuclear weapons only fuel uncertainty.
The ceremony itself held the usual silences and the usual absences. The moment of silence came at 11:02 a.m., the instant the plutonium bomb exploded over the city on August 9, 1945. About 3,700 people attended, with delegations from 98 countries and the European Union. The United States, which dropped the bomb, sent its deputy chief of mission rather than its ambassador. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi attended, after some shouting from the crowd, and repeated the formula she used at Hiroshima three days earlier, saying Japan is upholding the three nonnuclear principles, the pledges not to produce, possess or allow nuclear weapons onto Japanese soil.
The phrasing matters, because the anniversary falls in the middle of a live political argument in Tokyo. Takaichi has refused to promise that the principles will survive her government’s security review at the end of the year, and she declined again on Sunday to commit Japan to attending the November conference of the treaty that bans nuclear weapons outright, the TPNW. She said Tokyo must weigh what actually works for the country’s security. The mayor pressed the other way, urging the government to uphold the peace ethos of the constitution and the nonnuclear principles.
Behind the politics stands a clock that no ceremony can stop. The average age of Japan’s officially recognized atomic bomb survivors now exceeds 86. They are dying at a rate that makes every anniversary one of the last with witnesses in the crowd. Toyomi Okada, 87, was six years old and about four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the blast center when the bomb went off; she has never left the house she grew up in and still attends every year. She remembers little of the day itself, only the devastation visible from her home all the way to the park. About 74,000 people died in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, and the survivors’ memories are now the last living record of what the doctrine of deterrence actually costs when it fails.
Suzuki said the world is at a critical moment when the voices of the hibakusha can still be heard directly, and that the memories must be handed down. That is the gentle part of the message. The sharper part was aimed at the leaders in the nuclear states and under the umbrellas, including his own prime minister: the theory that safety comes from the threat of annihilation is not a shield, it is the mechanism of the next war. Nagasaki knows what that mechanism produces. It is the only city on earth entitled to say so from experience, and on Sunday it said so to the people most likely not to listen.