The True Legacy Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

Ever since the earliest records of organised society, mankind has displayed a persistent inclination towards conflict, conquest, and the assertion of dominance. Land was seized, populations displaced, and power measured by the capacity to subdue rivals.

From the blood-soaked plains of ancient Mesopotamia (the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates river, also known as “The cradle of civilisation.”) to the imperial campaigns of Rome, war was just an instrument of civilisations. As societies advanced, so did the means of destruction. Steel replaced stone, gunpowder steel, the industrial revolution transformed battlefields into factories of death.

Control of land expanded to control of seas and later, skies. The world became modern, more industrialised, more globalised, yet what remained was the steely will to outdo the adversary. To deter through strength, and to secure status through brute force. Fourth/fifth century Roman writer Flavius Vegetius Renatus coined the phrase “Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum” in his treatise, Epitoma rei militaris. As is the case with religion, politics, poetry, art, literature and almost everything under this sky, this phrase too, has been interpreted according to the convenience of the one who was prepared/mighty enough to write history. The most accepted translation of “Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum” seems to be, “Therefore, he who desires peace, must prepare for war.” And in this “preparation” for this “desire for peace” we prepared so well that we are ready to wipe ourselves from the face of this earth – many, many, many times over!

The Manhattan Project, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer accelerated this trajectory with unprecedented speed. What emerged from the deserts of New Mexico in July 1945 was not merely a weapon, but a rupture in human history. The Trinity test demonstrated that a single device could unleash destruction unknown to mankind. Three weeks later, that “knowledge” was applied with barbaric designs in mind over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three weeks from experiment to extermination. JUST three weeks from theory to ashes. Innocent, civilian populations witnessed the unthinkable, the unimaginable.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were “experiments” to teach the Japanese “a lesson in the language that they seem to understand” because, “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast” said President Truman. Men have fought wars for as long as we have been around. To die on a battlefield is one thing, to defend a border is one thing but to annihilate cities at the push of a button, quite another. Killing innocents is terrorism. It was a clear assertion of ruthless power. In possessing and demonstrating nuclear capability, the United States established itself as the pre-eminent global power, its dominance resting not only on victory, but on the capacity to end civilisation itself.

What followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki was far from remorse. It was replication. Power, once demonstrated, invites imitation. The nuclear monopoly enjoyed by the United States was brief. The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic device in 1949, ending America’s brief moment of destructive supremacy. The world had entered a new phase, where annihilation was not just practical, it was mutual.

The Cold War was not merely an ideological contest between capitalism and communism, it was a period of international geopolitical rivalry. A race to the very end. The logic was simple: survival depended not on defence, but on the certainty of retaliation. The Soviet Union would later detonate the “Kuzka’s mother” (Tsar Bomba) – the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested. It was about 3300 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima! It was a statement to the world that restraint was optional and capability limitless. The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) ensured that peace was preserved not through trust, but through fear. 

Inevitably, the nuclear contagion spread. China, driven by security concerns and great-power aspirations, tested its first nuclear weapon in 1964. India, surrounded by nuclear-armed adversaries and shaped by a traumatic defeat in 1962, entered the nuclear club in 1974. Propelled by the humiliation post the largest single-day military surrender in history, Pakistan’s then new President (3rd Chief martial law administrator), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto famously declared, “We will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will have our own nuclear bomb.” It took 27 long years, help and materials (albeit, clandestine) from many nations to showcase to the world that it had nuclear capabilities. Nuclear weapons became the ultimate equaliser, allowing states with limited conventional strength to command disproportionate attention. The bomb was no longer the preserve of superpowers; it was the currency of survival in a hostile international system.

As arsenals multiplied, so did the realisation that unrestrained accumulation would end only one way. The very states that had perfected nuclear destruction began searching for ways to regulate it. Arms control was born not out of idealism, but necessity. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), followed by Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START), were attempts to impose order in chaos. They did not eliminate nuclear weapons; they sought to manage them. They acknowledged a grim truth: disarmament was unrealistic, but restraint, essential.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, commonly known as New START, signed in 2010, was one of a small number of bilateral agreements aimed at reducing the risk of a catastrophic nuclear conflict. It expired on the 5th February 2026. It placed verifiable limits on deployed strategic nuclear warheads and delivery systems, reintroduced inspection regimes and restored a measure of transparency between the United States and Russia. In a world increasingly defined by mistrust, New START functioned as an institutionalised pause, a recognition that even adversaries required guardrails.

New START, and treaties like it, represent humanity’s uneasy attempt to coexist with its own capacity for destruction. They do not promise peace. They promise time. Time to think, to negotiate, to step back from the edge. Whether that time is used wisely or not remains an open question. History suggests that mankind’s appetite for dominance has always outpaced its restraint. The tools have changed, the impulse has not. The challenge before us is whether we can regulate our weapons faster than we invent new reasons to use them.

“If you have any tears, prepare to shed them now…” There exists a photograph from Nagasaki that does more to indict nuclear warfare than volumes of treaties and doctrines ever could. It shows a young Japanese boy, no older than ten, standing upright, with his chest out, almost to the point of defiance. Strapped to his back is the lifeless body of his younger brother, tied with rope because there was no one left to carry him and nowhere left to put him down. The boy’s face is expressionless, not because he does not feel grief, but because grief has exhausted him. His lips are bitten until they bleed, his eyes fixed forward as he waits in line at a crematorium that no longer distinguishes between soldiers and children, between combatants and civilians, between guilt and innocence. This is not a photograph of death, it is a photograph of what survives death. In that still frame lies the true legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — not victory, not deterrence, not the end of a war, but the quiet normalisation of the unbearable. Every nuclear doctrine, every strategic calculation, every treaty clause must ultimately answer to this boy, standing alone in a world that chose power over humanity, death over life, war over peace and destruction over creation. Until powers learn to bow before humanity, he will stand there forever, carrying the dead into a future that failed them. 

Sartaj Chaudhary is an LLM from UNIVERSITY OF KENT, UK. His areas of interests are terrorism, regional conflict and International relations.

(Views expressed are personal)