The dangerous new nuclear arms race 80 years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima

Japan is marking 80 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Survivors of the bombing were among those taking part in the ceremony earlier today. The prime minister laid flowers at a monument to pay tribute to the victims. A minute's silence was held at a quarter past eight to remember the moment in 1945 when an American plane dropped the atomic bomb on the city, instantly killing tens of thousands of people. More nations now possess nuclear weapons than ever before and arsenals are being modernized, which raises the question, has the world truly learned the lessons of Hiroshima? Hiroshima. Before it and the world changed forever. Over 120,000 men, women and children lost their lives when two U.S.-made atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, Hiroshima's peace memorial is a perpetual ruin, intended to keep the memory of nuclear weaponry's destructive fury alive. It's horrible to see that all those people were bombed and hear all these stories, and we have to do something about it. If we remain silent, it might happen again. But 80 years on, has the world learned the lessons of Hiroshima? The number of nuclear weapons peaked during the Cold War. It's been decreasing thanks to disarmament agreements between Russia and the United States. A good start, according to observers. But the picture isn't so simple. There are more nuclear powers now than ever before, nine in total, with stockpiles estimated to top over 12,000 warheads. Most of them are in Russia and the United States. All major nuclear powers are currently modernizing their arsenals, expanding their destructive capability. The weapon that destroyed Hiroshima back in 1945 had a yield of about 15 kiloton, so by today's standard, that weapon would be considered a low-yield warhead, even though it destroyed an entire city. But today, most weapons typically have yields in several hundred of kilotons. New delivery systems like Russia's plane-launched hypersonic Kinzhal missile can deliver nuclear payloads in minutes around the globe. Nuclear powers are also pulling out of treaties limiting the spread of atomic weapons, and countries like Russia, China, or the United States, with its proposed Golden Dome system, are considering placing weapons in space for the first time, or incorporating AI technology into their defensive systems. I think we're considerably less safe now than we were when the Cold War was ending in 1990, 1991. Beneath the headlines of the nuclear weapons reduction that has been going on over the years, in recent years, we've started to see an uptick in the number of operational nuclear warheads, and we're seeing the introduction of new technologies which are taking us into a new arms race. And with military flare-ups between nuclear-armed powers like India or Pakistan becoming more common, and the looming disruption climate change is likely to cause, experts have a message for voters. Show interest, get informed, be talking with other people, be talking about it, be part of creating a political climate in which political leadership that takes us towards disarmament is valued. That's something that everybody can do. Everybody has a stake in this, and everybody has a part to play in it. To help leave the horrors inflicted on Hiroshima squarely in the past. Well, I'm joined now by Hans Christensen. Hans, you saw in that report, he tracks nuclear arsenals for the Federation of American Scientists, and SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Hans, it's good to have you with us this Wednesday. SIPRI's 2025 yearbook, it warns of a dangerous new nuclear arms race. What exactly does this arms race look like, and what makes it so threatening? Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a mixed picture. It's not an arms race like we had back in the 1970s, where it literally was a question of building the most nuclear weapons. Countries were racing against each other. What we have today is more like a technological arms race and a political arms race, so to speak. We're seeing an increase of the role of nuclear weapons than the prominence that they have in the world. And so countries are just basically switching back into a more focus on nuclear weapons in their national and foreign policies than before. There are currently nine nuclear armed countries on the planet. How many other nations do you think are striving to develop or possess nuclear weapons? Yeah, the two most likely other candidates, or the two most prominent candidates, in addition to the nine we have today, are Iran and South Korea. Those two countries, Iran has a technology that is, seem to have been trying to create the conditions to be able to create, to build nuclear weapons very quickly. They've just had their facilities bombed, of course, and so they've had a significant setback. The other is South Korea, where there is a large majority that favors getting their own nuclear weapons, even politicians, mainstream politicians are talking about it. So those are the two most likely cases. The mayor of Hiroshima said today that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are now contributing to growing acceptance of nuclear weapons. Do you see it that way as well? Well, it depends who you talk to. It depends what country you're talking about. Countries react very differently to threats. Some countries do reach for the nuclear weapon if they're threatened too much with conventional or certainly nuclear weapons. Others don't see that as a solution. So it really, most countries do not seem to be tempted about requiring nuclear weapons. I think the danger here is more that with more strife and international tension and an increasing role in prominence of nuclear weapons, we could risk seeing conventional wars that would escalate out of control into nuclear use. And what about new technologies? And I'm thinking here, especially of artificial intelligence, they are rapidly transforming many fields. What role do they play in this current nuclear arms race? Yeah, right away, you know, AI or fast data processing, so to speak, has played a significant role in nuclear planning, computer programming, etc., war gaming for a long time. But what we're beginning to see is this new phase of suppose that technology can make decisions, so to speak, about what needs to be done. So there's an effort to try to limit the role that AI can play in specific nuclear missions, most sort of popularly without having AI making decisions, so to speak, about whether nuclear weapons should be used. So but that requires political will to instigate those kind of laws. And before we run out of time, what future do you see for nuclear disarmament efforts if arsenals continue to grow and diplomatic channels weaken? Yeah, right now it's very bleak. If we continue on the current path, of course, there is no chance of disarmament. That is just the way it is. We would have to see a significant change. And that will require initiatives by sort of visionary politicians that really want to make bold decisions here. We need to break this pattern. Otherwise, we're sliding back into the very, very same dynamic that ran the Cold War for so many decades. Hans Christensen from the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation for American Scientists. Hans, we appreciate your time and your insights today. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks. Joining me here in the studio now is William Alburk. He's a top expert in nuclear deterrence with decades of experience with the Pacific Forum, NATO, and the US government. William, it's good to have you with us. So we're marking 80 years since the bombing of Hiroshima. How would you characterize the global nuclear threats today? Well, the nuclear threats right now are more in the news. They're more present than they've been since the end of the Cold War. It really is something that fell off people in the West's radar in the 1990s and 2000s. It increased a little bit with the first Trump administration. But really, Russia's very loose use of nuclear threats over the past few years, Iran racing towards nuclear program, North Korea building up, it's back on the radar, China with a massive buildup as well. People are thinking about it and talking about it in ways that we just haven't heard in about 30 years. We heard in our report that the world's nine nuclear powers are busy. They're all busy modernizing their arsenals. Does that make the world safer or are we more at risk of an accident? I mean, it's a depressing situation. The United States under President Obama really tried to work with Russia to eliminate nuclear weapons. There was the Berlin proposal in 2013. We now know that Russia was already well in the midst of a modernization program. We now know that China had already decided at this point to start building up. So the US, the UK, and France are actually playing catch up with Russia and China. North Korea is building. India and Pakistan have their nuclear balance. India and China have the nuclear balance. So the risks are much higher than they've been in a long time. They're not as bad as they were in the Cold War, but the risks are higher, mainly because there's so many more players in the game. The relationships are so much more complex. Because the US and Russian numbers are so much lower, countries like China might be able to race up to them. So it is really a worrying time in terms of risks. You mentioned India and Pakistan. A few weeks ago, we saw a tense standoff between these two countries. They did not threaten, though, to use nuclear weapons against each other. What does that tell us? Is that a good thing? Did they exercise restraint that all nuclear powers have? They have maintained some very, very particular restraint in a number of situations. They had the BrahMos missile incident. They had a shootdown between their fighter jets. They've had these standoffs with their troops. And every time, they don't threaten nuclear weapons in a way that you might expect other situations. And it really is because, on the one hand, Pakistan is smaller and has geographic disadvantage. So they want to go nuclear much earlier in a conflict to dissuade India from attacking. India, on the other hand, doesn't want the conflict to escalate to nuclear weapons. So both sides understand that balance. They have front-level communication channels, some risk-reduction tools. And they have back channels, where they try to talk this through and avoid conflict. And so, yeah, we've seen some really interesting restraint. They even have an agreement between the two countries to refrain from attacks on nuclear facilities, which is something that we've seen in Russia's war on Ukraine. What about what we're seeing, for example, with the United States pulling back from all nonproliferation agreements? When you've got a key player like the U.S. doing that, where does that lead us? Yeah, again, I go back to that earlier answer. The U.S. really was trying to push arms control and move towards a world free of nuclear weapons as late as 2013. But then, with Russia's invasion of Crimea, and then its reinvasion in 2014, and the reinvasion of Ukraine in 2022, and China's buildup, we really reached this sort of high-water mark for attempts at arms control. And then we found out Russia was cheating on the INF Treaty. They cheated on the CFE Treaty. They cheated on all these old treaties. Russia was taking them and shaking them and trying to see what they could get out of them. And so I think there's just this growing realization that the tools meant to manage the Cold War aren't the right tools for today. So while it's sad that the U.S. is stepping back from some of these agreements, there is a recognition, I think, on all parties that we need new agreements covering new issues in new ways. And we can't just go back to old Cold War agreements. You know, it is 80 years since the bombing of Hiroshima. And here we are sitting in the studio today talking about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Have we learned the lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for that matter? Well, you know, I've been thinking about this issue a lot because Hiroshima is such an important milestone in history, the bombings of Hiroshima and in three days, Nagasaki as well. A real nadir for humankind in combat. But we also have to remember, the United States offered, along with the allies, unconditional surrender. July 26, I think it was, the Potsdam Agreement. And Japan said no. And even after the first bomb, they still thought about it. After the second bomb, when the emperor finally declared unconditional surrender, the military tried to overthrow the government. So even in Japan, these lessons are hard to learn. And what have we really learned except that a global war like this can never happen again? And maybe nuclear deterrence is only thing keeping us from that brink. But I think we also need arms control measures. Yeah, I think everyone is in agreement that they hope that whatever the anniversary is, that we'll be here to be able to talk about it again. William, good to have you in the studio. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. More on this, we can talk now with Suzy Snyder. She's a leading expert in nuclear disarmament with ICAN. That's the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, whose work has been recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize. Suzy, thanks for being with us. Survivors of Hiroshima have dedicated their lives to ensuring this tragedy never happens again. Are their voices still being heard 80 years later? Well, most survivors are around 86 years old now. And the Japanese Confederation of Atomic Bomb Survivors, Nihon Hidakyo, was also the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize just last December. The thing is, the survivors do more than tell the story of the horror that they themselves witnessed. They call for abolition. And now more than 70% of these survivors in a recent poll have demanded that the Japanese government and all governments join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to make sure that no one ever lives through what they themselves suffered. Let's revisit for a moment the map we just saw in our report. It highlights the increasing number of countries with nuclear weapons worldwide. Recent confrontations between nuclear-armed states such as India and Pakistan have intensified concerns about nuclear escalation. I wanted to ask you, is the use of nuclear weapons in such conflicts a realistic threat today? Unfortunately, it is. Not only is the risk of use of nuclear weapons in a conflict a higher threat than it has ever been before, but the risk of accident, or misunderstanding, and an escalation caused by misunderstanding, by some blustering, or some misinterpretation of data, or the misreading of data provided by artificial intelligence, could lead to the use of nuclear weapons, which would rapidly expand into a nuclear conflagration like the world has never seen. I am personally worried about this. I've worked on this issue for decades, and I'm more worried than I ever have been before. At the same time, for the first time ever, governments, almost 100 governments, have stood up and said that the very existence of these weapons is a detriment to their safety and security, a detriment to the security of their own citizens. And they're demanding action from the nine, and it's only nine, who have these weapons to reduce and eliminate them in a safe and verifiable manner. Some have argued, however, that nuclear deterrence has maintained peace for decades. How do you see that? Well, let's think about this for a second, because nuclear deterrence and that idea, that theory, has been around as long as the United Nations has been around. So we have to ask ourselves, is it the threat to incinerate cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated? Or is it the fact that we can participate, and all states participate in a community of nations, to argue their differences, not on the battlefield, but in conference rooms, to find solutions to their problems? I think this theory of nuclear deterrence is unprovable. What it does do, however, it poses a risk of failure. And nuclear deterrence could fail at any moment, and that is a risk that we can't afford to take. Now, emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, which you mentioned already, are rapidly evolving. What impact do these have on the nuclear threat landscape, as you see it? Well, there are a few different ways that we see the application of these emerging technologies coming into the use of nuclear weapons. Most of the nuclear-armed states have committed to not put artificial intelligence in charge of launching nuclear weapons, which is good, and it's a step in the right direction. However, the application of some of these technologies includes looking at and assessing data coming in to facilitate and speed up decision-making about whether or not to use those nuclear weapons. And that is where my concern is, because already that decision-making time is about five minutes that one of the leaders of these nine countries has to choose to send a bomb designed to destroy a city or not. And if that is sped up, already the fog of war is likely to be clouding their judgment. Already they are unsure of their adversaries' intent. Already they are putting many lives at risk. What could making that decision faster do except increase the risk to all of us? And that's just one of the many worries I have with the application of these emerging technologies. Thank you. So, Susie, just one last question. What, if anything, gives you hope that the world will one day be free of nuclear weapons? Well, we have lived through a time where we had tens of thousands of these weapons, and there are fewer now today than there were before. It is times of great crisis, great concern, great urgency that we come together and realize we have to take these off the table. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, to which most governments on the planet have adhered, is a way to do that, and it is moving the needle forward to the end of nuclear weapons. And I am confident that through this treaty and through other negotiated agreements, I will live to see the end of nuclear weapons. Susie, thank you very much. That was Susie Snyder with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICANN.