BRUSSELS (AN) – Ahead of the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, humanitarian leaders demanded that world powers reduce nuclear tensions that have skyrocketed with Russia's expanded war in Ukraine.
It's not just in Ukraine. The threat from proliferation is rising among nations such as China, India, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia, which all have nuclear weapons, and nations such as Iran, which has long maintained it does not intend to develop them but has research technology that could be used to make them. And the U.S. is still the only country to have used nuclear weapons at war.
"The risk of use of nuclear weapons is highest since the worst moments of the Cold War, amid heightened political tensions and new steps to expand arsenals," International Committee of the Red Cross President Mirjana Spoljaric and Japanese Red Cross Society President said on Wednesday. Their organizations saw first-hand the suffering and devastation caused by the world's first atomic bomb attacks in 1945, sending medical and humanitarian personnel to assist the dying and injured.
"Even the use of a so-called 'tactical' or low-yield nuclear weapon would have devastating humanitarian consequences and break an 80-year nuclear taboo. The Hiroshima bomb had a yield of 15 kilotons, what today would be described as a small nuclear weapon," they said. "The only way to guarantee that nuclear weapons are never used again is by eliminating them, and their prohibition is an essential step for reaching this goal."
They're not alone in their concerns. In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the symbolic hour of apocalpyse. It was the first such update since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine stoked fears of a nuclear showdown between Russia and the West. The clock is now the closest to midnight it has ever been since it was first conceived in 1947 as a measure of existential global threats like nuclear war.
The G-7 summit this coming weekend for seven of the world's most powerful democracies plans to honor the 140,000 people killed in the United States' August 6, 1945, atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the world's first such attack. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki and killed 70,000 people. Days later, Japan's half-century of nationalist aggression gave way to unconditional surrender, ending World War II, but ushering in a new era in which humanity has the power destroy itself. The Charter of the United Nations, which takes aim at that threat by seeking to banish the scourge of war, took effect a month later.
Visitors at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park are asked to consider the horrific power of nuclear weapons and help work to abolish them. The G-7's host, Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, whose family is from Hiroshima, has repeatedly called for a “world without nuclear weapons,” but he doesn't plan to seek binding commitments to cut arsenals or stop putting weapons abroad. He wants the summit to find new ways of reviving the world's stalled disarmament talks.
The G-7 includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, plus the European Union as an "8th member," but just three of those countries, plus six others, are known to possess nuclear weapons: China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S.
On paper, global momentum to ban nuclear weapons has grown in recent years. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the first binding international agreement to ban nuclear weapons, came into force in 2021 and now counts 92 signatories. Sixty-eight countries ratified it. None of the nuclear powers signed on.
Japan, still the only country to suffer a nuclear attack, also is not a signatory, nor are any of the countries, like Japan, that are protected under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. At the start of 2023, the nine nuclear-armed nations had 12,512 nuclear warheads, down from 12,705 a year earlier, according to the Ban Monitor produced by Norwegian People's Aid and Federation of American Scientists. That includes 2,936 retired nuclear warheads waiting to be dismantled. Russia and the U.S. account for 89% of all the active and retired nuclear warheads.
That's the good news. The bad news is that five of the nine nuclear-armed nations – China, India, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia – have recently driven up the global arsenal of nuclear warheads that are considered to be active and available for use worldwide. Those rose to 9,576 in early 2023, equal to the destructive power of 135,000 Hiroshima bombs, for an increase of 136 warheads in that category above early 2022. Russia and the U.S. still possess 86% of all those.
Beyond weapons, nuclear power risks
China's President Xi Jinping, who denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin's threats to use nuclear weapons, has been rapidly expanding China's nuclear arsenal and continues to shield North Korea's nuclear program as Pyongyang conducts dozens of tests of its increasingly advanced nuclear arsenal.
The tests rattled South Korea, leading to a state visit by its President Yoon Suk Yeol to Washington, where he secured the deployment of U.S. nuclear ballistic submarines to South Korea for the first time in decades and a pledge from U.S. President Joe Biden to "end" the North Korean regime if it waged a nuclear attack.
The end of the Hiroshima summit coincides with the planned opening of a Russian storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, Ukraine's northern neighbor. Putin announced in late March that Russia would deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus and was training Belarusian air force crews how to use them.
In the face of the Russian army's manpower, Ukraine's military operates fast-moving, small tactical units to avoid concentrating too many of forces in one place. This leaves Russia with no large military targets to strike, undermining any advantage Russia may hope to gain with the firepower of its nuclear arsenal.
The frontlines of the war also remain just a short distance from Russia's western border, meaning a strike on Ukrainian forces would quickly lead to radioactivity blowing into Russian territory. In many cases, Russian and Ukrainian frontlines are just kilometers apart, precluding Russia's ability to strike just its own forces.
Major cities like Kyiv or Lviv are immobile targets. Any nuclear strike would inflict catastrophic casualties on civilians, but Ukraine's military capacity would be unchanged and the world would likely turn against such a crime against humanity.
U.S. intelligence officials are skeptical of Putin's intentions to use the weapons. "It's very unlikely, is our current assessment," U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the Senate Armed Services Committee this month.
The larger nuclear threat may be the fragile state of Ukraine's Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe. Frequent shelling nearby has compromised its power, and the plant could lay in the path of future battles.
Repeated attempts by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency to secure a safe zone around the plant have failed. The United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency has staff on-site who continue to hear shelling on a regular basis.
“The general situation in the area near the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant is becoming increasingly unpredictable and potentially dangerous," IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi said this month.
On Tuesday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called on G-7 leaders to commit to a world without nuclear weapons. "This is the moment in which we must insist on the need of revitalizing disarmament, and especially nuclear disarmament,” he told Japanese news outlets ahead of his trip to Hiroshima.
