FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2025

Defuse Nuclear War Statement on the 80th Anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings

This week marks the 80th anniversary of the U.S. bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Defuse Nuclear War coalition honors the victims of this terrible act of war, and urges decisionmakers in the United States and across the world to take its lessons seriously.

The bombings have since been misused as a lesson that somehow, with the exception of that first, tragic step into the nuclear age, the system works: that a world with nuclear weapons is fundamentally stable and secure, despite their incredible destructive power, which has increased with the growth of global nuclear arsenals and technological advances to a scale unimaginable even by the standards of the hundreds of thousands of casualties caused by the 1945 atomic bombings. A clear-eyed look at the history of the nuclear age reveals how precarious the situation truly is: how decades of close calls, flouted protocols, and systematic overconfidence have brought us time and time again to the edge of nuclear catastrophe. To deny the tremendous role of good luck in this is simple hubris.

Nuclear weapons remain a part of the international political system because people and institutions that benefit immensely from their ongoing existence work hard to maintain the status quo. Nuclear weapons are not the manifestation of some inherent drive toward conflict, competition, or self-destruction within human nature. Nor are they a manifestation of divine power, as they are so often spoken about. Nuclear weapons and the systems that support them were designed and built by human beings, and human beings can take them apart.

We must honor the victims of the attacks in August 1945 by finally learning their lesson: that nuclear weapons are first and foremost a liability to us as people and the world we work so hard to maintain. Defuse Nuclear War is committed to working to reduce the risk that nuclear weapons are used again, and to building a world without their threat.