Key Points
・Hiroshima held its Peace Memorial Ceremony on August 6, 2026, marking 81 years since the atomic bombing, with a record 121 countries and regions represented; Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi reaffirmed Japan’s three non-nuclear principles.
・The world’s nuclear stockpile still stands at roughly 12,000 warheads, and with the U.S.-Russia New START treaty expired and the NPT review conference ending without agreement, the framework that has underpinned arms control has entered a gap period.
・The contrast between countries that gave up their nuclear weapons, such as Ukraine and Libya, and North Korea, which kept its arsenal, has spread the belief that nuclear weapons are the ultimate insurance policy, a reminder that decades of deterrence working is no guarantee it will keep working.
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A Record 121 Countries Attend the 81st Anniversary Ceremony
Hiroshima held its “Peace Memorial Ceremony” at Peace Memorial Park on August 6, 2026, 81 years after the atomic bombing. A record 121 countries and regions sent representatives. Russia did not attend for the fifth consecutive year.
In his Peace Declaration, Mayor Kazumi Matsui said that “many leaders continue to rely on nuclear deterrence as a realistic response,” and that a world without nuclear weapons “keeps receding.” He noted that the 2026 NPT Review Conference had failed to adopt an outcome document for the third consecutive time and warned this could invite “a third Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Matsui called on the Japanese government to attend the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) review conference opening this November as an observer and to become a state party as soon as possible. He also noted that the average age of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) has passed 86 and called for expanded support.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, speaking at the ceremony, reaffirmed Japan’s commitment to the three non-nuclear principles. She said nuclear disarmament efforts would proceed through maintaining and strengthening the NPT regime, and pledged steady, realistic steps in line with the “Hiroshima Action Plan.” According to Japan’s health ministry, 91,105 people held hibakusha health record books as of the end of March 2026, with an average age of 86.66.
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Why Japan’s Position on Nuclear Weapons Is Harder to Explain Than It Looks
Readers outside Japan often assume that the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack would simply oppose nuclear weapons outright. Japan’s actual position is more layered, and understanding it requires three pieces of domestic context that rarely make it into international coverage.
The first is the three non-nuclear principles: not possessing, not producing, and not permitting the introduction of nuclear weapons. Adopted as a Diet resolution in 1971, they are policy, not law, which is precisely why every prime minister’s ceremony remarks on “upholding” them draw scrutiny over whether the commitment is being quietly narrowed.
The second is hibakusha support. As of the end of March 2026, 91,105 people held official hibakusha health record books, with an average age of 86.66. In 2024, Nihon Hidankyo, the national organization of atomic and hydrogen bomb sufferers, received the Nobel Peace Prize for testimony that helped sustain the international norm against nuclear use, often called the “nuclear taboo.” That award has raised the bar for what Japan, as the only country attacked with nuclear weapons, is expected to do diplomatically.
The third is the split over the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), adopted in 2017 and in force since 2021. It comprehensively bans the development, possession, use, and threat of use of nuclear weapons, but no nuclear-armed state has joined, and neither has Japan. The government’s stated reason is that joining would send the wrong signal while Japan still relies on the U.S. “nuclear umbrella,” the extended deterrence under which Washington has pledged to respond, potentially with nuclear weapons, to an attack on its allies. Other countries under the same umbrella, including Germany and Norway, have attended TPNW meetings as observers without becoming states parties, a middle path Japan has so far not taken.
These three pieces explain why Hiroshima’s ceremony each year produces two speeches that sound like they are talking past each other: a mayor pressing for observer status and disarmament, and a prime minister affirming non-possession while declining to close the door on the deterrence Japan depends on.
The Gap Between Giving Up Nuclear Weapons and Keeping Them Is Reshaping How Countries Think About Security
Ukraine and North Korea Have Become the Two Reference Points Every Government Now Reads
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are widely credited with helping build a strong normative constraint against nuclear use, the so-called nuclear taboo. But that taboo has not translated into pressure against possession. In recent years, the diverging fates of countries that gave up nuclear weapons and those that kept them have become visible enough to shape other governments’ calculations.
At the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine held roughly 1,900 strategic warheads on its territory, the world’s third-largest stockpile at the time. It gave them up under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, receiving security assurances from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia. In 2022, Russia, one of the guarantors, invaded. Five days before the invasion, President Volodymyr Zelensky told an international conference that the assurances tied to giving up nuclear weapons had not held.
To be precise, Ukraine never actually held launch authority over those warheads, and the Budapest Memorandum was not legally binding. Libya, which abandoned its nuclear program in 2003, saw the Gaddafi government fall eight years later, not immediately, so “giving up nuclear weapons caused the fall” is an oversimplified claim as a matter of fact.
Even so, the simplified narrative carries real weight. North Korea has repeatedly invoked “Libya’s miserable fate” to justify continuing its nuclear program, and at its 2026 party congress declared its nuclear-armed status “irreversible and permanent.” The eight-year gap between Libya’s disarmament and its government’s collapse carries little force against that perception.
And in 2026, Iran, long suspected of pursuing nuclear weapons through uranium enrichment, saw its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei killed in U.S. and Israeli strikes, following an earlier attack on its nuclear facilities the previous year. South Korea has reportedly dropped its longstanding policy of prioritizing North Korean denuclearization this month. The belief that possession brings protection and disarmament brings vulnerability is no longer confined to North Korea’s own messaging.
Deterrence Has an Undefeated Record, Which Is Not the Same as a Guarantee
The debate over nuclear deterrence often comes down to how the same set of facts gets interpreted. No two nuclear-armed major powers have fought a full-scale war against each other since 1945. Whether that is attributable to nuclear weapons alone is itself contested, since conventional forces, alliances, and economic interdependence have all been at work simultaneously.
Deterrence theory reads this as evidence that mutually assured destruction has worked: when both sides can guarantee the other’s destruction, neither strikes first. On this view, the U.S. and Soviet Union avoided direct full-scale war even while clashing by proxy in Korea and Vietnam because of this balance.
Abolitionist arguments read the same history as a string of close calls survived by luck. During the Cuban Missile Crisis and several Cold War false-alarm incidents, individual judgment calls by people on the ground are known to have averted nuclear launches. On this reading, deterrence did not “work” so much as human judgment and chance repeatedly caught it as it nearly failed.
What deterrence has clearly not prevented is also observable. Proxy wars have continued, and limited clashes between nuclear-armed states, such as between India and Pakistan, have occurred. In Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, nuclear signaling is widely believed to be one reason NATO members have been cautious about direct intervention, and that signaling has become routine, from Russia’s 2024 nuclear doctrine revision to a large-scale nuclear exercise in May 2026.
Deterrence is a system that looks like it is working right up until the moment it fails, and the first failure would mean damage on a civilizational scale rather than the scale of a single city. A record of having worked so far is not a guarantee that it will keep working.
Drones and AI Are Changing What Nuclear Weapons Are Actually For
Ukraine’s battlefield also illustrates how nuclear weapons are becoming less relevant to who actually wins a war. What has shaped the fighting has been inexpensive drones, backed by information warfare and electronic warfare, not nuclear weapons.
Russia, which holds one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, has been unable to translate that arsenal into battlefield advantage, and has instead ground through a war of attrition fought with drones and artillery shells. Nuclear weapons can serve as an umbrella that deters outside intervention at the point of invasion, but they are not a weapon that wins the war itself. That asymmetry is eroding part of the assumption that possessing nuclear weapons equals safety.
At the same time, new technology is not working only to reduce nuclear risk. AI-assisted early warning and target selection are compressing decision time, and combined with hypersonic weapons and missile defense, they intensify the pressure to “strike first or be neutralized.” The danger of a launch decision based on bad information runs in a direct line from Cold War-era false alarms.
In short, technological change is cutting the military relevance of nuclear weapons while simultaneously raising the risk of accidents and miscalculation, pulling in two directions at once. Whether nuclear weapons can be kept bound as “the weapon that is never used” is a question this new environment will test directly.
Japan Is Carrying Two Obligations at Once, Not Contradicting Itself
Japan’s position is less a simple self-contradiction than the coexistence of two obligations: the long-term goal of nuclear abolition and the immediate demands of security. This year’s ceremony made that intersection explicit. The mayor called for joining the TPNW; the prime minister spoke of upholding the three non-nuclear principles and strengthening the NPT regime. On the same plaza, calls for abolition stood alongside a realist case built on the nuclear umbrella.
The government’s position has a factual basis. China continues expanding its nuclear forces, North Korea has declared its arsenal “irreversible,” and Russia has normalized nuclear signaling. In this environment, the government’s consistent argument is that giving up U.S. extended deterrence would undermine Japan’s security, and that joining the prohibition treaty would send the wrong message about the legitimacy of deterrence.
At the same time, the explanation for not even attending as an observer, short of becoming a state party, has grown harder to sustain year by year. Nihon Hidankyo’s 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in recognition of how hibakusha testimony has helped sustain the nuclear taboo, has only sharpened that question.
This past July, Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said that “no country can secure its own security alone unless it debates nuclear issues without taboos,” prompting a protest statement from 32 hibakusha and related organizations. The tension between deepening reliance on the nuclear umbrella and Japan’s voice as the only country attacked with nuclear weapons is intensifying.
This is not a binary choice between joining and betrayal. Germany and Norway, both under the same nuclear umbrella, have attended TPNW states parties meetings as observers without becoming members. Whether Japan follows that path is not a question of abandoning deterrence, but of where it chooses to use its voice as the nation that experienced the bomb.
The Arms Control Gap Leaves Room for Steps Short of Full Abolition
2026 may be remembered as a year when several of the frameworks that sustained nuclear arms control fell away at once. Short of the binary choice between abolition and the status quo, there is a real gap that needs filling.
In February, the U.S.-Russia New START treaty expired with no successor in place. That removed not only the legal limits on each side’s deployed strategic forces but also the mutual inspection regime and the official data it produced. The NPT Review Conference, which ran through May, ended without an outcome document for the third consecutive cycle.
The next framework will not be a simple U.S.-Russia bilateral matter. The United States wants China included; China is wary of entering the same reduction framework while its stockpile remains far smaller; and Russia refuses to separate arms talks from the war in Ukraine. With the three sides’ starting positions this far apart, the groundwork for negotiation has not been laid.
Even so, practical options remain between full abolition and the current standoff: turning Russia’s stated cap on deployed numbers into a mutual understanding, rebuilding crisis communication channels, lowering alert postures, and agreeing to keep AI out of launch decisions. Each of these would reduce the risk of accident and miscalculation even from the standpoint of a government committed to keeping deterrence.
Can the World Keep Nuclear Weapons as “The Weapon That Is Never Used”
Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only two instances in human history in which nuclear weapons were used in war. Radiation exposure from nuclear testing reaches far beyond those two cities, from the Marshall Islands to Semipalatinsk in the former Soviet Union, but what happens when a nuclear weapon detonates over a city is something humanity knows only through what happened in those two places.
The nuclear taboo that experience helped create is thought to be part of what has sustained 81 years of non-use. It has not, however, stopped countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. Each individual government’s calculation in favor of nuclear-backed security can look rational on its own terms. Add them together, and the result is the world as it stands today: roughly 12,000 warheads and a widening gap in arms control.
Seeking safety through nuclear weapons while accepting the risk of being destroyed by them is a balance that has held for 81 years. Whether to keep maintaining it as is, or to look for a path that lowers the risk one step at a time, remains an open question, one that carries the same weight as the question of who will keep telling the story once the hibakusha, whose average age has now passed 86, are no longer here to tell it themselves.
Reference Links
- Increasing focus on nuclear weapons amid heightened escalation risks｜SIPRI
- New START Expires As U.S. Urges ‘Modernized’ Treaty｜Arms Control Association
- Ukraine, Nuclear Weapons, and Security Assurances at a Glance｜Arms Control Association
