The use of two atomic bombs at the end of World War II transformed the nature of warfare in frightening ways. The new weapons leveled cities in a single stroke and caused hundreds of thousands of casualties. During the Cold War, a small group of countries developed ever bigger bombs that dwarfed the power of the original ones. Testing displaced local, often indigenous, people and produced widespread and long-lasting radioactive contamination that continues to affect humans and the environment today. While states adopted treaties that limited testing and proliferation and created regional nuclear-weapon-free zones, their response was incomplete. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, progress slowed dramatically.
A Survivor's Story: Witness to the Hiroshima bombing will visit HLS
On Oct. 8, Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and an advocate for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), will visit Harvard Law School to share her experience as a witness to the bombing of Hiroshima and her lifelong work as a nuclear disarmament advocate. Harvard Law Lecturer Bonnie Docherty will also discuss the latest developments concerning the treaty banning nuclear weapons.
In 2010, opponents of nuclear weapons began to reframe the debate as a humanitarian, rather than primarily a national security issue. By transcending national borders, this approach motivated non-nuclear armed states to act collectively to advance nuclear disarmament. In December 2016, the UN General Assembly mandated negotiation of a new treaty. On July 7, 2017, states voted 122 to 1, with one abstention, to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a global civil society coalition, served as a driving force in spotlighting the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and pushing states toward a ban. During the negotiations, the HLS International Human Rights Clinic provided legal and advocacy support to ICAN, successfully arguing for provisions to both prevent and remediate human and environmental harm. In recognition of its leadership, ICAN received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.
This exhibition reflects on the past while heralding the prospect of a brighter future. It traces the history of nuclear weapons from the devastation of early use and testing to the global effort to eliminate these horrific weapons of mass destruction. At a time when tensions among nuclear powers dominate the media, it showcases an alternative, humanitarian path to achieving a nuclear-weapon-free world.
Credit: Berlyn Brixner/Los Alamos National Laboratory Read CaptionFireball from the Trinity Test, the world’s first nuclear explosion, New Mexico, July 16, 1945. The U.S. Army detonated this weapon, which released energy equivalent to 19 kilotons of TNT, in the Jornada del Muerto desert. The test marked the dawn of a second revolution in warfare, the first being the invention of gunpowder. Witnessing the explosion, Manhattan Project leader Robert Oppenheimer remembered a passage from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”Credit: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Read CaptionThe ruins of the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, now preserved as a memorial (see next photo), were almost all that remained of Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. This Japanese city, a military Hiroshima, a military command and communications center, had escaped earlier airstrikes, which made it a desirable site for measuring the impact of a new weapon. An estimated 140,000 people died from the bomb in 1945, and tens of thousands more suffered from long-term effects of radiation.Credit: Ari Beser Read CaptionKoko Kondo was an infant at the time of the attack. In 1955, on the American TV show “This Is Your Life,” she came face-to-face with Captain Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, which had dropped the bomb. She later recalled, “I was so angry to that point I thought of all the things I could do to get revenge. When I saw him, he had tears in his eyes. I realized then and there we were the same human heart.” Credit: Charles Levy, US government Read CaptionOn August 9, 1945, the United States dropped a second, plutonium bomb on the hilly port city of Nagasaki, which had once been Japan’s gateway to the West. The bomb detonated near the Catholic Urakami Cathedral and killed 74,000 people by the end of 1945. Japan surrendered six days later.Credit: U.S. Government Read CaptionResidents leaving Bikini Atoll before a nuclear test, Marshall Islands, March 7, 1946. Despite the devastation caused by the use of nuclear weapons in Japan, countries continued to develop them during the Cold War. To clear the way for nuclear testing, the US Navy relocated 161 people from Bikini to another Pacific atoll 120 miles away. Although the displaced persons were told they could eventually return to their homeland, a series of detonations vaporized three of Bikini’s islands and left the rest uninhabitable.Credit: U.S. Department of Energy Read CaptionThe 1954 Castle Bravo test was the most powerful of the 67 tests the United States conducted in the Marshall Islands, then a US trust territory, between 1946 and 1958. This hydrogen bomb released 1,000 times more force than the uranium bomb used in Hiroshima. Islanders who witnessed the attack from more than a hundred miles away still remember the blinding red sky and falling radioactive ash.Credit: U.S. Defense Special Weapons Agency Read CaptionRunit Dome, on Enewetak Atoll of the Marshall Islands, covers 84,000 cubic meters of radioactive soil, which were buried in a US nuclear test crater in the late 1970s. People walking on the surface in this photograph provide a sense of scale. Designed to be temporary, the facility is unlined, raising concerns that it may leak waste into the Pacific Ocean.Credit: Ari Beser Read CaptionAbacca Anjain-Maddison was born on Rongelap, a Marshall Islands atoll heavily contaminated by fallout from the Bikini tests. A regional civil society leader, she advocated strongly for obligations to address the human and environmental harm caused by nuclear weapons use and testing, and urged Pacific states to adopt the final Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.Credit: Clare Conboy Read CaptionThe International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is a global coalition of nongovernmental organizations from more than 100 countries. Its campaigners worked on many fronts during the negotiations of the TPNW. Actions, such as this one at the UN in 2017, raised public awareness of the humanitarian threat posed by nuclear weapons and the UN process to ban them.Credit: Ari Beser Read CaptionThrough legal research and advocacy in partnership with ICAN, the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic helped achieve the inclusion of victim assistance and environmental remediation obligations in the final treaty. Docherty sits with members of civil society organizations from Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands, who also made interventions at this session of the TPNW negotiations.Credit: Clare Conboy Read CaptionThe adoption of the TPNW by 122 states on July 7, 2017, marked the culmination of a movement that began in 2010 when countries, civil society, and international organizations shifted the focus of the nuclear weapons debate from national security to humanitarian concerns. The TPNW makes nuclear weapons illegal as well as immoral, closing a gap in the law governing weapons of mass destruction. Although the nuclear armed states chose not to participate in the negotiations, the treaty provides a pathway for them to join.Credit: ICAN/Darren Ornitz Photography Read CaptionThe TPNW bans nuclear weapons-related activities, including production, possession, testing, and use. It lays out safeguards to prevent the creation of new nuclear arms and to ensure the elimination of existing ones. It also contains positive obligations on victim assistance and environmental remediation. The treaty, which opened for signature on September 20, 2017, will become binding law once 50 countries have ratified it.Credit: Ari Beser Read CaptionA torchlight parade on on December 10, 2017, to celebrate the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons receiving the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. ICAN was recognized for “its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences” of nuclear weapons and for “its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.” The adoption of the TPNW and the award that followed attest to the power of ordinary people to join together to create global change.Credit: Jo Straube Read CaptionIn her Nobel Peace Prize address on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Setsuko Thurlow called for continued work toward a nuclear-weapon-free world. She exhorted, “To all in this hall and all listening around the world, I repeat those words that I heard called to me in the ruins of Hiroshima: ‘Don't give up! Keep pushing! See the light? Crawl towards it.’”
