Launching 'Hiroshima Watch'

Remarks at Press Conference launching Hiroshima Watch, Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, Tokyo/Online, 5 August 2024

The Hiroshima Prefecture and Governor Yuzaki are to be warmly commended for this Hiroshima Watch initiative, the latest in a long line of initiatives by the Governor and Prefecture in recent years designed to remind the world of the horrors of nuclear weapons – to get both policymakers and publics not just to vaguely nod their heads but to really understand:

• that these are the most indiscriminately inhumane weapons ever devised
• that any significant exchange of nuclear weapons would not just be catastrophic for the millions immediately killed and injured, but threaten the existence of life on this planet as we know it, and
• that complacency is not an option: the risk of their use, either deliberately or accidentally, as a result of human or system error or miscalculation, is growing with each passing year - as the security environment in our region and the wider world, grows ever more fragile and volatile

Hiroshima has a critical role continuing role to play in telling this story. When Hiroshima speaks, the world listens.

• Because of the horror that befell its people on that terrible morning, 79 years ago, when the hands of that famous wrist-watch froze at 8.15.
• And because Hiroshima is a symbol not only of despair, but of hope -- hope for a safer and saner nuclear-free world.

The quality of the research and analysis being carried out by the Prefecture staff and the experts who advise it – as embodied in the annual Hiroshima Report - has long been first-class.

But there was a feeling among those of us, both from Japan and internationally, who participate in the annual Hiroshima Roundtable, convened by the Govermor and chaired by Professor Fujiwara, that we needed to do more to sharpen the quality of our advocacy – to get into the heads of policy makers, and those who influence them, that the risks of another nuclear holocaust are now shockingly real.

So what we decided to do, and what we are now doing with this first Hiroshima Watch publication, is to narrow the focus and raise the intensity of our advocacy efforts, to draw the world’s attention to the most alarming recent developments and describe, succinctly, the necessary policy responses.

There are a great many issues of concern, involving many different countries who are falling short in their policy responses in many different ways, and these are spelt out in detail in the latest 240-page Hiroshima Report. But the ones that currently cry out – shriek out – for attention are the three areas of alarming recent backsliding identified in our first Hiroshima Watch statement:

• the increased reliance on nuclear weapons in too many countries’ national security policies (not only the nuclear armed states, but those like yours and mine – Japan and Australia – who like to believe that we are protected by an allied nuclear umbrella)
• the very real risk of significant increase in the number, types and deployment of nuclear weapons
• the increasing fragility of the treaty, and global norm against testing of nuclear weapons and the very real risk of those tests restarting – with all that implies for the resumption of nuclear arms racing.

There has been plenty of talk by political leaders about the dangers of nuclear weapons, with some welcome reaffirmation of the Reagan-Gorbachev statement that ‘a nuclear war can never be won, and must never be fought’.

But there is a big, and in fact growing, gap between the rhetoric and the reality. Our political leaders talk the talk, but they don’t walk the walk.

It’s not going to be easy to get them to change. But if there is any voice of sanity and decency that has a chance of being heard in high places, it is the voice of Hiroshima. That’s why we are publishing Hiroshima Watch, and I hope and believe it will make a difference.