On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. local time, the first atomic bomb used in warfare exploded over Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, a second atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki. Historians and pundits continue to debate the utility and morality of this launching of the “nuclear age.”
No one was sure ahead of time what the bombs’ impact would be. Within a week of the second drop, Japan had surrendered, its emperor announcing the end of the war over the radio. At least 100,000 mostly civilian deaths occurred during the first few days after the attacks. Over the next months, some survivors developed mysterious sets of sometimes lethal symptoms. These got grouped into a generic category, “radiation sickness.” Longer term, cancer rates among survivors remained higher than among non-exposed populations, with leukemia deaths peaking several years after exposure, and deaths from cancerous tumors, “solid cancers,” showing up later.
In 1945, if Americans thought at all about the implications of nuclear warfare, their musings were likely tinged with relief that this costly, horrific war was finally over. Surviving soldiers and sailors could begin returning home; families could begin reconstituting peacetime lives. Those who’d lost loved ones during the war could mourn, console each other, gain some sort of closure. Few outside the scientific community were ready to consider what a nuclear-armed and/or nuclear-enabled world might become.
As the longer-term damage of nuclear radiation became clearer, public opinion changed. John Hersey’s lengthy article about the bomb’s impact on Hiroshima was important in advancing the transition. Hersey had spent several weeks in the springtime of 1946 interviewing A-bomb survivors in person. The resulting article filled the entire August 31, 1946 issue of The New Yorker. His piece was widely disseminated via print and radio. It was published in book form as Hiroshima. Hersey provided extensive profiles of six survivors: a personnel clerk, a private clinic doctor, a tailor’s widow who was mother to two young children, a German Jesuit priest, a Red Cross Hospital surgeon, and a Japanese born Methodist pastor, Kiyoshi Tanimoto. Hersey’s writing captured the human toll of the bombing in ways that photos, films, and statistics had not. One scene that especially moved me, generations later, was an interaction between Pastor Tanimoto and a dying neighbor:
“After five days of ministering to the wounded in [Asano] park, Mr. Tanimoto returned to his parsonage… While he was at work, a Miss Tanaka came and said that her father had been asking for him. Mr. Tanimoto had reason to hate her father, the retired shipping company official who, …[j]ust before the bombing, had said openly to several people that Mr. Tanimoto was a spy for the Americans. At the moment of the bombing, Mr. Tanaka had … received serious flash burns, but was able to walk home. He took refuge in his Neighborhood Association shelter and from there tried hard to get medical aid. He expected all the doctors of Hiroshima to come to him, because he was so rich and so famous for giving his money away. … Now he was very weak and knew he was going to die. He was willing to be comforted by any religion.
Mr. Tanimoto went to help him. …The old man smelled very bad, and he moaned constantly. He seemed to recognize Mr. Tanimoto. Standing at the shelter stairway to get light, Mr. Tanimoto read loudly from a Japanese language pocket Bible. … Mr. Tanaka died as Mr. Tanimoto read the psalm.”
When World War II ended, the U.S. had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, but this ascendancy did not last long. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), using its own technology plus information from spies, developed its nuclear capacity and successfully detonated an atomic bomb in August, 1949. The nuclear arms race was on. It has not yet ended.
In December of 1953, U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a speech at the United Nations lamenting the increasingly expensive nuclear arms race and its potential for widespread harm. He suggested the possibility of peaceful uses for atomic energy. In this “Atoms for Peace” speech, Eisenhower urged the development and advancement of civilian uses for atomic energy. His talk was part of the effort that eventually led to the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1957.
At the time Eisenhower gave his talk, the USSR had constructed the world’s first nuclear power plant in Obninsk, the “science city.” Completed in 1951, the plant was connected to the electric power grid in 1954. The first nuclear plant in the U.S. came online in 1958 in Pennsylvania. Since then, enthusiasm for nuclear energy has waxed and waned. Three highly publicized nuclear power plant disasters—Three Mile Island in the U.S. in 1979, Chernobyl in the then USSR in 1986, and Fukushima in Japan in 2011—have slowed or reversed the impetus toward wider use of civilian nuclear energy. Several countries who formerly used nuclear reactors have phased them out. Australia and Ireland now explicitly forbid nuclear power plants.
As of 2026, there are eight acknowledged nuclear-armed nations: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom (England), France, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. It is widely supposed that Israel possesses nuclear arms, though Israel does not explicitly admit it. The current conflict between the United States and Iran is characterized in part as an effort to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Also as of 2026, per the trade group world-nuclear.org, civilian nuclear power produces about 10% of global electricity from over 400 reactors in 31 countries. (At its maximum, prior to both Fukushima and the increasing use of renewables, nuclear energy had produced about 17% of the world’s electricity.) Though the U.S. has the largest capacity, it is France that generates the highest proportion of its electric power through nuclear energy—65%.
By this year’s anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, nearly all of its survivors will have died, either from radiation-related illnesses or from old age. Some of the few living hibakusha continue to advocate for the abolition of nuclear weapons, though the memory of their long ago catastrophe often gets sidelined by more current global problems.
Yet the “nuclear genie” unleashed in 1945 cannot be put back in the bottle. The potential for both military and civilian uses of nuclear energy will be with us for at least as long as humans exist on earth. Will we come of nuclear age in time to use nuclear energy wisely?
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