Tomorrow marks the 67th anniversary of an event that has changed the world perhaps more than any other, when on Aug 6, 1945 a United States army plane dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb killed an estimated 80,000 people immediately and the horrible effects of the radiation from the explosion are still with us today. The event is past the memory of the great majority of people alive, but to a large extent the incredible destruction unleashed that day has shaped modern history and continues to do so. While some believe that the use of the bomb was necessary to end World War Two in the Pacific, everyone knows that such weapons must never be used again.
Yet today there are thousands of thermonuclear bombs which are much more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and shortly later on Nagasaki, fitted onto guided missiles in fortified shelters around the world, most of them under the control of the US and Russia.
A key component of the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), aside from the unsuccessful aim of keeping the possession of nuclear weapons from spreading beyond the original five nuclear-armed states, was that these states must take progressive steps to disarm until the day comes when there are no more nuclear weapons in the world. But although the US and Russia have each decommissioned thousands of nuclear warheads, this part of the NPT is a distant and some say an impossible dream.
As the academic and writer Noam Chomsky points out in a recent opinion piece (http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10660-in-hiroshimas-shadow), this year also marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, when in October 1962 US armed forces were at their highest state of readiness ever and Soviet field commanders in Cuba were prepared to use battlefield nuclear weapons to defend the island if it was invaded. US President John F Kennedy took Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev ''right to the brink of nuclear war'', as described by US Gen David Burchinal, but Kennedy found he ''had no stomach for it'', as did Kruschev.
There have been other very close calls, including the confrontations between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, but fortunately the men with the power to make this terrible decision have thus far also found themselves without the stomach for it.
It can be argued that the nuclear deterrent may have been instrumental in preventing a possible World War III during the Cold War, but the political realities today make the value of the deterrent far less than its cost.
That was the message at the annual International Symposium for Peace held on July 28 in Hiroshima, which was attended by policy and nuclear weapons experts from Japan, China and the United States.
In his keynote speech at the symposium, Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute and co-founder of Global Zero, said that mutual nuclear deterrence is no longer a cornerstone of the US-Russian security relationship. He added that the US nuclear arsenal did nothing to deter the Sept 11, 2011 terrorist attacks in New York and were useless in responding to them.
Mr Blair called for the following three steps toward the total elimination of nuclear weapons: One, the United States and Russia should reduce their nuclear stockpiles by 80% over the next 10 years, down from 5,000 each today to 900.
Second, they should agree to take all of their strategic missiles off launch-ready alert status, so that they cannot be fired quickly.
Third, the United States and Russia should convene the first multilateral negotiations in history among all the nuclear weapons countries and key non-nuclear countries to cap, freeze and reduce nuclear arsenals of all nuclear countries with a view to ultimately eliminating them.
Another expert at the symposium, Shen Dingli, a professor of international politics at Fudan University in China, said: ''If the United States and Russia move forward, it will make a good case for medium nuclear states like China to be engaged in the reduction process.''
With the current state of distrust in the world it is probably not possible at this time to totally eliminate nuclear weapons. That does not mean that we should stop working toward the goal and the day when it is within our reach.