‘What is war for?’ The need for a child’s-eye view of the nuclear age

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has established a virtual Children’s Peace Memorial, giving voice and presence to the nearly 40,000 young lives silenced on and after Aug. 6 and 9, 1945. 

The Memorial also documents the struggles and suffering of the children who survived, whether briefly, as in the famous case of Sasaki Sadako, who succumbed to leukemia in 1955, aged 12, after folding a thousand paper cranes, traditional Japanese symbols of hope and peace, or into old age, as in the celebrated case of Setsuko Thurlow. A Canadian citizen since the 1950s, Thurlow accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 on behalf of ICAN for its role in achieving the recently adopted UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), opposed only by the nine nuclear-armed states and their allies and accomplices (including, alas, her native and adopted homelands). 

Schoolmates, Teachers Remembered 

In hundreds of talks around the world, Setsuko has displayed a banner with the names of 351 of her schoolmates and teachers killed in Hiroshima. “As I show this to you,” she urges, “I want you to feel and imagine that each name here represents an individual human being, a real person who was loved by someone and was engaged in his or her life until 8:15 that morning.” 

And she always singles a special ‘someone’ out: “Whenever I remember Hiroshima, the first image that comes to mind is of my four-year-old nephew, Eiji – his little body transformed into an unrecognizable melted chunk of flesh.” 

The Memorial features a sphere of gracefully circling cranes, each unfolding, when clicked on, to tell a unique story: in the case of my visit, the story of Toshiko Fujimoro, killed in Hiroshima at the same age, 13, as Setsuko. “A surviving classmate,” the site records, saw her “in the Motoyasugawa River soon after the attack, clutching some floating wood” – one of thousands of schoolchildren who unavailingly plunged their burning bodies into the city’s poisoned rivers. 

Acute Radiation Sickness 

In perhaps the most perverse irony of the atomic age, children’s capacity for growth – and, often, for recovery – becomes the vulnerability exploited by acute radiation sickness, the ‘black rain’ that fell from the sun-blotting Cloud. Devastation was also wreaked on the unborn, especially, as the Memorial documents, on foetuses two to four months ‘old’, “the period of intense brain development, with the greatest proliferation of neurons and their migration to the cerebral cortex.” 

Similarly unnatural radioactive deaths and tortures would be visited on predominantly Indigenous communities affected by Cold War nuclear testing, with many lands remaining uninhabitable; and for eight exhausting, overshadowed decades, human development has been blighted by the prospect of world-ending war with weapons massively more destructive – and sky-shrouding – than the ‘crude devices’ criminally dropped on Japan. 

‘Limited’ Nuclear War Talk Alarming

That we have survived this long is due far more to luck than judgment, and is thanks in large part to the influence and interventions of the anti-nuclear movement at crucial moments. To presume that we can continue at vast cost to wager our future on the ultimate mug’s game of ‘deterrence’ would be to retain an infantilizing faith in the Bomb as a protector rather than predator, an ‘umbrella’ rather than a threatening storm.

In 2024, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, an association of atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) campaigning for a nuclear-weapon-free world. At a Peace Prize Forum in Oslo in their honour, Dr. Manpreet Sethi, Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Air Power Studies in New Delhi, worried that with increasingly loose talk about ‘limited’ nuclear war “we are stumbling into some marshy lands where it will become extremely difficult to extricate ourselves.” 

Referring to a recent series of videos from UNICEF in which children ask “what is war for?” she reflected: “I think on this we all need to be children.” 

And stop kidding ourselves.

This article appeared in The Cape Breton Post: online, August 5, 2025, https://www.saltwire.com/cape-breton/opinion-cape-breton/commentary-what-is-war-for?itm_source=cape-breton; print edition, August 6, 2025.