Melissa Parke is Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. She formerly worked for the United Nations in Gaza, Kosovo, New York and Lebanon and served as Australia’s Minister for International Development.
The 80th anniversary of the United States’ nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan’s surrender in 1945 have produced an understandable wave of media commentary. What is less understandable is how many of these articles unthinkingly repeat the myth that the atomic bombings ended the Second World War, thereby implying some positive aspect to the use of nuclear weapons.
In the immediate aftermath of Japan’s capitulation, announced by Emperor Hirohito on August 15, six days after the attack on Nagasaki, American leaders quickly asserted that the bombs had ended the war, and there was a concerted and successful propaganda effort to embed this narrative in political and public consciousness.
Speaking after the war, the director of the Manhattan Project that developed the bomb, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, said: “While they brought death and destruction on a horrifying scale, they averted even greater losses— American, English, and Japanese.
This assertion enables the U.S. to avoid addressing the question of why a weapon that was created for use against Germany, which the U.S. knew by 1943 was not developing a nuclear bomb, was then used against Japan when it was known to be nearly ready to surrender.
We now know from Japanese historical records that the primary reason for Japan’s surrender was the Soviet Union’s entry into the war against Japan on August 8. The leadership’s fear was that if Soviet forces invaded Japan, they would impose a communist system in areas they came to control. An American occupation, on the other hand, was seen as likely to be less of a threat to their interests, which proved to be an accurate assumption.
When, just a few hours before the bombing of Nagasaki, the USSR, which had signed a nonaggression pact with Japan in 1941, declared war and attacked Japanese forces in northeast China, it was a profound shock that helped dispel any remaining doubts among Japanese generals about surrendering.
On the U.S. side, crucially for those who took the decision to drop the bombs on Japan and those who have endorsed it to this day, claiming that it “saved many more lives” and brought about the end of World War II enables them to avoid having to confront the inhumane nature of these weapons and their knowing use against hundreds of thousands of civilians, which, even by the standards of the time, was recognized as a potential war crime.
At this year’s 80th commemorations, the survivors of the bombings—the hibakusha—called again for nuclear weapons to be abolished. Again, the nuclear-armed states and their allies who support the use of nuclear weapons—which ironically include Japan—have ignored them.
These countries prefer to talk in vague, abstract terms about how nuclear weapons provide deterrence and security, rather than confronting the true reality of nuclear weapons. We know from the nuclear bombings of New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in 1945 and the more than 2,000 nuclear weapons test explosions carried out by nuclear-armed states around the world since that they have caused catastrophic ongoing harm to humans and the environment over long periods of time and across vast distances. And, as the only weapons ever created by humans that have the capacity to destroy all complex life on earth, nuclear weapons pose a constant existential threat to humanity and the planet every moment they continue to exist.
Currently, the risk that nuclear weapons could be used again, by design or accident, is at its most acute, with nuclear-armed countries involved in major conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, in which threats to use nuclear weapons have been made, armed clashes between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, as well as heightened nuclear tensions on the Korean Peninsula. The increasing incorporation of AI into military command and control systems is adding to the danger.
In light of this, politicians and journalists, particularly, have a responsibility to avoid reinforcing the myth of what ended World War II. Journalists, instead of accepting it at face value when politicians and other advocates for nuclear weapons use this myth, should challenge it.
In 2025, continuing to imbue the use of nuclear weapons with the mythical power to end a protracted war in one fell swoop helps to justify the continuing possession of even more powerful weapons by the U.S., Russia, and the other seven nuclear-armed states, and helps motivate their opposition to the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
The TPNW came into force in 2021, and to date, half of all countries have either signed or ratified it. The treaty provides a pathway under international law for getting rid of these weapons of total destruction and is the only bright spot in an otherwise bleak outlook for multilateralism and disarmament.
For the sake of our future, it is time this myth about the past is discarded, along with the flawed and dangerous deterrence doctrine it spawned, so we can focus on making a world without nuclear weapons a reality.
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