Leaders of the group of atomic bomb survivors awarded the Nobel Peace Prize recently warned on Saturday that risk of nuclear war was rising, renewing their call to abolish nuclear weapons. “The international situation is getting progressively worse, and now wars are being waged as countries threaten the use of nuclear weapons,” said Shigemitsu Tanaka, a survivor of the 1945 US bombing of Nagasaki and co-head of the Nihon Hidankyo group.
There is every reason for international community to hear to the voice of those who were speaking on grave threat on the basis of their personal experience of devastation they witnessed because of the nuclear holocaust. The two bombs dropped on Japan by the US killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people and their effects are still being felt today. In the years that followed, many of survivors faced leukemia, cancer and other terrible side effects of radiation. The threat about which survivors are trying to sensitise the world is not imaginary as on different occasions formal and informal nuclear powers did hurl threats for their use. It is all the more worrying that there seems to be no genuine commitment to the cause of nuclear disarmament as nuclear powers are speedily increasing their stockpile of nuclear weapons. In South Asia, Pakistan has long been expressing its willingness to contribute its share in making the region safe but no progress has been made due to the Indian intransigence. It is time a non-discriminatory approach is adopted to the issue of nuclear non-proliferation in all regions of the globe.
