Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Retrospect and Prospect

In August 1945, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic weapons were used for the first time. About 100,000 people died instantly; by the end of the year some 200,000 were dead, and many thousands since have died of leukaemia and other malignant diseases.
A distinguished group of contributors look back at these events and their consequences, and forward to the prospects of ridding the world of the 45,000 nuclear weapons now in the stockpiles. They present evidence that Japan was negotiating for peace well before the bombings, which were as much the start of the East-West Cold War as the end of the Second World War.
Far from preventing war, the existence of nuclear weapons came close to causing war at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and has led to war by proxy between East and West in their client states in the developing world. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting economic crisis, there is concern that fissile material or even nuclear weapons could be obtained illicitly by 'rogue' governments or terrorist groups.
There is a close relationship between civil nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki type is freely available, and ample supplies of plutonium are generated in nuclear reactors every year - not least in Japan itself.
Prevention of nuclear war requires a nuclear-weapon-free world. The contributors to this volume have been in the forefront of efforts to achieve this, including the attempt to have the use and threat of nuclear weapons declared illegal by the International Court of Justice. They advocate the need for a Convention, backed by a resolution of the UN Security Council, declaring the testing, production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons illegal, and call for security to be redefined in order to address the problems of North-South confrontation and achieve a genuinely peaceful world order.