Zeynep ConkarOn a quiet summer morning in 1945, 13-year-old Terumi Tanaka was reading a book, completely unaware that, in the blink of an eye, a blinding light and searing fire would shatter his world forever.
“I first heard the loud roar of a flying bomber,” recalls Tanaka, then a first-year junior high student, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
“I stood up and went to the window to look at the sky… Then, a tremendous light spread out. Everything turned white. No sound, just light. I ran down the stairs and lay on the floor, covering my eyes and ears. After that, I lost consciousness.”
Eighty years ago today, the United States dropped the atomic bomb “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb, “Fat Man,” was detonated over Nagasaki.
Now 92 and a Nobel Peace Prize holder, Tanaka is one of the few remaining hibakusha: survivors of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945.
Three days before Tanaka’s account, Hiroshima suffered the same fate. To this day, these remain the only nuclear attacks ever carried out in the history of warfare.
Together, the two bombs: Little Boy and Fat Man killed about 250,000 people and left lifelong trauma for survivors, many of whom were silenced by radiation illnesses or social exclusion.
And yet, 80 years on, the United States has never apologised.
Worse, official narratives – including those from the United Nations – still fail to name the actor. “Atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” they say, as if the bombs dropped themselves.
It’s a linguistic trick that reflects a broader refusal to reckon with what many experts today argue was not only an act of mass murder, but a war crime.
Committing crimes with impunity
Unsurprisingly, the atomic bombings were never brought before a court, as the US was the perpetrator.
After World War II, Washington sat as both judge and victor at the Tokyo Trials, while its own actions, including the firebombing of Tokyo and the use of nuclear weapons, escaped scrutiny.
A growing body of legal scholarship, including former UN officials, has argued that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would constitute war crimes under today’s legal standards.
Experts in international law and history note that the Hiroshima bombing prioritised mass civilian deaths, with the destruction of military targets serving as a secondary justification.
Today, such an act would be considered a grave violation of international humanitarian law, breaching the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution as codified in the Protocol.
Analyses by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) have also affirmed that nuclear weapons would violate these principles.
While these laws were codified after 1945, many legal scholars argue the bombings already defied the norms of warfare at the time, making them retroactively identifiable as war crimes.
“If Germany or Japan had developed and used atomic bombs in World War II against the inhabited cities of the victors, the war crimes trials held in Nuremberg or Tokyo would certainly have investigated, and in all probability, condemned, the use of this weapon, and would have punished the officials responsible as war criminals…” says Professor Richard Falk, former UN special rapporteur on human rights.
What makes the case even more dreadful is the US’s own justification: to force Japan’s surrender and “save lives,” as President Harry Truman claimed at the time.
But this narrative has long been contested by historians who argued Japan was already on the brink of surrender and that the Soviet entry into the war would have sealed it.
Shaping memory through power
An expert from Hiroshima Peace Institute, Shota Moriue agrees.
“The atomic bombing reduced the city of Hiroshima to ashes. People had lost everything - their homes, their work, their food and above all, their families and friends,” Moriue tells TRT World.
“Across Japan, more than 100 cities were devastated by the US air raids. But the scale and destruction in Hiroshima were unprecedented.”
In Nagasaki alone, around 70,000 people died in the five months that followed the bombing, suffering slow, painful deaths from burns, radiation sickness, and trauma.
The US has managed to control the global narrative about the bombings through media and education as well as its geopolitical influence for a while. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have long been taught in American classrooms as a strategic decision that ended the war.
Films, textbooks, and commemorations often left out the human cost, or worse, justified it.
This ability to define what counts as justice, what is labelled a crime, and who is held accountable is a form of privilege, one that shielded Washington in 1945 and has enabled Israel to bomb Gaza with impunity in 2025.
The decision to use the bombs was also driven by deeply racist and dehumanising attitudes toward the Japanese. They were routinely portrayed as “yellow vermin,” “snarling rats,” or “monkeys.”
This level of dehumanisation was so pervasive that the mutilation of Japanese soldiers became a common practice among Allied troops.
Similar language is used for Palestinians who are referred to as Amalek by the Zionists. Amalek is a “biblical enemy of the Israelites”, described in the Hebrew Bible as a nation that attacked them after the Exodus from Egypt.
“What happened to the Japanese in World War II was also ethnic cleansing, genocide, and a war crime; not only the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also the destruction of Tokyo. The Japanese went through hell, and we are going through hell, too,” says Waleed Ali Siam, Palestinian Ambassador to Japan.
Anyone who believes Israel is simply fighting Hamas doesn’t understand the status quo, he adds.
“Israel is ethnically cleansing the Palestinians; it is committing genocide in Palestine,” he tells TRT World.
History, unfortunately, repeats itself, as he puts it.
What has fallen on Gaza since 2003 until today is estimated to be over 90,000 tonnes of bombs. The radiation from these bombs exceeds that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the effects today are perhaps six or seven times worse than those bombings, according to him.
Refusing silence
But both in Gaza and in Hiroshima-Nagasaki, survivors have refused silence.
Activists have spent decades speaking out. Anti-nuclear campaigns, particularly led by hibakusha, led to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in 2017.
Younger generations, particularly in the Global South, are increasingly questioning the dominant Western narratives of “just wars” and “necessary violence.”
But none of that changes the fact that, at every anniversary, the US remains silent. No apology. No acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Just the same quiet implication that the ends justified the means and that the civilian lives lost were the unfortunate price of victory.
“First and foremost, Hiroshima reminds us of the unimaginable human cost of nuclear warfare. The deaths, injuries and long-term suffering were not abstract statistics. They were children, parents, workers and students,” Moriue says.
“The bomb shattered lives, families and generations to come,” he adds.
As the last survivors like Tanaka grow older, the risk is forgetting the injustice. To remember Hiroshima honestly is not just to mourn. It is to resist similar injustices.
“This is a city that made a deliberate choice not to dwell on revenge or anger, but to focus on remembrance, healing and diplomacy,” says Moriue.
“In doing so, Hiroshima has become a living message to the world. No more Hiroshima.”
