It was a sweltering day last August when Valentina Urtan, a 30-year-old from Ukraine, sat in an auditorium in Nagasaki, Japan, listening to a survivor of the atomic bomb. The man flipped through black-and-white photographs from eight decades ago showing wrecked buildings and charred bodies. Some 70,000 people died from a single bomb, dropped by the United States on Aug. 9, 1945.
The photographs felt familiar to Ms. Urtan. They reminded her of cities in Ukraine that had been leveled by Russian warplanes and missiles. She wanted to get out of her chair, she said, and show images of that destruction to the people around her. The proof was right on her phone, in photos of her home region, Borodyanka, and alerts of air raids that had been flashing across its screen all morning.
These were reminders of a war in which President Vladimir Putin of Russia has repeatedly used the threat of a nuclear strike to try to cow the West. “It’s not the past for me,” Ms. Urtan wanted to tell them. “It’s actually happening right now.”
Today, nuclear war is mostly thought to be the stuff of history books: gruesome, uncomfortable and firmly in the past. But as nations’ nuclear stockpiles expand and the risk of a strike rises, a generation of young people like Ms. Urtan is waking up to the threat. In the halls of New England prep schools, students are gathering to re-energize the antinuclear movement. Medical students are learning to use their knowledge to educate the public about the growing danger. Young Japanese activists are questioning their lawmakers’ commitment to global disarmament, and the descendants of nuclear test survivors in places including the Marshall Islands and Kazakhstan are fighting for recognition — and to make sure testing never happens again.
And if not them, who? The adults who were children at the dawn of the atomic era are nearing the end of their lives, and there are now fewer than 100,000 officially recognized hibakusha, as Japanese A-bomb survivors are known, alive today. Last fall, when the grass-roots survivor movement Nihon Hidankyo won the Nobel Peace Prize for its struggle against the bomb, the hibakusha made a plea: When we are gone, they said, the next generation must carry on their fight.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear-armed nations never again used the weapons in war. But they have come close far too many times, restrained by fear, memory or sheer luck. The task now falls on young people to bring the devastating humanitarian toll these weapons would cause back into the global conversation before our luck runs out.
One afternoon in November at the Bishop’s School in San Diego, a projector clicked off, and the dozen or so high school students in Matthew Valji’s class on nuclear weapons sat silent, frozen in their seats. “The Day After,” the 1983 made-for-TV movie on a hypothetical thermonuclear war around the Great Plains, had just ended. The students had watched American cities and towns turn to ruin; bodies dropped into mass graves; and survivors stumbling through a wasteland, dying slow and painful deaths. In one scene, bodies wrapped in cloth lined a trench; in another, two survivors, their hair thinned, shared a quiet moment in a gym, scenes showing how much brutality the film put on prime time television.
“This is not just a movie,” Ben Brown, then a high school senior in the class, told me later. “That fictional world could become a reality in the press of one button.”
The film is mostly forgotten, but at one time it gave America nightmares, when it aired at a peak of the Cold War. The fear of nuclear annihilation had already “penetrated deeply” into the consciousness of American children, as the Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John E. Mack said less than two years earlier. By the spring of 1983, as a physician told a House committee, more than half of California teens thought a nuclear war would happen in their lifetime. (Surveys from elsewhere in the United States had findings nearly as dire.) That year, a few days before Thanksgiving, an estimated 100 million Americans watched that fear play out in “The Day After.”
Before its release, the nation’s largest teachers’ union warned that kids should not watch the movie without a parent. A debate swept the country over whether the film would force Americans to question the world’s growing nuclear arsenals or teach pacifism, handing the Soviets a win. In the end, the film helped awaken a generation.
By the time the students in San Diego watched the film 41 years later, they had studied classics like “Hiroshima,” John Hersey’s record of the atomic bomb’s aftermath, in Mr. Valji’s class. The challenge, Mr. Valji said, is not just explaining to students that nuclear weapons are bad; that much is intuitive from books and films like these. “The hardest part,” he said, “is explaining why it is still relevant.”
Like me, at 30, many young Americans today grew up in a time when the atomic bomb had almost completely faded from view. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the temperature cooled and arsenals shrank. The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 soon brought another fear — terrorism — to the fore of American life. But back in the 1980s, as Mr. Valji tells his students, the dread of these weapons was menacing.
It was the second-highest worry for American teens, worse only than the death of a parent, according to a landmark study published in 1988. In the Soviet Union, kids listed nuclear war as their greatest fear. Led by the physician Dr. Eric Chivian, the researchers spoke to children during the 1980s and filmed their responses in Brookline, Mass., and the Soviet Union.
Children in the United States on the nuclear threat in the early 1980s
Children in the Soviet Union
Eventually, those fears came to drive U.S. policy. “My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war,” President Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary after watching “The Day After.” Years later, he reportedly messaged the director of the film to say it was instrumental in talks leading to the 1987 treaty that eliminated a class of land-based cruise and ballistic missiles.
A similar awakening played out for the Bishop’s School students in San Diego in November. Many left the screening despondent, but they later discussed how it had changed their views. Mr. Valji said many went from seeing the bomb as a necessary evil to being wholly unnecessary. “These are things that we absolutely can change with sufficient political will,” Mr. Valji said. “But that will only come about if young people start to care about it.”
In March, Rishi Gurudevan stood in a cafe at the United Nations headquarters, wearing a spotted tie and navy blazer. Then a high school senior in New Hampshire, he was on edge; it was finals week. But he was at the U.N. anyway, representing Students for Nuclear Disarmament, an organization of high school and college students he founded to fight the threat of nuclear weapons.
He was there with other young activists to try to grow a movement. They met among a sea of diplomats and experts gathered for a conference on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which bans the development, testing and use of nuclear weapons. In 2017, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a Geneva-based campaign at the helm of today’s movement, led the charge to push the treaty through the U.N. More than 90 countries have since signed on, but none of the nine nuclear states have; nor has Japan, and at the conference in March, it didn’t participate as an observer.
Mr. Gurudevan wants to see his generation take to the streets and push through antinuclear legislation across the United States like the nuclear freeze movement did decades earlier. On June 12, 1982, a million people marched in Central Park to protest nuclear weapons, he reminded me.
Nuclear weapons are slowly coming back into people’s minds as the largest nuclear powers — Russia, the United States and China — spend billions to build new weapon systems, and as Mr. Putin leverages his country’s nuclear arsenal in his confrontation with the West. In Europe, leaders are debating the creation of their own nuclear umbrella, and officials in South Korea and Japan are warming to the idea of one day pursuing weapons of their own. Norway will soon require new buildings to have bomb shelters, and the U.N. disarmament office has even organized a multiyear program, supported by the Japanese government, that educates the next generation about nuclear issues and has brought young people like Ms. Urtan to Japan.
During the U.N. conference in March, a group of medical students sat in a church basement on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where Dr. Arthur Hale, then in his fourth year at Harvard Medical School, explained that if a nuclear weapon the size used on Hiroshima fell on Washington, an estimated 120,000 people would die, and 170,000 more would be injured. He then cited recent research on nuclear famine: Even a so-called limited nuclear war could kill enough crops that hundreds of millions of people could starve.
“These are just the things that you might want to have in your back pocket,” he told the other medical students.
The students met to learn how to use their medical expertise to educate the public about the pain inflicted by nuclear weapons and why, in the words of Dr. Bernard Lown, a founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, “modern medicine has nothing to offer, not even a token benefit, in the case of thermonuclear war.” They are carrying on the long tradition of physicians speaking out about the threat nuclear weapons pose to humans: The meeting was organized by the international physicians group, which was founded by American and Soviet doctors in 1980 and has affiliates in about 60 countries. It is widely credited with helping end the arms race once before.
The most potent warnings, of course, have come from survivors in Japan — voices that we will soon be able to hear only through recordings. A couple of years ago, Chieko Kiriake, then 93, sat on a stool in Hiroshima, less than a mile from where the atomic bomb buried her in a hut and made her classmates unrecognizable.
For decades, Ms. Kiriake didn’t speak publicly about what she saw that day. But in her 80s, as other survivors began to die, she believed it was her duty to pass on the story. “I felt that unless I spoke to younger generations about the horror of nuclear weapons, history would repeat itself,” Ms. Kiriake said. “I just wanted to forget. But I realized I was wrong.”
New agreements between nuclear powers are urgently needed, as the old ones are unraveling. But for leaders to put those guardrails back into place, the conversation must change, from one focused on an abstract menace to something more human. Only the next generation can bring about this change.
I find hope in the work of young Japanese activists like Yuta Takahashi and Miho Tanaka of the Hiroshima-based group Kakuwaka, who routinely sit down with Japanese officials to ask why their country is not taking a more active role in disarmament. And in the ideas of Chinami Hirabayashi, a 24-year-old elementary-school teacher and researcher in Nagasaki who has taught kids across Japan about disarmament.
She has dug through online archives for records of her grandfather, Dr. Mitsuhisa Koyanagi. At 22, he led a unit of young doctors and nurses who worked in Nagasaki after it was bombed in 1945, walking miles in a day to reach patients as food ran low. He died in 2015, when she was only 14. But his story is now hers.
This Times Opinion essay is funded through philanthropic support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Outrider Foundation and the Prospect Hill Foundation. Funders have no control over the selection or focus of articles or the editing process and do not review articles before publication. The Times retains full editorial control.
Spencer Cohen is an editorial assistant in Opinion.
Video production by Emily Holzknecht.
Video from “The Day After”/ABC Circle Films. Clips of American and Soviet children’s interviews courtesy of Dr. Eric Chivian and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
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