SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST

APLN member C Uday Bhaskar emphasises that we cannot afford to forget the catastrophe unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the world lurches towards nuclear conflict.

The global nuclear orientation since 1945 has been shaped by amoral realpolitik and misplaced certitude about the centrality of nuclear weapons, their inherent safety and their role in maintaining international peace. The dominant policy discourse is framed only in geopolitical, security and strategic terms while the moral and ethical dimension has been relegated to near erasure.

In his acclaimed novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera presciently observed: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Power is the operative determinant, and the narrative about nuclear weapons has been shaped to exclude the broader threat to humanity and the planet itself.

The destruction caused by the use of rudimentary atomic weapons in 1945 was cataclysmic, and the combined destructive potential of the global nuclear arsenal in 2024 is beyond apocalyptic. The scale of devastation that would follow a nuclear exchange goes beyond current human comprehension and articulation.