Eighty years after Hiroshima, calls to ‘nuke Gaza’ show how little has been learned

On 22 May 2025, the register of all victims of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima was brought out from its stone-chamber cenotaph at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, following a silent prayer at 8.15am – the exact time the bomb fell 80 years ago.

The register lists 344,306 names, with one volume dedicated to those whose identities are unknown. Marking the 80th anniversary, the city allowed media to view the inside of the chamber for the first time.

That very same day, as Hiroshima quietly marked its dead, Republican Congressman Randy Fine went on Fox News to suggest that a nuclear weapon be dropped on Gaza. Despite his history of incendiary and extremist remarks, he was not the first US politician to make such a statement.

A year earlier, on 21 March 2024, Republican Congressman Tim Walberg also suggested dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza, “like Nagasaki and Hiroshima”.

The previous November, less than a month after Israel began its assault on 7 October 2023, heritage minister Amichay Eliyahu, of the Jewish Power Party, told a Hebrew radio station that a nuclear bomb should be dropped on Gaza.

Some Israeli commentators warned that calls to “nuke Gaza” risked drawing international outrage and undermining Israel’s long-standing policy of nuclear ambiguity – its refusal to confirm or deny possessing such weapons. After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suspended him from cabinet meetings and publicly disavowed the remarks, Eliyahu claimed his words were “metaphorical”.

Since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza, comparisons to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place three days later on 9 August 1945, have been invoked by a range of figures.

The frequency and flippancy with which politicians and pundits have entertained – and at times encouraged – the nuclear destruction of Gaza has struck a nerve in Japan, where anti-war and pro-Palestine sentiment has surged.

The frequency and flippancy with which politicians and pundits have entertained – and at times encouraged – the nuclear destruction of Gaza has struck a nerve in Japan

Last year, Nihon Hidankyo, the group representing living atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha), won the Nobel Peace Prize. One of its leaders, Toshiyuki Mimaki, said aid workers in Gaza deserved the honour instead. Earlier that year, the mayor of Nagasaki refused to invite the Israeli ambassador to the city’s memorial, despite public criticism from Israel’s embassy and its supporters.

Japan’s pro-Palestine mobilisation has not been confined to civil society. In July 2025, Reiwa Shinsengumi, a five-year-old left-wing populist party led by former actor Taro Yamamoto, overtook the century-old Japanese Communist Party in the lower house and gained an additional seat in the upper house. Reiwa’s platform includes an explicit opposition to Zionism and support for Palestinian rights.

After nearly two years of a live-streamed genocide, the Japanese response carries a particular historical resonance.

In a country where the devastation of nuclear war is a living memory, casual calls to obliterate Gaza reflect the same logic of annihilation. That this recognition comes from survivors of mass destruction – who have stood publicly with Palestinians in Gaza – underscores not only the cruelty of such rhetoric, but the ease and impunity with which it is voiced.

Eighty years after Hiroshima, politicians’ open calls for the extermination of an entire civilian population – even as Palestinians are starved, bombed and incinerated – reveal how little has been learned, and how thoroughly such apocalyptic violence has been normalised.

Reanimated memory

The harrowing images emerging from Gaza – skeletal infants, children burned, dismembered and sniped at by US-supplied weaponry, and a region reduced to rubble – have reverberated globally.

In Japan, these scenes have cut even deeper, reanimating historical memory and evoking haunting parallels with the wide-scale destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – entire cities levelled, where virtually no buildings were left standing.

Photographs of mutilated and burned bodies, taken by the US military in 1945, were shown to the Japanese public as a chilling display of nuclear horror, and later appeared in the 1959 French film Hiroshima Mon Amour.

This assertion of colonial dominance echoes in Gaza today, where Israeli soldiers have live-streamed their sadistic acts in what human rights groups describe as war crimes broadcast in real time.

In both cases, the violence is not only inflicted, but also staged and justified through self-serving myths that confer moral legitimacy.

Although the Empire of Japan was a brutal colonial force that committed war crimes across East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not deployed to end the war.

Rather, they served to establish US postwar supremacy in the Asia-Pacific region after the Soviet Union declared in 1943 its intention to enter the Pacific Theatre once the war in Europe had concluded.

By early 1945, diplomatic discussions between Japan and the Soviet Union regarding the terms of surrender were already under way, including before and after the Potsdam Conference, which brought together the US, UK and USSR from 17 July to 2 August.

Even the choice of Hiroshima as the first target was not predetermined. The original plan was to strike Kokura (now Kitakyushu) on the island of Kyushu, but heavy cloud cover threatened to obstruct aerial surveys of the bomb’s impact and aftermath. Hiroshima, on the island of Honshu, was selected instead due to its clearer skies.

Myths of war

Of the many myths invented to rationalise imperialist mass murder, few are as enduring as the US claim that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were somehow necessary to save lives.

In his 1955 memoirs, former US President Harry Truman claimed that the use of nuclear weapons on Japan “saved 500,000 American lives”.

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However, records from the Joint War Plans Committee, dated 15 June 1945, estimated American military casualties (not including Japanese military or civilians) of 40,000 killed, 150,000 wounded and 3,500 missing – totalling 193,500 – if the US were to invade Kyushu and then Honshu from the south.

On 18 June, in a memo from General Douglas MacArthur to General George C Marshall, MacArthur agreed with this estimate and wrote that he regarded “the operation as the most economical one in effort and lives that is possible”.

Unlike the deadly Battle of Okinawa, which took place from 1 April to 22 June 1945 and claimed 150,000 Indigenous Ryukyuan lives, and around 50,000 US and 100,000 Japanese soldiers, the Joint War Plans Committee expected a mainland invasion to be far less lethal, given the multiple points of entry into Kyushu, unlike the heavily militarised island of Okinawa.

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Instead, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed an estimated 246,000 people, most of them civilians. Between 10 and 20 percent were Zainichi Koreans – themselves victims of Japanese colonialism who were brought to Japan as labourers after the empire’s colonisation of the Korean peninsula in 1910.

The myth that dropping the bombs “saved lives”, therefore, only holds if Japanese and Korean lives are excluded from the calculation – if, in the logic of war, only American lives matter.

Yet this distorted claim remains fervently defended by right-wing American and Zionist nationalists.

On a recent episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored, hardline pro-Israel commentator Rabbi Shmuley Boteach cited Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ask whether Truman “was a war criminal” for authorising the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians, including children.

Morgan, unsurprisingly, responded “no”, insisting that neither Truman – the only US president to authorise nuclear attacks on civilian populations – nor Winston Churchill – who presided over the 1943 Bengal Famine that killed up to 3.8 million Bengalis – could be considered war criminals.

Weaponised history

The invocation of Hiroshima is no longer limited to historical debate. It is now a rhetorical device used by Israel apologists to justify the destruction of Gaza.

On another recent Piers Morgan episode, Clay Travis, a far-right US radio host and successor to Rush Limbaugh, linked the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor to the atomic bombing of Japan in a discussion about “proportionality”.

The invocation of Hiroshima is no longer limited to historical debate. It is now a rhetorical device used by Israel apologists to justify the destruction of Gaza

He drew a parallel between those events and Hamas’s 7 October attack, which he referenced to excuse Israel’s starvation, bombing and collective punishment of Gaza.

The historical absurdity of such comparisons reveals just how deeply entrenched the myth of the atomic bombing’s necessity remains in the American psyche – and how central it is to the political and media machinery now condoning another genocide.

When the Japanese Empire attacked Pearl Harbor (its Hawaiian name, Puʻuloa, was renamed by the US Navy), it also targeted other American military installations on the island of Oʻahu, including the marine base at Mokapu Peninsula, now home to the Kāneʻohe Marine Corps Base Head (MCBH).

But what is often omitted from such narratives is that Japan’s military action in the Hawaiian Islands occurred within the context of US imperial aggression – namely, the illegal overthrow of the sovereign Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1893, with which Japan had maintained a peace treaty since 1871.

Glorified annihilation

The atomic bombings of Japan continue to hold a powerful grip on the American and western imaginary, framed as life-saving, morally righteous acts and triumphant displays of technological might and imperial dominance.

Their use in 1945 was not, as many still claim, a response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Rather, it marked a strategic assertion of US supremacy across the Pacific in the postwar era – a campaign extended through decades of nuclear weapons testing.

On 1 March 1954, the US detonated “Castle Bravo”, its first high-yield thermonuclear bomb, on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The blast irradiated the 23-man crew of a Japanese tuna boat and inspired the original Godzilla film later that year, with the monster serving as a metaphor for nuclear destruction. Fallout from the test forced the displacement of Indigenous Bikini Islanders, who remain exiled from their ancestral land.

Yet while Japanese popular culture reckoned with the trauma of nuclear war, the West transformed it into spectacle. The designer of the modern bikini swimsuit named it in commemoration of the 1946 “Baker” atomic bomb test on Bikini Atoll. Today, SpongeBob lives in “Bikini Bottom”. The nuclear arms race became, in the West, a source of humour, fashion, and even children’s entertainment.

Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer extends this tradition, centring the guilt of a white American physicist while omitting the civilian death toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ecological devastation of nuclear testing, and the displacement of Indigenous Pueblo farmers to make way for the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.

This aestheticisation of mass death follows centuries of American mythmaking, propaganda and nationalist storytelling – a mythology that glorifies technological violence and depends on the erasure of its victims.

This moral and cultural detachment has consequences. In a shocking moment during a 2014 showing of Godzilla in a Philadelphia cinema, the American audience hissed when a Japanese character delivered an impassioned speech against the use of nuclear weapons. A film born of nuclear trauma was consumed as pure entertainment in a culture that scorns its victims.

It is this same genocidal worldview that now allows American and Israeli politicians to openly call for “nuking” Gaza and other declared enemies of US hegemony.

For decades, Israel has positioned itself as a global innovator of military technology, boasting of weapons that are “battle-tested” on Palestinians. During its 2014 assault on Gaza, surveillance footage of targeted buildings was displayed at international arms expos to advertise Israeli drones. Similar showcases have accompanied the current war, with Israeli officials reportedly promoting new weapons systems based on their performance in Gaza.

Whether in Japan, the islands of the Pacific or in Gaza, the ideology that enables the mass killing of civilians remains intact. It endures through the systematic dehumanisation of its victims – Indigenous peoples, colonised populations, and now Palestinians – whose suffering is reduced to data points, sales metrics or propaganda fodder.

And as this system of annihilation reaches its most violent and unrestrained expression in Gaza today, the world continues to look away – or worse, to hiss.

False equivalence

If some in the West scorn or dismiss victims altogether, others do acknowledge the horror in Gaza, only to dilute it with misleading historical comparisons.

The growing trend of comparing the scale of destruction in Gaza to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki risks obscuring, rather than illuminating, the nature of Israel’s assault.

Consider political commentator Peter Daou’s viral post on X from 26 July 2025, which superimposed Gaza onto a map of New York and read:

By the way, this is the size of Gaza. Basically a train ride from Brooklyn to Yonkers. Now imagine this slice of NYC being subjected to the equivalent of 6 Hiroshima bombs, mass starvation, drones sniping children, hospitals demolished, and aid workers massacred.

The intention behind such posts is understandable, as many wish to convey the sheer scale of devastation in a small, densely populated area.

But these analogies are dangerously imprecise. The total tonnage of conventional explosives dropped on Gaza cannot be meaningfully compared to even the earliest nuclear weapons, let alone those in today’s arsenals.

The atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 were fission-based weapons with yields of 15 and 21 kilotons, respectively. By contrast, modern thermonuclear weapons use both fission and fusion, resulting in vastly larger blast radii and destructive power, sometimes up to 3,000 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan.

For example, the overall yield of the two bombs – “Little Boy” on Hiroshima and “Fat Man” on Nagasaki – was 15,000 and 21,000 tons of TNT equivalent.

Modern thermonuclear weapons can have yields up can yield up to 10 megatons – or 10 million tons of TNT equivalent – such as the weapon tested over Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1 November 1952, more than 700 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Even so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons today can carry payloads of 100 kilotons or more – five times the destructive force of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

President Barack Obama’s nuclear modernisation programme upgraded over 1,550 US warheads with precision-guided missile delivery systems, at a cost of $1.25 trillion under the 2011 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia.

All of these weapons have horrifying short-term and long-term destructive effects.

While Israel has a nuclear arsenal, perhaps one reason it does not use such weapons on Gaza is the simple proximity of its own population centres. Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and surrounding Israeli settlements lie just 44-48 miles (71-78km) from Gaza – well within reach of radioactive fallout.

Though the intensity of bombing in Gaza is extraordinary in the context of 21st-century conventional warfare – with reports of US-supplied GBU-31, GBU-32 and GBU-39 bunker buster bombs levelling entire neighbourhoods – even these powerful bombs do not approach the destructive scale of nuclear weapons.

So simply comparing the tonnage of explosives to “six Hiroshima bombs” is misleading – and, frankly, does not compute in the American mind, which has long glorified nuclear weaponry as a “life-saving” and “technological miracle”.

The destructive force of even six “Little Boys” would quite literally kill everyone, not only in Gaza, but across the surrounding Israeli settlements, possibly reaching the rest of occupied Palestine and poisoning the Mediterranean Sea and nearby freshwater sources. The entire region would become a kind of Chernobyl.

Remembrance and resistance

In the run-up to President Donald Trump’s June attack on Iran, there was speculation that he might order a tactical nuclear strike on Iran’s Fordow nuclear plant.

Instead, he reportedly authorised the use of GBU-57 bunker buster bombs, which weigh 30,000lbs (13,607kg) and can only be deployed by a B-2 stealth bomber – unlike strategic nuclear warheads, which can be launched via ballistic missile.

The tactical nuclear weapon under consideration was the B61 thermonuclear bomb, which remains in the US stockpile in versions with yields ranging from 0.3 to 300 kilotons – the upper limit being six times the power of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

That we now live in an age where serious talk of using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state – a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty – can be entertained in defence of an undeclared nuclear power that has signed no such treaties, should give us pause.

It should also force us to interrogate the language we use when we speak of nuclear threats – whether literal or metaphorical – and to ask who is permitted to wield them without consequence.

On this day, 6 August 2025, the 80th anniversary of the first use of an atomic weapon on a civilian population, we must honour their memory by uplifting the courage of the hibakusha who have stood in solidarity with the Palestinian people – especially those in Gaza – and resisted US imperialism and its agents in Japan.

Their defiance reminds us that remembrance without resistance is hollow. To truly honour the victims of Hiroshima is to confront the political systems that treat some lives as disposable. It is to reject the dehumanisation and racial hierarchies that sustain violent military occupations – from the islands of the Pacific to Palestine.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.