"Does the tragedy that unfolded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki serve as a sufficient call to the conscience regarding the self-destructive capacity humanity has generated? Eighty years on, do those two blinding flashes, those two unimaginable shockwaves, still constitute an intangible warning, the fulcrum of a deeply felt awareness?"

These were the words of President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, spoken last Saturday before the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, in the presence of the hibakusha, the living witnesses to the nuclear horror of 6 August 1945. Their memory, and the recollection of that tragedy, should be enough as a reminder. As should the entire Second World War and the Shoah suffered by the Jewish people. "And yet, today," Mattarella continued, "the architecture of disarmament and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction appears to be undermined by irresponsible rhetoric of conflict, when not by conflicts already underway."

The meeting with the hibakusha, survivors of the atomic holocaust

Mattarella visited the Peace Museum, established to bear witness to the destruction wrought by the bombing and to remind the world of the importance of peace, before proceeding to the Orizuru Tower, where he met the president of Nihon Hidankyo, Toshiyuki Mimaki, and the Nihon Hidankyo association of Hiroshima. The speech delivered by Mattarella before the atomic bomb survivors, the hibakusha — the concluding act of his official visit to Japan — stands as a stern and timely warning in an era in which geopolitical tensions seem to be dragging the world back by decades, with wars in progress, prospects of massive rearmament, and even the taboo surrounding the use of nuclear weapons appearing increasingly fragile.

Only last October, the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the organisation of Japanese survivors of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose decades of commitment have contributed to the creation of the "nuclear taboo" that has ensured no atomic weapon has been used in 80 years. The Nobel Committee itself, however, had highlighted the numerous escalation risks currently underway. At Hiroshima, Mattarella evoked the words of Professor Terumi Tanaka, who upon accepting the prize "described with lucidity and emotion the devastation of Nagasaki, transforming his own pain into a warning for future generations. The atrocity of those two moments, the terrible consequences of radiation, helped forge an international consensus around a moral imperative: that the atomic bomb must never be used again. From that horror, the debate on disarmament drew renewed vigour." A debate that now, even at the heart of Europe, is tilting towards the opposite word: rearmament — even if not specifically nuclear. For the Head of State, the threats issued by certain countries, Russia among them, the erosion of non-proliferation treaties, and the very notion that "usable" nuclear weapons exist in limited scenarios are all alarming signals. Mattarella stated firmly that a nuclear war "cannot be won by anyone and must never be fought."

Humanity at a crossroads: peace or destruction?

The Hiroshima speech closes with a heartfelt appeal to collective responsibility — and also against every form of simplification and trivialisation. The debate between pacifists and advocates of rearmament "is not — as some would have us believe — a confrontation between deluded idealists and realists, but between the case for life and the case for death. Between the case for peace and the case for conflict." It is also a confrontation between the reasoning that gave rise to international frameworks "in which states have committed to respecting norms that never contradict the dignity of human beings and the inviolable rights of the person," and the recurring temptations, on the other side, "to adopt conduct that in practice contradicts them." A word to the wise.