Empress of Japan speaks against nuclear weapons

Empress Michiko of Japan has called for “a world free of nuclear weapons” and praised President Obama’s moves towards nuclear disarmament.

By Jonathan Liew
Telegraph, 26 Oct 2009

Empress Michiko, pictured here during her visit to Britain in 2007, was 10 years old at the time of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Photo: Getty

In a written statement to mark her 75th birthday, she said that Obama’s speech in Prague in April had shown a “strong determination to eliminate nuclear weapons”, and had contributed to his winning the Nobel peace prize earlier this month.

“The horror of nuclear weapons lies, in addition to the magnitude of the destruction, in the enormity and misery of the effects of radiation which continue to afflict the victims long afterwards,” she said.

Japan is the only country that has ever suffered a nuclear attack, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Empress Michiko was 10 years old at the time. She was at primary school in Tokyo during World War Two, but was forced to leave due to US bombing raids, and resumed her studies after the war.

“As a country which has suffered atomic bombings, I believe that Japan should make efforts to seek further and deeper understanding of this from the international community,” she said.

The nuclear attacks on Japan during World War Two precipitated a period of almost half a century during which the world lived under the spectre of nuclear warfare.

The Soviet Union developed a nuclear bomb in 1949, followed by Britain in 1952, France in 1960 and China in 1964.

By the late 1960s both the US and the USSR had each stockpiled enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other completely. This bilateral balance of power, known as “mutually assured destruction”, acted as a deterrent to full-scale atomic war.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, the threat of nuclear warfare has taken on a multilateral dimension.

In addition to the original five nuclear powers, South Africa, India, Pakistan and North Korea have all developed nuclear weapons. However, South Africa destroyed its nuclear arsenal after the end of apartheid in the early 1990s.

Israel is widely believed to possess a nuclear capability, while Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey have been given nuclear weapons by the US for storage.

These developments have complicated the strategy of mutually assured destruction.

A 1995 document published by the US department of defence explained that while the concept of mutually assured destruction still applied to Russia, pre-emptive action should be an option for dealing with smaller nuclear states, or for preventing states from acquiring nuclear capabilities.

The US administration’s current tensions with Iran over the latter’s alleged nuclear weapons programme reflect this line of thinking.

The central objective of Russia’s policy on nuclear engagement has remained “essentially unchanged from that of the Cold War”, according to Ifri, a French think tank.

It has adopted a more defensive concept of mutually assured destruction, replacing its notion of “unacceptable damage”, or the cost of waging a successful nuclear war, with one of “required damage” – the amount of damage that would be necessary to make an attack on Russia unacceptable to an enemy.

However, Russia also stated in 2003 a willingness to use nuclear weapons to “prevent political pressure against Russia and her allies”, meaning that for the first time since the fall of Communism, it was contemplating small-scale nuclear war.

Malcolm Grimston, an expert on nuclear policy at Chatham House, said that the role of nuclear weapons in today’s world requires wholesale reassessment.

“The threats now don’t come from big armies and big weapons, they come from small groups aiming for relatively soft targets,” he said. “It’s difficult to see what a nuclear deterrent is deterring.”

As well as her pronouncements on nuclear weapons, Empress Michiko also addressed the financial crisis, which she said had severely affected many Japanese people, and the swine flu pandemic.

Michiko, the daughter of a flour magnate, was the first commoner to marry into the Chrysanthemum Throne when she married then-Crown Prince Akihito in 1959.

It is unusual for her to express her thoughts in this manner. Previously she has answered written questions from journalists on her birthday, but the royal family decided this year only to issue a written statement.

This was an effort, it claimed, “to reduce the burden on Her Majesty”.