Eighty Years On, New Research Challenges the Claim That Atomic Bombs Ended the Pacific War

For eight decades, the dominant narrative in Western political discourse has held that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to force Japan’s surrender and that, by shortening the war, they ultimately reduced overall fatalities. That interpretation, famously articulated by U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson in 1947, has also been extended beyond the end of the Second World War: the terror associated with nuclear weapons is routinely invoked to explain why great-power war has been absent since 1945. A new Research Topic published in Frontiers in Political Science, edited by Timo Kivimäki of the University of Bath, subjects both assumptions to rigorous, evidence-based scrutiny—and the results are striking.

The collection opens with a contribution by Howe, who assesses the moral arguments surrounding the development, possession, and use of nuclear weapons during the Second World War. Drawing on realist, communitarian, and just war perspectives, Howe searches for an overlapping normative consensus on universal human wrongs—acts that, in his framing, shock the conscience of humankind—beyond the framework of the responsibility to protect. His conclusion is nuanced: although the possession of nuclear weapons is not universally prohibited, there is broad agreement across the major theoretical traditions of international relations on the desirability of their elimination and the rejection of their use.

That consensus, however, sits uneasily beside a persistent belief that the only historical use of nuclear weapons shortened the war and saved lives. Howe’s analysis therefore exposes a central puzzle: how can mainstream normative theories reject nuclear use as morally unacceptable while simultaneously accepting that the single instance of nuclear use was beneficial? Resolving that tension is the intellectual engine of the entire Research Topic, and it is Kivimäki’s own contribution that attempts the demolition work.

Kivimäki interrogates the premises underlying the mainstream view that the U.S. nuclear attacks shortened the war. Using a game-theoretical reconstruction of the bargaining dynamics at the end of the U.S.–Japanese war, and drawing on documentary evidence of decision-making on both sides, he argues that the conventional interpretation is logically flawed. The flaw, in his account, is one of perspective: the mainstream narrative adopts an agent-centric view—focusing on how the bombings influenced Japan—yet draws relational conclusions about the termination of a war, which necessarily involves both parties.

The technical core of the argument is worth unpacking. Simplified, the traditional account assumes that the bombings pushed Japan toward accepting U.S. terms of peace, treating those terms as fixed and natural. In reality, the peace bargain involved shifting positions on both sides. American possession of nuclear weapons strengthened U.S. bargaining leverage, and that leverage encouraged Washington to harden its demands. It is historically unusual for a warring party to insist on permanently disarming its opponent, rewriting its constitution, and establishing enduring military bases on its territory. Thus, while nuclear weapons may have increased Japanese willingness to concede, they simultaneously incentivized the United States to escalate its demands. The net effect on the duration of the war may therefore have been neutral. The assumption that nuclear destruction shortened the conflict, Kivimäki concludes, is far less robust than commonly believed.

The second pillar of the nuclear narrative—the claim that the precedent of nuclear terror created by the U.S. attacks has sustained great-power peace since 1945—is challenged by Kmentt. His policy-oriented critique interrogates not only the strategic logic of nuclear deterrence but also its political, legal, and moral legitimacy in light of new evidence on humanitarian harm, environmental devastation, food insecurity, health-system collapse, transboundary effects, and systemic global risks. Deterrence theory, he argues, has ignored these collective harms and relies instead on an idealized model of bargaining leverage through threats of nuclear punishment.

The technical weaknesses Kmentt identifies are substantial. When nuclear weapons generate global harm, leverage depends not on the power of the coercer but on its willingness to tolerate catastrophic consequences—a fragile foundation for security. Moreover, deterrence theory overlooks scientific insights into bounded rationality, imperfect information, misperception, and accidents, factors that fundamentally undermine the reliability of nuclear coercion. Kmentt also critiques the conceptual foundations of the theory itself, which largely reflect the perspectives of nuclear-armed states, especially the United States, thereby marginalizing the security concerns of non-nuclear states and other affected actors. His article concludes by examining alternatives to nuclear-based global security, particularly those advanced in debates surrounding the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, offering a case for rejecting nuclear weapons as the backbone of international order.

The final article in the collection turns to one of the collective harms Kmentt identifies as neglected by idealized deterrence theory: the humanitarian consequences of nuclear testing, which remains essential for maintaining credible deterrence. Vaha focuses on Pacific Island nations, which have borne the brunt of this overlooked dimension of nuclear security. She links the humanitarian harm of testing to the civilian suffering caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, challenging the state-centric conception of security embedded in deterrence theory and foregrounding human security as the ultimate criterion instead.

Her analysis also exposes the racial and colonial biases that render some humanitarian costs acceptable while others are deemed intolerable and worth defending through nuclear threats. In doing so, Vaha’s argument resonates with Achille Mbembe’s necropolitical critique, which highlights racialized distinctions between populations considered worthy of protection and those treated as expendable. It is a reminder that the ethics of nuclear weapons cannot be separated from the politics of whose lives count.

Taken together, the contributions to this Research Topic offer a rigorous, evidence-based challenge to the longstanding consensus on the supposed merits of nuclear weapons in producing global security. Confronting both the historical logic of nuclear use and the contemporary logic of nuclear deterrence, the articles collectively suggest that nuclear weapons are better understood as instruments of mass harm—and potentially as war crimes—rather than as tools of peace. Eighty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the scholarly case for rethinking the atomic narrative has rarely been sharper.

Subject of Research: Historical and ethical reassessment of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the logic of nuclear deterrence

Article Title: Editorial: Weapons of peace or war crimes? Revisiting the historical narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Article References: Kivimäki, T. (2026). Editorial: Weapons of peace or war crimes? Revisiting the historical narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 2016546. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.2016546

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.2016546

Keywords: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, nuclear weapons, atomic bomb, nuclear deterrence, war ethics, Pacific War, Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, human security, game theory, necropolitics, Frontiers in Political Science