Scary Report: 'The Nuclear Club May Double' with S. Korea, Japan and Others

Another important article from The Atlantic's special issue.

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books (with several on nuclear issues) and now writer/director of award-winning films aired via PBS, with four since 2022, including “Atomic Cover-up.”

Returning again with coverage of yet another feature in the new special issue of The Atlantic with numerous important pieces on nuclear threat (and history) marking the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan and the birth of the nuclear age. I’ve explored three of the pieces in two previous posts, here and here (the latter related to Kurt Vonnegut).

First, I’ll briefly note again my own project for the 80th starts streaming on PBS tomorrow, and on stations rolling out over the next month. This is the link to the PBS preview page which will probably include the actual film starting on Saturday, but in any case, you will be able to find it somewhere at PBS.org and PBS apps. Also, I will point you to a new review of the film by the great Charlie Pierce at Esquire, with the evocative title. “The Atomic Bowl Is an Urgent Reminder of the Terrors of Nuclear War: The new PBS documentary is necessary viewing.” And one more time: the companion e-book.

Now onward. The new Atlantic piece by Ross Andersen is titled, “The Nuclear Club Might Soon Double: As American power recedes, South Korea, Japan, and a host of other countries may pursue the bomb.”

It opens with his meeting in Hiroshima with a survivor of the bombing, now 87. (Survivors were far easier to find when I interviewed more than a dozen—forty-one years ago.) He then turns at length to elsewhere in Asia, where a “destabilizing proliferation cascade has already begun in East Asia, and proliferation often begets proliferation. Julian Gewirtz, who served as the senior director for China and Taiwan affairs on the National Security Council during the Biden administration, told me that China’s astonishingly fast and ambitious nuclear buildup has unsettled countries all across Asia. In both South Korea and Japan, he said, these concerns, combined with uncertainties about the Trump administration, ‘may lead them to consider ideas that were once unthinkable.’”

North Korea’s Kim “is already estimated to have about 50 warheads, and the material needed to build as many as 90 more. His nuclear ambitions have grown along with China’s. He doesn’t want to be a nuclear peer of India and Pakistan, who have contented themselves with about 170 warheads each. Kim wants to have about 300, like the United Kingdom and France, sources told me.” Andersen then probes South Korea’s interest in joining the nuclear club, and how that might spur a very nervous rival, Japan, to do the same.

Separately, Andersen spoke with Isabel Fattal, a senior editor, and reported:

For the story, I spent some time with the governor of Hiroshima, Hidehiko Yuzaki, and he told me that nearly everyone who goes sees something that hits them particularly hard. For me, it was seeing the burned clothes of very small children in the museum and thinking about what happened to them and also what happened to 20,000 other children. The enormity of that suffering is hard to even hold in your mind. But in light of that, what’s remarkable—and what surprised me—is that among the city’s leaders, there isn’t a sense of bitterness over what happened there. Instead, going all the way back to just a few years after the attacks, when the wounds were still raw, they sought to make Hiroshima a mecca for global disarmament and peace.

But going back to his own article for the magazine, and at the risk of providing a bit of a “spoiler” (though it is a tiny portion of the piece), here is his powerful ending:

Before I left the Hiroshima-prefecture headquarters, I asked Governor Yuzaki what people usually overlook when they come to his city. Yuzaki paused for a moment to consider the question. He has personally hosted heads of state who control these arsenals. He said that most people are moved. He has watched foreign dignitaries weep in Hiroshima’s museums. He has seen them sitting in stunned silence before the memorials in the Peace Park. People feel horrible about what happened here, he told me. But they don’t seem to understand that humanity is now risking something even more terrible. They think that Hiroshima is the past, Yuzaki said. It’s not. It’s the present.

Also see Andersen’s earlier piece “If DOGE Goes Nuclear.” More scary stuff.