When United States President Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev met in Geneva in 1985 they agreed “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” It was the prelude to the beginning of the end of the Cold War nuclear arms race and subsequent deep cuts in American and Soviet – later Russian – arsenals.

Since then, the original five nuclear weapons states have reaffirmed this statement, most recently in 2022.

But some disagree and hark back to the military strategies of the 1950s that envisaged the use of nuclear weapons by troops on the battlefield to win wars. A recent example is former Trump administration official, David Lasseter, who argued “the Department of Defense (DoD) is not doing nearly enough to ensure the American warfighter is able to fight, survive, and win on a nuclear battlefield”.

The timing of such comments could not be more inopportune: as the Nobel Peace Prize is about to be awarded to Nihon Hidankyo – an organisation of hibakusha, the survivors of the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – for their lifelong campaigning for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

The 1945 atomic bombs that killed more than 200,000 people in Japan would today be called “tactical” nuclear weapons. The survivors of those “tactical” nuclear weapons........

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