News

by Kyosuke Mizukawa, Senior Staff Writer

On October 23, 1962, the Chugoku Shimbun ran the headline “U.S. Blockades Cuba” on the front page of the newspaper’s evening edition. After learning of the Soviet Union’s deployment of nuclear missiles to Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy had announced countermeasures the previous day that included the demand that the ships carrying offensive military weapons bound for Cuba turn back. In response, the Soviet Union warned it was prepared to launch a powerful retaliatory attack if the United States attempted an invasion, heightening the risk of nuclear war.

Kyoto Conference begins

Physicist Hideki Yukawa, a professor at Kyoto University who, in 1949, became the first Japanese to receive the Nobel Prize, viewed the Cuban Missile Crisis as “a terrifying experience in which nuclear war was just barely averted,” as he wrote about in the publication Kaku Jidai wo Koeru (in English, ‘Beyond the nuclear age’), published in 1968. In May 1962, just prior to the crisis, Dr. Yukawa had launched the Kyoto Conference of Scientists organization to discuss issues involving nuclear weapons.

In 1955, the Russell-Einstein Manifesto was issued, calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons and war and warning of the threat nuclear conflict posed to the continued survival of humankind. The manifesto was signed by 11 prominent figures, including British philosopher Bertrand Russel, Albert Einstein, and Hideki Yukawa. In 1957, the first Pugwash Conference — an international gathering organized to serve as a venue for scientists to discuss issues involving nuclear weapons and war beyond their traditional roles and specialties — was held in Canada.

The participants from Japan, Hideki Yukawa and physicist Shinichiro Tomonaga (1965 Nobel Prize laureate), proposed having the Kyoto Conference serve as Japan’s version of the Pugwash Conference. In May 1962, the conference’s inaugural gathering was held in Kyoto City and a statement was drafted.

Twenty-one people, including such novelists as Yasunari Kawabata and other cultural figures, added their names and expressed their opposition to “deterrence of war by means of nuclear weapons,” a philosophy espoused by nuclear weapons states. They pointed out that, “Countries in confrontation with each other would inevitably try to maintain increased retaliatory power and seek to obtain ever greater capacity to wage war.” Also noted was that, “Such deterrence would increase the risk of war based on misjudgments about military capability or current circumstances.”

Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had heightened those concerns, the second Kyoto Conference was held in Takehara City in May 1963. Yoshitaka Mimura, a theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at Hiroshima University, who had been born in Takehara and was a signatory to the first statement, was involved in organizing the second meeting. Eighteen years earlier, the Hiroshima University of Literature and Science’s theoretical physics laboratory, of which he served as director, had been destroyed in the atomic bombing, with Mr. Mimura himself directly experiencing the bombing and suffering head trauma as a result.

Eleven people, including Mr. Yukawa and Mr. Tomonaga, engaged in three days of discussions at the hotel where the second meeting was being held. Mr. Mimura participated in the meeting with the mindset, “I was well aware of the consequences and tragedy of the atomic bombing from my own personal experience,” information that was reported in the Chugoku Shimbun newspaper at the time, and he served as co-chair on the meeting’s first day. After introducing messages from children of the Hiroshima Paper Crane Club who were hopeful of the discussions at the meeting, he made such statements as, “The issue is how to eliminate nuclear weapons.”

Making efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons

After the discussions, the 11 participants moved to Hiroshima City and issued a meeting statement. They emphasized that, “A situation similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis could occur again somewhere in the world at any time.” Renewing their warning against deterrence policies relying on the threat of nuclear weapons, they remarked, “All people in every country around the world are being held ‘hostage’ by a small number of global policy decision makers.”

Mr. Mimura died two years later at the age of 67. Mr. Yukawa sent a message of condolence, that read, “I fully realize we need to make further efforts to completely eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.” The third meeting of the Kyoto Conference was held in Tokyo in 1966. Until his death in 1981 at the age of 74, Mr. Yukawa continued to advocate at a variety of different venues and occasions for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

(Originally published on April 8, 2025)