'With One Bomb You Can Kill Hundreds Of Thousands. Is It Ok To Do That, Mr Putin?”

Having lived through the Nagasaki atomic bomb attack in 1945, Terumi Tanaka tells Adam Withnall in Tokyo that Russia’s sabre-rattling threatens civilisation as we know it

A survivor of the atomic bomb attack on the Japanese city of Nagasaki during the Second World War has warned Vladimir Putin that he has no idea of the destruction and pain such weapons cause as the Russian president threatens the West with the prospect of nuclear war.

Terumi Tanaka, one of a diminishing number of survivors of the US attacks on Japan in August 1945, said the use of nuclear weapons would spell “the end of the human race” and that leaders like Mr Putin “don’t realise the extent of the damage that can be done”.

Mr Tanaka’s warning, made during a sit-down interview with The Independent in campaign group Nihon Hidankyo’s small but bustling Tokyo office, came at a time of escalating nuclear sabrerattling from the Russian leadership. This week, Mr Putin issued a decree loosening Russia’s nuclear arms protocols, saying the country could use them even if attacked with conventional weapons if the aggressor were to be backed by a nuclear-armed nation.

The decree serves as a clear warning, after US president Joe Biden gave Ukraine the green light to use American long-range missiles against targets inside Russia, that Moscow reserves the right to respond to such a strike with nukes. Both US and UK long-range missiles have subsequently been used by Ukrainian forces.