From a Broken Marriage to the Broken Psychology of War

A few years into my first marriage, I started writing songs on a small portable Casio keyboard. Not only was it a welcome catharsis, but it also became part of my plan to escape; it looked like the only way I could get out of a dependent family system that was making me miserable. For so many good reasons, my relationship with my husband no longer felt tenable. It felt like I was going to die if I didn’t get out soon.

My Funny Gray Land, by Gina Louthan, 1977

Getting out of the marriage did not mean abandoning my children as my parents did. They divorced twice and married three times. I had so wanted to do better than my parents. Even so, both sets of parents mooted their disapproval of my breakup. They told me how much of a disappointment I was to them and that I had ruined their lives and mine. Theirs as well? I drank to numb the pain, hanging on to the belief that my amazing lawyer would solve my life and get me a fantastic settlement, and then I would be free from all of them.

“I had so wanted to do better than my parents.”

The songs I wrote landed a record deal; I toured, got media attention, and had a top dance hit, but like my marriage, my music career was short-lived, took me away from home and was exhausting. On top of that, too many decisions were being made without me. I hated my management, and I hated the kind of people I was attracting; I felt out of my depth and overexposed, and despite some success, I didn’t make a penny. Fame, I decided, was not going to save me. All I had been able to show was a complex mishmash; a pastiche of someone I didn’t really know. So, I walked away again.

12” Mr Big Stuff - Gerbina Joblotti 1987

My ex met someone he shacked up with and, without telling me, stopped paying alimony – my mortgage and the bills. Coupled with my own feckless stab at running a music career, I ended up taking on all the bills, including the legal ones, and suddenly I was in the shit, owing thousands and thousands of pounds. Liens were made on my property. Debts that weren’t even mine were attached. With no way to fight back, I could no longer afford to keep my children under my roof. Against every bone in my body, I had to let the kids go to their father, despite the fact that we had agreed between lawyers that I should have main custody. To him, the agreements were worth no more than the paper they were written on. He had been preparing to take them away from me anyway – that was always part of his plan, and now his 2.0 family, with a baby on the way, was complete. I was £250,000 in debt and without my children, my reason for living. Angry, resentful, and devastated, my life was finished. I was 30.

Gerbina Joblotti’s manager crashed her car - photo by Jon Chapman 1987

I learned that life can be brutal. I didn’t have the teeth to fight my case, no financial support or know-how; dysfunction won, and I ended up as I had always feared, abandoned with my confidence and self-esteem in bits. I ached for my children. Yet, I still had no idea how things had gone so wrong.

The Office — Collage by Gina Louthan, 1977

A friend introduced me to Buddhism, and I found a way to do the inner work, learn more about myself, about my masking and my damage, and I started to change for the better, rebuild and get educated. And happier. I was fortunate enough to pull myself out of a humongous mess, and although it meant walking a new road and years of struggle to heal my life and get my children back, it was the first of many dramatic, life-changing experiences that have shaped me into the person I am today.

What has not changed throughout my life is that I have remained curious, and my subject matter has widened progressively. I began looking at my life more closely, dealing with my emotions, relationships, and experiences (which I still work on today). Through my creative work, I moved toward how society tries to express what happens when those same human behaviours are amplified through institutions, nations, and ultimately war.

“I didn’t have the teeth to fight my case; no money or knowledge – dysfunction won.”

Marriage is designed so that two people can create a life together that is bigger than themselves. What it doesn’t do is magically fix them if they are traumatised. It didn’t fix me. It isn’t a fairytale. Yet, many of us hold onto that frankly cruel “happy ever after” myth as if our lives depend on it.

A quote from the Buddhist writings of Nichiren Daishonin stayed with me as I rebuilt: “No worldly affairs of life or work are ever contrary to the true reality.”

What if our everyday lives really are connected to a broader reality? What if the toxic behaviour playing out between individuals, families, and communities is simply mirrored in the way nations behave?

We have created world systems to protect our societies, economies, and borders. We’ve got international laws, treaties, alliances, and sophisticated frameworks for measuring peace. All of this is great for recording the state of our world. But as I watch nuclear arsenals get bigger and the political rhetoric get more toxic, one big question keeps nagging at me: why isn’t peace actually working? Why do governments the world over keep resorting to military solutions? Why are we fighting so many wars now? To me, that looks like peace without teeth. And it isn’t working.

Our governments and institutions can count casualties, calculate economic costs, and map violence. But do they ever look at our human connection and the shared psychological engine driving it? How can we expect nations to act logically when the people running them are no longer rational?

When I look back at my first marriage, my ex and I were choking on the consequences of our own childhood dysfunction. Even though neither of us could see it then, our parents had passed on much of their own dysfunction from their parents too. These generations were still reeling from two world wars. I don’t think any of us had much idea of what love meant anymore. We were all so full of grief – too guarded for fear of going mad with it. I left home at sixteen because my mother was acting out on her grief and misery as her second marriage was falling apart, and I felt as unhinged as she did. At the same time, it was more than my life was worth to express to her what I was feeling. It was time to leave home.

In my marriage, I mirrored that exact survival mechanism. I lived in a perpetual fight-or-flight state. I built walls. I numbed out – made bad decisions. Could not express myself without exploding. I was victimised by my past just like my parents were. My husband was the same.

We were too hurt and confused to care about the pain we inflicted on each other, or our children. We couldn’t simply sign a piece of paper and expect peace to magically appear. He, as it turns out, clearly didn’t believe in it. We couldn’t pretend things hadn’t happened, or suddenly demand trust. We were trapped in a cycle, reacting to every perceived threat as if it were an existential attack.

“We couldn’t pretend that things hadn’t happened.”

This kind of destructive trauma seems to create a vacuum. In my own life, my lack of “teeth” invited predatory behaviour. The music industry exploited me. A legal system failed to protect my assets and my children from being ripped away by my husband. I was too ill-equipped and naive to see what was really going on or fight my corner. I became good at complaining.

The same thing happens globally. When historical trauma, generational grief, or economic despair breaks a society, it becomes easy prey. There are always winners and losers. Populist leaders step in and use fear, confusion and blame to win power, as they are doing now, and arms dealers swoop in to profit from exploiting national insecurities. Just like a broken marriage, a traumatised nation stops thinking rationally, and complains, making it vulnerable to systems that thrive on conflict.

What if the aggressive, threatening behaviour we see from nations today isn’t a sign of strength that their propaganda is so keen to portray, but of deep historical resentment, humiliation, and the terror that if they lower their guard, they will be destroyed?

Recognising this trauma shouldn’t excuse aggression. It doesn’t mean victims and perpetrators are the same, nor does it mean we have to abandon justice or boundaries. True peace requires teeth. But “teeth” shouldn’t mean bigger nuclear arsenals or heavier artillery. That is just the old, coercive, tired war mindset masquerading as security. How can that massively bullish stance be twin-tracked with being secure and at peace?

Genuine “teeth” takes accountability – the structural courage to reflect and face our generational wounds; the need to draw boundaries against centuries of predatory exploitation, and to do the messy, painful inner work of healing – the kind of ongoing work that helped turn my own life around. And still does.

If we want a safe world, we must find the collective courage to make big and deep changes in our behaviour as human beings. We need to grow our own “peace with teeth”. Otherwise, we will keep blaming others and fighting the same old wars, become more traumatised, destructive, and mad, and while everything around us is crumbling and falling apart, wonder why our current but outdated perception of peace is so badly letting us down.

Author’s note

I have always used creativity to investigate the human condition. I started writing songs and poetry when I was young, using my own experience to make sense of emotions, relationships and the world around me. Over time, that enquiry widened through my creative work into questions about society, conflict and peace.

My work with 80,000 Voices has taken me into the human stories behind nuclear weapons and their consequences. Increasingly, I am interested in what happens when we look beyond the systems we have built to manage conflict and begin to ask what is happening underneath them – in human beings, in our relationships, and in the societies we create.

This is the thinking behind Arts to Disarm: using creativity not simply to communicate ideas about peace and disarmament, but to explore the human conditions that make conflict possible in the first place.

Why do we keep returning to cycles of conflict, blame, and war?

Why do we keep returning, again and again, to cycles of conflict, blame, and war, even when we, as ordinary members of the public, say we want something different?

Recently, I woke up feeling stuck and grumpy. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a quiet internal Monday morning moan. How many times have I been here? Dealing with the old chestnuts of helplessness, frustration, inertia, apathy, and suppressed rage in my own life. States I know too well.

But wait. What else is entering with these feelings? Demons? Amoebic entities? Perhaps it’s just a lack of magnesium? A few minutes of doomscrolling will happily supply a raft of explanations.

And yet I can see now that my old, reliable companion, blame, has slipped in again, shapeshifting as usual. A turning outward of responsibility. Alongside it, a narrowing of perception, with trust at a low ebb, so I withdraw to that place where it begins to feel as if nothing can really change.

Not because change is impossible, I know it is possible, and I have achieved a lot. But if attention is moved away from where agency actually sits, a loss of mojo can take its place. And maybe this time, I won’t get it back. There’s always that quiet fear underneath - especially as I get older.

And it makes me wonder how often we confuse what we cannot control with what we cannot influence at all.

Because when everything is located “out there” in systems, people, and governments, our sense of possibility narrows.

But if even part of the pattern is in how I respond, then something can reopen if I let it. And it often does.

The key is not control over others, but clarity about where I am and how I am relating.

And that changes how I participate in everything else.

What I’m really asking

This brings me to why I’m writing today. It is not only about my personal questions or my search for solutions.

I want to explore the relationship between what is happening within me and what is happening around me: in ecosystems, in climate, in the systems we are still dependent on.

Most people now accept that what we do in one part of a system affects the whole. Right?

But that recognition does not always extend into human life in situations of conflict or power.

In those contexts, human beings are separated from a sense of interconnection, which makes harm easier to frame as necessary, distant, or contained.

Why is that?

What shifts in perception allow continuity in one domain and fragmentation in another?

When that happens, human life begins to split into categories: fully valued in some contexts, conditional in others. And once that split exists, harm becomes easier to justify.

How cycles repeat

This is where cycles repeat, between victim and victimiser, between helplessness and control, between withdrawal and reaction.

Not because people are indifferent, but because perception becomes inconsistent, often unconsciously shaped by narratives we have absorbed but that no longer serve us.

What is missing is not knowledge. It is the wisdom and willingness to endure. A steadiness of seeing that does not collapse under circumstances.

The ability to stay with reality long enough to see it clearly, rather than escaping into quick explanations, judgment, or withdrawal when things become uncomfortable.

These responses are understandable. But they are not neutral. Over time, they shape what we believe is possible.

And this is where things become more difficult.

Because if attention becomes fragmented, if life becomes something we react to rather than remain present within, then it becomes harder to respond clearly to real consequences.

Not because people do not care.

But because attention itself becomes unstable.

And in that instability, reality becomes distant. Abstract. Something is happening elsewhere.

That gap matters.

Because what we are facing, conflict, nuclear risk, environmental breakdown, and social fragmentation, does not respond well to distance.

It requires continuity. And the ability to stay present long enough to see what is actually happening.

Yoko Ono — Peace Exhibition (2024)

“a jigsaw piece of cloud”

A fragment held apart from a larger sky, suggesting how perception can isolate what is otherwise continuous. The image sits in tension between separation and wholeness, attention and fragmentation.

Banksy — Immersive Video Installation (South Kensington, December)

A still from an immersive environment where the viewer is placed inside the work rather than outside it. The boundary between observer and scene becomes unstable, shifting the sense of distance that normally structures attention.

Listening and consequence

This is where survivor testimony becomes essential.

That alone raises a question: what does it mean to live in a world where some experiences are still so difficult to express, and yet so necessary for others to hear?

Because when survivor voices are not heard, reality becomes more distant. Harm becomes easier to frame as abstract or necessary. The human cost disappears from decision-making.

This applies to all forms of violence and abuse. When survivors are not heard, the next generation grows further removed from what certain choices actually produce.

And distance changes judgement.

It makes repetition easier.

This is why listening matters.

Not as agreement, but as a way to restore contact with consequences.

Without that contact, we are more likely to repeat patterns without recognising them.

Responsibility and participation

Responsibility is often framed in terms of control over outcomes. But most of what we deal with in life is not controllable. It is relational, complex, and shared.

So where does responsibility sit?

It begins in how we see, how we listen, and how we respond.

Because when I noticed myself slipping into that low, stuck, victim-like state again, I could also see something else: the sense of helplessness was not only about circumstances, but about how I was relating to them.

And when that shifted, even slightly, something opened again.

Not control over others, but clarity in myself.

Clarity changes participation.

And participation is where patterns are made or broken.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

My work moves between writing, artistic practice, and reflection on how perception shapes responsibility, both in private life and in wider systems of power.

I am interested in how patterns of violence begin close to home: in relationships, in language, in the small and often unspoken ways we assign blame, withdraw, or lose contact with one another. These same patterns, when scaled and legitimised, can reappear in institutions, in policy, in conventional wars and ultimately in nuclear war.

On 28 February 2026, the U.S. government under Donald Trump, in coordination with Israel, launched military actions targeting Iran. Officials described the strikes as “major combat operations” against military, nuclear-associated, and leadership facilities. Among the casualties were civilians, including children at a school in Minab.

Iran responded with missile and drone strikes against U.S. and allied forces, triggering international alarm and an emergency session of the United Nations.

This escalation is not exceptional. It is familiar. The world continues to default to militaristic escalation as a way of exerting power and domination over others, often framed as necessary for peace and security, and it’s been going on for hundreds of years.

The blocked imagination

What interests me is not only what is happening, but why alternatives are so difficult to imagine let alone implement. Across nuclear discourse, escalation, runaway crises, and even total annihilation are routinely framed as “rational”, and war the only logical option.

The result is a dangerous narrowing of possibilities. World leaders, and much of the public in the West, have been conditioned, and psychologically persuaded to believe that military force is the only viable response to crisis. This mindset is centuries old, yet it remains largely unquestioned when it should be forensically examined.

Decisions are driven not only by bad actors, those reprehensible immoral individuals we all like to hate, but also by those materially and ideologically invested in warmongering narratives that relies on heroism, propaganda, and the false logic of winners and losers. In reality, there are no winners. The cost of sustaining this dated ethos is annihilation. The problem is not a lack of intelligence, but a belief system constantly reinforced through power, fear, and a push–pull dynamic that resists change in order to survive.

PULL QUOTE:
“The cost of sustaining this dated ethos is annihilation.”

Creativity as cultural diplomacy

From my perspective, creativity in action is cultural diplomacy. It connects disciplines, institutions, and communities. It opens dialogue where walls have hardened.

Arts advocacy, storytelling, and immersive experiences are not “add-ons.” They are tools of engagement, influence, and intervention. My hibakusha portraits, for example, do not argue in policy language. They restore humanism. They allow people to feel consequences that facts alone cannot convey. Changing cultural patterns of thinking is itself an act of peace.

It is not the arts alone that shift the conversation. Art must work in combination with dialogue; spaces where emotional responses are metabolised, examined, and translated into forms of understanding that do make logical sense. This combination matters because the real obstacle is not reason, but the worldview shaping how reason is used.

The elephant in the room is a form of megalomaniacal nihilism: the belief that lives, land, air, ecosystems, and entire cultures can be destroyed, reordered, and rebuilt into some imagined future utopia. This worldview treats human and planetary loss as collateral, temporary, or abstract. It is the opposite of harmonious humanism. Creative practice, when paired with ethical dialogue, challenges this nihilism by restoring proportionality, consequence, and empathy - reconnecting feeling and reason rather than allowing one to cancel out the other.

PULL QUOTE:
“Megalomaniacal nihilism treats human and planetary loss as collateral, temporary, or abstract.”

EBNE: Excellent, But Not Enough

Edward de Bono described this dilemma as EBNE: Excellent But Not Enough. Expertise and logic are powerful, but insufficient when the frameworks themselves are locked into binary, black-and-white thinking. Lateral thinking struggles to be taken seriously in systems addicted to linear escalation.

De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats method offers a way out of this impasse. Rather than arguing from fixed positions, it deliberately shifts how the mind approaches a problem; moving between facts, emotions, caution, optimism, creativity, and process. Its power lies not in agreement, but in movement. It allows thinking to step sideways, cutting through the noise of entrenched tropes that have become impervious to change.

It is almost as if one has to cut through a membrane of mindset or create new synapses to break out of the bubble of impasse. Lateral thinking does not reject logic; it frees it from repetition.

PULL QUOTE:
“Lateral thinking does not reject logic; it frees it from repetition.”

When the conversation changed

I remember being at the ICAN conference in Oslo in 2013. By reframing nuclear weapons in humanitarian terms, the movement shifted discourse away from abstract deterrence toward lived human consequences. It was a radical, profound, ethical, and heartfelt intervention, and electrifying to witness. The change in energy was palpable.

Today, geopolitics appears increasingly immune to that kind of moral reasoning. Gaza shows how cruelty, genocide, and mass civilian suffering escalate with impunity. Genocide is no longer a warning sign; it is unfolding in real time while being rhetorically minimised, legally distorted, or politically excused. It is time to become more creative again.

PULL QUOTE:
“Genocide is no longer a warning sign; it is unfolding in real time.”

Toddlergenics

Toxic concentrations of power, wealth, and hubris have turned the runaway train into something worse: a system driven by immaturity masquerading as authority. I call this Toddlergenics childish, reckless behaviour embedded in power structures, where impulsive, punitive, ego-driven decision-making wreaks destruction on a global scale while being dressed up as strategy.

The Trump train is a runaway train hurtling down a steep mountainside. There are no visible brakes. No sensible driver. And, we, the passengers, can see the crash coming.

History shows that wars, especially illegal or reckless ones, rarely stay contained. Nuclear escalation is treated as an abstract risk rather than an existential certainty, dominated by the narratives of nuclear-armed states and host countries. In reality, human society as we know it would not survive. Nothing would ever be the same again.

PULL QUOTE:
“Toddlergenics is childish, reckless behaviour embedded in power structures.”

Every spark counts

Right now, every act of creativity - a story, an artwork, a conversation - is a spark. Alone, it may seem insignificant. But sparks multiply. Millions of sparks can interrupt momentum, challenge inevitability, and stop the train so that passengers can get off safely.

Exploring new possibilities, reclaiming imagination, and reconnecting with curiosity can be transformative. For many of us, on a personal level, creativity has become a popular counter-culture: a refusal of fear, rigidity, coercion, and despair in our own lives. We have learned to let go of our abusers and reconnect with joy, wonder, and the courage to face life fully, including mortality - all shared on our social media platforms. But when it comes to world crises there is still a disconnect.

Reckless interventions, whether illegal wars, genocide, or escalation in Iran, show how habitual thinking blinds decision-makers. No actor is immune to blowback. Structural patterns continue to produce “solutions” that worsen the problem. Creativity, lateral thinking, artistic insight, and imaginative dialogue offer a more progressive, non-violent route.

Agency exists on a spectrum. Each person can notice, reflect, and act. Alone, sparks flicker. Together, they form networks capable of reshaping culture, policy, and imagination.

We don’t need heroism. We need intentional, creative interventions; acts that disrupt destructive momentum, shift cultural patterns, and bring the train to a halt. Each spark strengthens the network and allows us to imagine something extraordinary: a world where runaway systems stop, risks are recalibrated, people are protected, and destructive cycles are interrupted before catastrophe becomes irreversible.

PULL QUOTE:
“Every act of creativity is a spark.”

Author’s Note:

This piece draws on years of work across art, cultural diplomacy, and disarmament advocacy, shaped by close engagement with people, communities, and systems confronting violence and power. I write as someone who has observed, listened, and learned, bringing creativity and reflection to bear where conventional logic alone is not enough. There is much more to this experience - perhaps for another Substack, and likely for a book - but here I offer these thoughts as sparks for imagining futures that do not depend on destruction.

Arts to Disarm: Berlin 2026

Later this year, I will lead Arts to Disarm in Berlin—a three-day, founder-led cultural peacebuilding symposium organised by 80,000 Voices.

Using immersive, interdisciplinary arts, the symposium addresses the cultural and ethical gaps that continue to obstruct nuclear disarmament and challenges the notion that nuclear weapons are a necessary deterrent.

The event precedes the TPNW Review Conference (UN, 30 Nov–5 Dec) and centres survivor-led narratives, immersive artistic experiences, and cross-disciplinary dialogue to generate practical insights and actionable recommendations.

Guided by advisory and steering committees, the project is ethically grounded, collaborative, and explicitly rejects hierarchy, fear, and shaming as tools for mobilisation.

Video: Arts to Disarm

Roundtable discussion at UNA, Central London]
At UNA, London: ICAN, CND, and Medact partners, including Gina Langton, Founder and CEO of 80,000 Voices, ICAN CEO Melissa Parke (holding Nobel Peace Medal), Dr Rebecca Johnson, and General Secretary of CND Sophie Bolt.

Yesterday, I joined a roundtable at UNA’s offices in Central London, attended by partners and members of ICAN, CND, and Medact. The discussion, led by ICAN’s CEO Melissa Parke, focused on one of the most urgent realities of our time: the growing unpredictability of nuclear escalation. Not just the weapons themselves, but the fragile, complex systems that surround them: AI, cyber vulnerabilities, hypersonic missiles, and early warning networks.

The consequences of failure are catastrophic and interconnected: radiation, climate disruption, famine, mass displacement, and cascading conflict. It is, bluntly, a storm already upon us.

Melissa said something that struck me:

“We cannot continue to govern the 21st century the way we have before.”

Not a warning, not an appeal, but a statement of fact. The atmosphere in the room was tense: frustration, exhaustion, yet the steadfast spirit of hope remained undeterred, but flat. Almost everyone there has carried this work for years, some even decades. It’s personal. Everyone knows the stakes. Everyone feels the difficulty of making it resonate beyond these walls. No one in that room is going to give up. We have to keep reaching for solutions because there won’t be an “I told you so if a nuclear war is started.

Melissa also noted that humour should be part of our new approach - an acknowledgement that even in the gravest discussions, moments of lightness help sustain perspective, connection, and resilience.

Grappling with what’s happening

Humanity is a ship navigating a storm. Right now, it is not a passing squall. Environmental collapse, moral paralysis, systemic violence, unaccountable leadership - the crashing waves are relentless. We’re looking as catatonic as the carved wooden caryatid at the prow, sailing precariously and rudderless into the unknown.

Like all of us, I am grappling with how we move forward, translating risk into conscience, moral imagination, and responsibility. We remind ourselves that disarmament is not only a matter of law or strategy; that perhaps we need to look at it at a more micro level. It is a question of what it means to remain human in a world that can end in an instant, and what we can do individually to initiate our own transmutation of a painful and frightening situation.

The hibakusha portrait exhibition was an important first step, though it took me years of dogged perseverance to make it happen. This was because of my strong belief in the power of the arts to change hearts and minds. Now, over 50,000 people have seen it - not as data (although we did harvest feedback), not as an abstraction, but as a presence and a witness. Human-centred storytelling can do what treaties, graphs, and papers are finding increasingly more difficult to express: make the stakes less abstract and more visceral, human.

“Human-centred storytelling can do what treaties, graphs, and papers are finding increasingly more difficult to express: make the stakes undeniable, visceral, and human.”

Opening the Doors of Creativity

I am well aware that a few exhibitions alone cannot shift the conversation. The Arts, Culture, and Education need to be structurally recognised, fully integrated alongside scientific and policy expertise. Why? Because mechanisms are important, and using the Arts is a tool that should not be underestimated.

Just as the TPNW has a Scientific Advisory Board, an Arts, Culture, and Education Advisory Committee at The Review Conference of States Parties to be held in November/December 26 - could provide a space where creativity informs strategy, reflection informs action, and human experience informs policy. Not as an add-on, not as an afterthought, but as a core part of how disarmament is thought, imagined, and carried forward.

The movement knows these challenges intimately. Fatigue and frustration are real. Governments remain deeply intransigent, clinging to old, unexamined beliefs about nuclear deterrence, and public conversations are suppressed or sidelined. Civil society has done a great deal to flesh out the arguments, but they are too dry, often too technical, and too siloed for today’s public to be awakened. This is exactly why the Arts have been essential: they open doors to dialogue, imagination, understanding, and hope.

There should be joy in these spaces, too. Even amid discussion of existential catastrophe, moments of laughter, care, and hope matter. They are not distractions. They sustain the movement. They remind us why this work exists in the first place. And why it’s important to keep living.

“Even amid discussion of existential catastrophe, moments of laughter, care, and hope matter.”

Enlightenment and Public Understanding

The TPNW articulates humanitarian consequences with clarity that must remain central. But the argument can and should be brought into the public consciousness in ways that are culturally and educationally resonant.

People have been led to believe deterrence keeps them safe, and that discussion of nuclear risk is for “leaders only,” who are to be trusted implicitly. This is a dangerous fiction. The conversation has been shoved under the carpet for too long. Arts, Culture, and Education make it possible to bring it into the light, to make the moral and practical stakes felt and understood widely enough to influence behaviour and policy.

“Arts, Culture, and Education make it possible to bring the conversation into the light.”

Continuing the Work

80,000 Voices is continuing this work. Several projects are in development that explore the intersections of human experience, policy, and responsibility. The storm is here. The question is whether we navigate it with understanding, creativity, and conscience, or allow dominance and fear to guide the rudder.

The Arts, Culture, and Education are not optional. They are not decorative. They are central to our ability to imagine, feel, and act responsibly. They are part of the rudder, part of the compass, part of what makes navigation possible. And now, more than ever, the doors of creativity need to be opened.

“The Arts, Culture, and Education are central to our ability to imagine, feel, and act responsibly.”

Author’s Note

This piece reflects my observations, reflections, and experiences from the recent roundtable discussion and the ongoing work of 80,000 Voices. It is written in the belief that creativity, culture, and education are not peripheral to disarmament but central to shaping public understanding, ethical reflection, and action. The views expressed here are my own and intended to open conversation, inspire reflection, and illuminate the human dimensions of nuclear risk.

Today, 5 February 2026, marks the end of New START, the last treaty limiting the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. With its expiration, the United States and Russia are no longer bound by legally enforceable limits on their strategic nuclear weapons, a moment arms control experts rightly describe as dangerous.

Daryl G. Kimball of the Arms Control Association has warned that abandoning limits could spark a dangerous escalation:

“If the current U.S. administration continues to stiff-arm nuclear arms control diplomacy with Russia and decides to increase the number of nuclear weapons in the deployed strategic arsenal, it will only lead Russia to follow suit and encourage China to accelerate its ongoing strategic buildup in an attempt to maintain a strategic nuclear retaliatory strike capability vis-a-vis the United States. Such a scenario could lead to a years-long, dangerous three-way nuclear arms buildup.”
- Daryl G. Kimball, Arms Control Association, 4 February 2026

Other experts focus on launcher numbers, missile defences, verification gaps, and escalation dynamics. All this is important. But there is another dimension to this moment that receives far less attention: the psychological and relational effects of constant nuclear fear - what it does to our capacity to think clearly, to speak honestly, and to live coherently.

Melissa Parke, Executive Director of ICAN, frames the moment with similar urgency:

“We have entered 2026 with the highest threat ever from nuclear weapons, and we are on the cusp of the expiration of the last remaining arms control agreement between the United States and Russia, the New START treaty, removing the last restraints on an accelerating arms race.”
- Melissa Parke, ICAN, 2026

She notes that this moment coincides with ongoing military interventions, including in Ukraine and Venezuela, and signs of a possible future U.S. attack on Iran. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been since its creation in 1947.

A Disconnect Between Politics and Human Reality

Contrast this with the optimism at the end of the Cold War, when many assumed nuclear weapons would shrink and eventually be retired as relics. Instead, without much public consciousness, Britain, China, France, Russia, and the U.S. have continued to build new generations of nuclear weapons. Since the 1990s, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have joined the “nuclear club,” and Israel continues to refuse to admit it has nuclear weapons, though the world assumes it does.

In response to this disconnect between political abstraction and human reality, it is important to create spaces where memory, experience, and reflection can meet the technical and political facts of nuclear weapons. By holding attention on lived experience, we can begin to integrate ethical clarity and moral responsibility into the public conversation. This perspective underpins initiatives such as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which seeks to translate the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons into actionable global norms.

Yet there is a bright spot: the TPNW, now five years in force. By shifting the conversation to the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, the treaty has built momentum for disarmament. Its impact is slow but meaningful: banning nuclear weapons under international law, reinforcing the nuclear taboo, and creating growing diplomatic and reputational pressure on nuclear-armed states.

When Fear Becomes Performative

For decades, nuclear risk has been communicated through a vocabulary of threat, dominance, deterrence, and control - a language shaped by Cold War thinking, reinforced by hierarchy, abstraction, and command. Public discourse treats nuclear weapons as strategic abstractions, while private life is organised around care: for children, elders, homes, communities, and futures.

These spheres are deeply interdependent; both are under threat, yet rarely allowed to speak to one another. In reality, there is no separation; this split is corrosive and dishonest. We perform toughness and inevitability in public while privately sensing how fragile, relational, and contingent our lives really are. Over time, that gap breeds cynicism, disengagement, and a sense that nothing said at the political level truly belongs to us.

Beyond Technical Fixes Alone

The proposals put forward by arms control experts, the freezes, bilateral talks, and new frameworks, are necessary and urgent. Most operate on a horizontal plane: mechanisms, agreements, structures, often couched in language beyond the comprehension of ordinary people.

But this moment also exposes a vertical failure: a failure to integrate public power with private responsibility, strategy with consequence, posture with truth.

Why does security continue to be defined almost exclusively in terms of control, rather than mutual restraint? Why is vulnerability treated as weakness when it is the shared condition of all human communities?

These questions are not sentimental. They go to the heart of how political systems reproduce themselves, often through ego-driven fantasies of mastery that have little to do with how people actually survive and care for one another.

Peacebuilding as Reconnection

The Arts, combined with peacebuilding practices, play a serious role here - not as moral decoration, but as forms of public truth-telling.

The arts reconnect decisions with consequences, strategy with memory, and power with human experience. They provide a window through which nuclear harm can be understood - not as a hypothetical future scenario, but as a lived historical reality with intergenerational effects; to families, communities, and places, and therefore belongs within our moral field of vision. The arts also help us connect by filtering out the noise, offering a route to go deeper, to move vertically rather than merely horizontally.

By horizontal, we mean the habitual way of thinking, talking, and responding that stays stuck at the level of abstractions, statistics, bureaucratic language, and policy silos. Vertical engagement, by contrast, draws attention to lived experience, ethical reflection, and relational consequences, creating a space where insight, care, and moral responsibility can emerge.

The TPNW is a remarkable exception, and that is why we seek to promote it. While it is a treaty, it is a formal instrument of law with a distinct character. It reflects qualities of honesty, attention to lived experience, and a commitment to the principles of the heart. Its plain language carries the weight of ethical clarity, grounded in recognition of human suffering and intergenerational harm. The treaty translates these insights into actionable norms, making the consequences of nuclear weapons tangible and morally unavoidable.

The Arts, in this context, do what treaties alone cannot: they trigger a response that comes directly from the heart. By reframing reality, cutting through the horizontal noise of abstractions and policy, and showing consequences in human terms, art encourages public discourse rooted in empathy, reflection, and moral clarity. This is the central contribution of 80,000 Voices: to show, through creative practice, that attention to experience, memory, and ethical imagination can reshape how society talks about and acts on nuclear risk, disarmament, and peace.

Karipbek Kuyukov - Kazakh painter and activist

A Quiet Source of Hope

The TPNW, now in force for five years, reframes nuclear weapons as humanitarian catastrophes rather than instruments of prestige.

“As with bans on landmines and cluster munitions, the aim is normative change, making continued reliance on these weapons increasingly difficult to justify, politically and culturally.”
— Arms Control / TPNW commentary

These shifts begin when societies stop pretending that the public story and the private reality are unrelated.

A Call for Coherence

As New START ends, the question is not only what agreement might replace it, but what kind of coherence we are willing to recover between how we speak publicly and how we live privately; between power and responsibility; between fear and truth.

De-escalation will require treaties, expertise, and diplomacy. The world also needs to develop a new culture capable of restraint, one that values limits, interdependence, dignity, respect, and honesty over dominance and denial.

The end of New START is sobering, but it can also be an invitation: to step out from behind inherited masks, to slow the reflex of fear, and to remember that security is not only something negotiated at the top, but something sustained or undermined by the values we choose to live by.

Author’s Note

The author is the creative producer of Portraits of the Hibakusha – 80 Years Remembered and a practice-led PhD researcher in Cultural Diplomacy and the arts as catalysts for peace. 80,000 Voices is an organisation that advocates for peace and disarmament through the arts, in partnership with ICAN, Mayors for Peace, and Academie Heddwch.

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The times we are living in are defined by an uneasy relationship with time. Not because time is scarce, but because it is continually broken up, monetised, and shortened. Social media, mainstream, and to a certain extent, independent media narratives, and entrenched structures of power have reshaped attention and, in doing so, altered time itself: how we judge, how quickly we respond, and how incessantly we are expected to perform.

The prevailing atmosphere is distracting rather than reflective. Opinions are rewarded more than understanding. Every time a phone is opened, there is an opinion to behold. Visibility is confused with value. Speed substitutes for depth. For creatives, this produces a particular tension: you are expected to be thoughtful, original, and courageous, while also being constantly available, legible, and responsive. If you subscribe to it, this is not only exhausting but profoundly time-consuming.

Opinions are rewarded more than understanding. Visibility is confused with value. Speed substitutes for depth.

This is not a neutral environment in which to live. It trains the mind to move in tightening loops: reaction, comparison, affirmation, anxiety, repetition. Over time, this contraction begins to feel normal, even inevitable. Often, the consequences are burnout and listlessness, and at worst, suicidal ideation. Is it really that bad? I often think it can be.

Facing Change – Changing Face — Maxwell Durkin

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, written in 1959, thirteen years after the end of World War II, tells the story of a working-class teenager sent to a borstal who discovers the power of solitary running. His endurance is not about winning a race; it is about preserving inner agency, remaining free in a world structured to use him.

Most of us are running someone else’s race without realising it - responding to incentives we did not choose, measured by metrics we did not design, praised for compliance framed as opportunity. The danger is rarely overt coercion. It is the quieter, more insidious experience of being subtly used while believing oneself to be free. Many of us feel this viscerally but struggle to put it into words. Finding language that can be heard is difficult. I keep trying.

Most of us are running someone else’s race without realising it—responding to incentives we did not choose, measured by metrics we did not design.

Personal Context: Punk, Time, and Ted Hughes

I came of age in the late 1970s and was part of the punk scene, not as a musician, but as an intensely engaged teenage participant. Punk was vernacular, noisy, and often wilfully crude. It provoked authority and rejected respectability. More importantly, it was liberating. It was one of the first visible movements in which young people like me could openly rail against the establishment. It exposed the fragility of systems that demanded conformity and celebrated audacity, creativity, and endurance in public view.

Around the same time, through my then-boyfriend, Jonathan, I became socially connected to London’s literary circles, largely via The London Magazine - a magazine founded by his father and poet Alan Ross. In that context, I came to know Ted Hughes. One day, while walking near my boyfriend’s family home, I asked him for advice for someone just starting out in life. He replied simply: “Always give time a shock.”

Over the years, that advice has taken on different meanings. Today, I understand it less as provocation for its own sake and more as an injunction to disrupt habitual time - to break the trance of expectation, efficiency, and use. Giving time a shock is not about speed or spectacle. It is about reclaiming time as something alive rather than something merely spent.

Giving time a shock is not about speed or spectacle. It is about reclaiming time as something alive rather than something merely spent.

Punk gobbing on stage could shock time, briefly, and sometimes go viral. But it would not, on its own, change the conditions we now inhabit. The times we are living in require something more demanding: moral courage, vigilance, and endurance.

Genie With a Bottle — Maxwell Durkin

The Hibakusha and the Nuclear Age

The hibakusha, the “bomb-affected ones”, teach us that endurance is both personal and historical. Their lives bear witness to what can be lost and what must be preserved. They remind us that the world we inhabit is shaped by choices made at pivotal moments.

I often think of the nuclear age as an interlocking set of pillars. The atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 marked the first experience of total annihilation, revealing that our technological power had outstripped our moral imagination. The subsequent decades of nuclear weapons testing, from 1945 into the 1990s, normalised existential threat by embedding it within bureaucratic and scientific systems. In the present moment, nuclear weapons remain largely invisible yet omnipresent in global politics, while public attention is increasingly fragmented, distracted, and shortened.

This combination is not accidental. An invisible threat paired with a distracted populace requires a profound reorientation of thought, philosophy, and moral imagination. We must begin to question the fears, assumptions, and conditioning that underpin the current order.

Endurance as Resistance

Endurance is unfashionable. It does not photograph well. It cannot trend. And yet, endurance is what allows individuals and cultures to survive periods of distortion. It is the capacity to remain present without collapsing inward or lashing outward. To tolerate uncertainty without rushing to resolution. To stay attentive to what matters - values, ethics, life itself - even when there is no applause.

Endurance is the quiet refusal to be used. It is moral courage expressed over time.

Endurance is the quiet refusal to be used. It is moral courage expressed over time.

Expansion and Contraction

Left to itself, the mind tends to contract. It loops, repeats, and seeks certainty. Life, by contrast, expands biologically, relationally, and creatively. Even contemporary physics suggests a universe defined less by fixed objects than by relationships, probabilities, and unfolding potential.

Reflection, solitude, and endurance are ways of re-aligning with life’s larger motion: stepping out of narrowing loops and back into relationship.

A Quiet Refusal

This is not a call to withdraw from the world. It is a call to pause long enough to ask: whose bidding am I doing? At what cost? And to what end?

Like the long-distance runner, the power lies in knowing you could win and choosing when not to. Endurance becomes a radical form of freedom; quiet, subtle, transformative.

Endurance becomes a radical form of freedom; quiet, subtle, transformative.

The hibakusha embody this endurance. They show us what it means to survive, to witness, and to live with attention and moral courage in an era that once annihilated cities and still holds that power.

About the Author / Context

Over the past two decades, I have worked closely with hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, through arts projects, exhibitions, and lenticular portrait commissions. This work, including Portraits of the Hibakusha – 80 Years Remembered, has been supported by international collaborators such as Soka Gakkai International and has involved translating stories and labels across English, Japanese, and Welsh.

Through these encounters, I have witnessed the quiet endurance, moral courage, and attentive presence of those who survived unimaginable destruction. I aim to bring these lessons into broader conversations about creativity, moral responsibility, and meaningful living in the nuclear era.

I first visited Hiroshima in September 2013, when I enrolled at Hiroshima City University to study a graduate course in Peace Studies, with Professor Robert Jacobs as my senior tutor. It was a lively three-week discussion and study session with professors and several young students that I enjoyed immensely. I was profoundly moved by the stories of the hibakusha (the “bomb affected ones”) who came to the university to speak to us about what happened in 1945, and promised to use my skills as a creative director and producer when I returned home. That was when I formed 80,000 Voices, which today is an arts organisation that advocates for nuclear disarmament.

On my second visit to Hiroshima, I expected a quieter, more solemn encounter with history. This time, I had come to attend the Global Victims Forum, and I wasn’t entirely looking forward to it. I knew I would hear difficult stories and firsthand accounts of nuclear harm from around the world. I would also be meeting the hibakusha - many of whom were hosting the forum - to film and interview them, visit the Peace Memorial Park, see the names of the victims etched in stone, and lay a wreath with my colleague, Dr Elizabeth Ingrams, who had travelled with me and would conduct the interviews.

What I discovered was something far bigger - a story that spans deserts, oceans, and decades. Here, I met the “global hibakusha”: people affected not just by atomic bombs, but by the lingering, invisible reach of nuclear testing and contamination.

Caption: Mary Dickson, downwinder and playwright of Exposed, photographed with me at the Global Victims Forum in Hiroshima, 2015.

Among them was Mary Dickson, a downwinder and long-standing activist from Utah and survivor of thyroid cancer caused by radioactive fallout. Mary wrote Exposed, a play that tells the story of ordinary people who lived under radioactive clouds from Nevada’s nuclear testing. It blends her personal experience with those of her sister and other community members, showing how trusting official assurances could not protect them from invisible, decades-long harm. The play is raw, personal, and unflinching - a stark reminder of the human costs that were quietly swept under the rug.

Downwinders: Lives in the Shadow of Fallout

I also learned about the downwinders of Nevada more broadly - ranchers, children, and families who lived under drifting clouds of radioactive dust from above-ground tests at Yucca Flat between 1951 and 1963. These invisible bombs reshaped lives: cancers, congenital disabilities, chronic illness, and grief that spanned generations. Ordinary people, powerless in the face of government-sanctioned nuclear experiments, became unwitting participants in a slow, invisible war.

Caption: The Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima - Gina Langton and Dr Elizabeth Ingrams (with downwinder and activist/writer Mary Dickson in the background) remembering those who survived the atomic bombings of 1945.

Hollywood and Radioactive Sand

Radiation didn’t just stay in the desert - it drifted into Hollywood. In June 1954, the cast and crew of The Conqueror, produced by Howard Hughes and starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan, travelled to Saint George, Utah, to film. Saint George sits just 137 miles from Yucca Flat, which at the time was likely one of the most irradiated places on Earth. Many of the cast and crew later developed cancer, including John Wayne himself. The film earned the grim reputation of being a place “where you earned a death sentence.”

A documentary, The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout, revisits the story, showing how radioactive dust drifted across the set and into local communities. It’s a chilling example of how nuclear contamination doesn’t just touch distant landscapes - it seeps into culture itself, shaping lives and art in ways no one expected.

The Shelf Life of Radiation

Radiation has a long shelf life. Soil, dust, water, and even food chains carry its invisible legacy for decades, sometimes centuries. The harm persists silently, shaping lives long after the headlines fade. This is what Prof. Robert Jacobs calls the Global Hibakusha in his book published a few years ago, “Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha”. Traditionally, hibakusha refers to survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Jacobs expands the term to include anyone touched by nuclear exposure: downwinders, accident survivors, and communities near nuclear facilities or test sites. Radiation is not just a scientific or political concern - it is a cultural force, shaping fear, imagination, and social memory.

Nuclear Culture Today

Look around 20th and 21st century culture, and you see its fingerprints everywhere. Godzilla movies, Cold War civil defence drills, architecture, literature, activism - all reflect the anxieties of nuclear life. Fear, denial, fascination - these threads are woven into the fabric of our daily existence, often unnoticed. Our collective imagination carries them whether we live near a bomb site, a desert set in Utah, or a movie theatre in Los Angeles.

Even today, nuclear exposure is not just history. Contamination lingers invisibly in soil, water, and ecosystems, passing from generation to generation. Nuclear culture is subtle, pervasive, and often hidden, yet it shapes our habits, our media, and our anxieties in ways we rarely notice.

Remembering and Acknowledging

Standing in Hiroshima, I felt it clearly: nuclear culture isn’t confined to textbooks or memorials. It flows through art, policy, and daily life, through invisible radiation, and through the stories of those the world has forgotten. The hibakusha, once a term for a single city’s survivors, now stretches across deserts, oceans, and even into the movies we watch.

Understanding this history is not about fear-mongering. It’s about acknowledgement and awareness: recognising that the consequences of human ambition are long-lived, diffuse, and morally complex. Theatre, film, literature, and memory all bear witness to these invisible threads. And by listening to these stories - from Mary Dickson’s Exposed to the cast of The Conqueror - we see the human face of nuclear culture, and the quiet resilience of those it touched.

I am a cultural producer, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of art, memory, and nuclear history. My work focuses on how culture absorbs and reflects the long-term human consequences of nuclear violence - from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to test sites, deserts, and communities far from the blast zones. Through exhibitions, writing, and collaboration with survivors, artists, and scholars, I seek to make visible the stories that have too often been marginalised or forgotten, and to explore how the arts can open spaces for reflection, dialogue, and responsibility.

We Live in a World of Hidden Threats

We live in a world where the most significant threats are almost invisible. Nuclear weapons are one of them. Most of us encounter them only in headlines or in films like Oppenheimer: dramatic, thrilling, distant.

But what if we could feel the weight of history, the human cost, and the possibility of change all at once? That is what I have been exploring through my work.

Bringing Humanity to the Unimaginable

I help bring the stories of the dwindling hibakusha and nuclear-test survivors into spaces where the public can encounter them, through exhibitions, performances, workshops, and programmes that illuminate what they witnessed and the horrors they had to survive.

In those moments, people do not just learn; they feel. They pause. These encounters give us a moment to imagine walking in another person’s shoes. Awareness and empathy can become action; that is the objective. I’ve written about my own experience with this in a previous post.

Substack post.

I create spaces for honest conversation and reflection—for history that is memorable and capable of inspiring change. The goal is for hope to emerge from understanding gained through firsthand testimony.

Right now, this work is urgent. The hibakusha will not live for much longer.

As Rebecca Solnit reminds us:

“Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.”

Memory-induced hope serves as a compass for the choices we can make today, or collective amnesia takes over. We see examples of that everywhere. Cloaked in the guise of self-defence and human security, hostility and violence are justified by an extensive back-catalogue of war histories.
Why change the way we have always operated?
Why question “winning” and “losing”?
To hell with the long-term consequences, and ultimately, to hell with us.

Why This Work Is So Challenging and So Urgent

The nuclear threat is immense, invisible, and ever looming. Most people feel only a faint sense of urgency; they know it exists but don’t give it too much thought. “Let sleeping dogs lie.” “Don’t wake up the beast.”

There’s been a 40-year news embargo: general news fatigue and a public numbed by endless “isms,” each offering a temporary fix but feeding anxiety further. Meanwhile, the beast marches on, leaving a more toxic world; more heavily armed, more vulnerable to climate devastation. Our global ecosystem could be destroyed in minutes.

The challenge is both psychological and spiritual. We struggle to confront our own beasts: the darker truths about who we are, and the systems we’ve created that have led us here.

Too often, we focus solely on the traumas of the past instead of envisioning and working toward a future without war. We go in circles, ruminating, second-guessing our opponents (our mirrors of hostility), while scrolling endlessly through our phones, killing precious time feeding our addiction to distraction.

To imagine a safer world, we need to trust in a power greater than our individual fear and indifference. We need to reach into a collective spirit with creativity at its heart, connected and supportive.

Without that trust, the mind keeps looping back to our hideous histories, insisting we are unsafe because of what others will do to us. But that isn’t the whole truth. Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to forge a life-affirming future; what holds us back is often our fear of stepping into the unknown.

Hope requires courage. And courage begins the moment we stop rehearsing the past and allow ourselves to believe something better is possible.

We have allowed leaders and media figures who thrive on inducing fear and “othering” to manipulate us, feeding off our gullibility. We are only outraged when it affects our bank accounts. The information is out there, but we choose to ignore it.

We are complicit in their rise because we refuse to face the truth, preferring the charm that lures us in and ultimately leads to great suffering.

We recognise narcissism when we see it; the future-faking, manipulating, controlling, self-serving behaviour. Yet we let those who display it control the world’s deadliest arsenal.
Haven’t we realised we’re their supply?
We’ve learned to recognise it in partners and spouses, but when it comes to authority, there’s a disconnect.

Nuclear weapons are on the rise. More fighter jets are being built to carry them, and nuclear weapons are being shared and hosted by non-nuclear states. We may claim we will never use these weapons, yet trillions of dollars are poured into preparing for potential conflict.
For what?

It reveals our darkness, and that is what we have to battle. Until we do, the darkness keeps its secrets of impending doom under wraps and unreported.

Avoiding this darkness has bred in us a learned helplessness: a belief that the problem is too vast for any of us to influence. This is accompanied by a refusal to examine our part in this massive conspiracy. We end up living an anodyne, weaponised existence, staying muzzled and catatonic, waiting for someone else to take action.

And yet the stakes could not be higher. In a nuclear war, there will be no “I told you so.” There will be no one rising to fight for justice, no hero, no saviour. Nothing will remain.

That existential truth keeps me up at night and drives my commitment to this work.

We are better off without nuclear weapons. There can be no hope, no redemption, no memory, and no future if they are ever used.

When someone encounters a survivor’s story, understanding becomes empathy, distance becomes intimacy, and awareness emerges. From that awareness, the desire to act can grow, once we shed the armour of pain and the defensiveness we believe keeps us safe.

Why I Keep Going

I keep going because I believe another world is possible. I have grandchildren, and I cannot bear the thought of them growing up in a world governed by greed, carelessness, and nuclear threats.

When people see, feel, and understand, they act.

Working with donors, policymakers, and cultural institutions amplifies the connection between art, memory, and hope. I have witnessed this before: it was effective with the Windrush Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. That exhibition was supported by a compassionate narrative that placed those who had suffered racism at the heart of a culture of kindness, granting them dignity, recognition, respect, and space for healing.

Art alone cannot prevent nuclear war, but it can make ignoring it impossible. It can make hope and action possible.

Support art that refuses to let us forget, and that brings us together, so that we can live more vibrant, stable, and fulfilling lives.

Portraits of the Hibakusha – 80 Years Remembered

Our exhibition, Portraits of the Hibakusha, photographed by Patrick Boyd, brings these stories to life in three dimensions. Lenticular portraiture creates depth and movement, inviting viewers into a space of reflection and human connection.

In Japan, the exhibition, which has now toured four cities, has drawn over 50,000 visitors, and is currently on show in Cardiff.

“This exhibit astounded me… a collective wake-up call… This show needs to be seen by as many people as possible around the world.”

“[It] had a profound effect… my friend’s 14-year-old daughter is now doing a project on the hibakusha.”

The hibakusha do not dwell in despair. Their message is clear:
A Nuclear disaster cannot happen again.

Art gives that message the voice it deserves. It challenges power, expands imagination, and cultivates moral courage.

Photo: Seikyo Shimbun

About the Author

Gina Langton is the CEO of 80,000 Voices, a cultural producer and researcher dedicated to using art as a catalyst for peace and disarmament education. She is the creative producer of Portraits of the Hibakusha – 80 Years Remembered, a series of 3D lenticular portraits of atomic bomb survivors. She writes about how memory, empathy, and creativity can inspire action in the face of global threats.

I often say that I am an ordinary person pursuing an extraordinary challenge. Not extraordinary because I am special, but because the work itself is. And because every step demands a kind of courage I never knew I had until I needed it.

Right now, I am living through a period when expansion and resistance have been arriving together. It is uncomfortable, humbling, and profoundly instructive, and as I rarely examine my mindset when life is running smoothly, reflection seems to happen when I am tested. Recently, the tests have been relentless.

Yet even when I feel tired or emptied out, something immovable remains: a deep desire to help shift the culture of war and abolish nuclear weapons through art. That’s my beef; I am not here to represent the old paradigm, or to posture as the architect of a new one. I speak simply as a human being—with faith in humanity, and in a power greater than the smaller self that wants to shrink, withdraw, or take the air away from others.

This stance is the foundation of my work and the source of my resilience.

Who I Am (and Who I Am Not)

I am a multidisciplinary artist—primarily a writer, a curator, and a connector of voices and stories. My work emerges from intuition, conscience, and a lifetime of watching how culture shapes perception long before policy ever does. I’ve worked on the fringes for long enough to watch the movements and the shifts in consciousness.

I don’t claim authority from institutions or academic paradigms. I claim the authority of lived experience, deep listening, and the determination to create value where others see obstacles. That is how ordinary people initiate extraordinary change.

The Weight of Grudges, Blame, and “What-Ifism”

One of the greatest hindrances to my work is not necessarily external resistance, although it can prompt internal contraction. Holding grudges or replaying minor hurts slows me down. Blame seduces me into believing that someone else is responsible for my stagnation. And to start with, I can get caught up in that ingrained habit. My mother used to do it. And then what often follows is a plunge into a what-ifism—What if this doesn't work? What if support disappears? What if I’m misjudged, misunderstood, or alone?

These thoughts suffocate creativity. They shrink my life.

That is when I have to draw on courage and reconnect with my deeper purpose. And courage, I’ve learned, cannot always be summoned in isolation, but in order to conquer doubt and keep growing I need to reach out to people I trust—mentors, collaborators, spiritual companions—help me to breathe again. Their clarity and their wisdom realigns mine so that I can stay on course.

Creating Value Instead of Being Dominated by Circumstance

Art is the language of the subconscious: honest, unfiltered, and wiser than intellect. It reveals complicity, exploitation, and the quiet cruelties we’ve normalised. It also reveals our longing for integrity and our capacity for unity.

To create value is to refuse to be dominated by circumstances or narratives that diminish human dignity. It means choosing movement over paralysis. It means resisting the cultural weather that encourages fear, bullying, obedience, and silence.

For generations, we looked up to cultural institutions as guardians of truth and beauty. We’ve looked up to academics and experts. But are they looking up to us? Increasingly, institutions—from museums to universities to media—feel corporate, indebted to government agendas, and entangled with the broader undercurrent of the military-industrial narrative that protects the qualifiers and discards the unworthy. Independence has evaporated. Complicity is rife—barriers to entry rise. And the stories that shape public consciousness often reinforce, rather than challenge, inherited orthodoxies about security, conflict, and power.

This is why alternative voices—artists, citizens, educators, communities—are indispensable. We must create the value institutions have forgotten: human value, peace value, moral value.

The Four Pillars of My Work

Four interconnected truths shape everything I do. They are not political positions; they are historical realities and ethical imperatives.

1. What happened in 1945

The atomic bombings were not merely military strategy—they were a rupture of humanity itself. A precedent was set that civilian annihilation could be justified. We have still not reckoned with this truth.

2. What happened across more than 2,000 nuclear tests

Whole populations—Indigenous, rural, colonised—were treated as expendable. Islands and deserts became sacrifice zones. The rest of the world was fed propaganda appealing to greed, indifference, and survival-of-the-fittest thinking. These actions carved geopolitical schisms that remain today, alive in bodies, landscapes, and inherited trauma.

3. What is happening now

The same logic persists. Nuclear-armed states maintain hierarchies of whose lives matter. Cultural institutions often reflect this logic rather than interrogate it. Militarised narratives dominate the media. Dissenting voices, especially artistic ones, face shrinking space and rising scrutiny. Peace is undermined and underfunded.

4. Imagining a future that is no longer hostile

A peaceful world cannot be built on hostile individuals. Peace begins with people who know how to live creative, meaningful, joyful lives. This is not naïve; it is strategic. Fulfilled human beings do not need to dominate or destroy. A non-hostile future requires internal transformation as much as external action.

Why I Continue

Confidence does not come from ease. It comes from being centred in the knowledge that no matter what happens, I can get through it. That conviction keeps me alive.

I return often to prayer, asking what my deepest why is. And every time, I arrive at the same place: I made a promise—to my mentor, to myself, and to the hibakusha.
A promise to honour their stories, their warnings, and their desire for a world free from the weapons that defined their suffering.

No storm can uproot a promise like that.

Unity: The Only Way Forward

Working with people whom society has overlooked has taught me that the belief in “expendable lives” is at the core of our global dysfunction. It contradicts everything I know to be true about interconnectedness.

Unity is not idealism. It is infrastructure.
It is how ordinary people achieve what institutions cannot.
It is the antidote to hostility, fear, and despair.

So I keep moving.
I keep creating value.
I keep stepping into uncertainty with as much courage as I can summon.

Because resilience is not a trait—it is a practice. And the vision I’m pursuing is far bigger than my momentary doubts.

This is what it means to love the challenge. Not because it is comfortable, but because it is necessary.

Gina Langton, CEO and Founder of 80,000 Voices, an organisation that advocates for peace through the arts, is a multidisciplinary artist, a writer, and a curator dedicated to using the arts as a tool for peace, reflection, and social change. She works, often with other artists, to illuminate the human and environmental legacies of nuclear weapons and to inspire a more fulfilling, compassionate, and non-hostile world.

“The purpose of life is to live it for the sake of others.” — Daisaku Ikeda

When I spent ten days as an invigilator for Portraits of the Hibakusha – 80 Years Remembered at the Norwegian Church Arts Centre in Cardiff (24 October – 30 November 2025), I didn’t realise how much I would personally benefit from the experience. I thought I knew the work—after all, I had helped bring it into being. But being in the gallery, day after day, surrounded by these faces, I found myself quietly transformed and deeply grateful for the opportunity.

A Gallery of Stillness and Evolving Perspectives

The gallery has a particular stillness. The lenticular portraits shift as visitors move. One moment, the survivors look straight at you; the next, they seem to look past you, as though seeing something beyond this moment. There’s something profound in that movement: a reminder that perspective is mutable.

Image suggestion: A wide shot of the gallery with visitors moving among the portraits.

Dialogue Across Time

As visitors come and go, the exhibition becomes a living dialogue. Each person brings their own memories, questions, preconceptions, and personal trauma. Some walk silently from portrait to portrait, shifting their bodies from side to side, as if trying to see into the lives of the hibakusha, to connect.

A parent talks to their child, explaining what happened in 1945. Others pause to watch the video of Koko Kondo, the daughter of Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, one of the survivors chronicled in John Hersey’s Hiroshima.

In the video, Koko tells her story as a ten-year-old girl appearing on the American television programme This Is Your Life in 1955, when she and her father are unexpectedly brought face-to-face with Captain Robert A. Lewis, the co-pilot of the Enola Gay—the plane from which the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Seeing her describe that moment, she chooses to reach out and forgive rather than condemn, even though she is upset, after seeing the tears in the pilot’s eyes. That decision defines the course of the rest of her life.

Witnessing Forgiveness in Action

One afternoon, a visitor stood watching that video, and tears began to roll down her cheeks. We stood together quietly for a while. Then she said softly:

“I think I understand now. Forgiveness isn’t about forgetting, but about seeing.”

We discussed how true resolution arises when suffering is acknowledged and felt on both sides. Forgiveness is not a transaction; it is a transformation.

In that moment, I shared something of my own journey: how I came to this work through personal loss, after my daughter died suddenly at the age of twenty. That experience, too, had taught me how grief can either close the heart or open it wider. Standing there, both of us in tears, I realised that the exhibition was not just about remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was about learning how to live, how to heal, and how to remain human.

Lessons in Humility and Moral Courage

What strikes me again and again is the humility of the hibakusha. These survivors carry unimaginable trauma, yet they speak with quiet dignity, without hatred. They refuse to embrace the identity of victimhood. Instead, they use their experiences to encourage empathy, to warn others, and to teach. Their resilience is not merely physical endurance; it is moral courage.

Several visitors have told me they didn’t know anyone had survived the atomic bombings. Their surprise often turns into fascination—how did they survive? And then comes awe as they learn about the decades that followed: the stigma attached to radiation sickness, the ostracisation, the social and political silence in postwar Japan, and the world’s reluctance to face the moral implications and consequences of what was done to these people—and what could happen again.

That stigma stems from our collective unwillingness to bear witness and take responsibility for our cruelty. The atomic bombings were not only acts of destruction but acts of dehumanisation. And the acts continue to perpetuate: reducing human beings to strategic targets, treating civilian deaths as acceptable collateral. Societies often distract, rationalise, and perpetuate myths instead of acknowledging the truth.

Seeing, Feeling, Transforming

To truly learn from the hibakusha, we must resist that tendency. We must look directly at what happened, not with guilt or defensiveness, but with compassion and a willingness to change. This requires a massive shift in cultural, spiritual, and educational values—from an understanding of peace as domination and denial towards a peace of empathy and human dignity on both personal and collective levels.

Invigilating the exhibition has been a spiritual experience for me—a reminder that being truly spiritual does not mean escaping the pain of the world or remaining fearful, defaulting to anger, or blaming others. It means facing these emotions and transforming them. It means taking personal responsibility to stay focused and courageous enough to work towards a better peace, starting with our own lives, which contain the potential for empathy and compassion, as exemplified by the hibakusha and their remarkable survival. They teach us that forgiveness is not a sign of weakness; it is the highest form of resilience.

Art as Cultural Diplomacy

As the number of survivors dwindles, the exhibition becomes a vital messenger. While many hibakusha can no longer travel to share their stories in person, these portraits travel for them, opening up conversations that might never happen. It is not only an artwork but also a form of cultural diplomacy, serving as a bridge between histories, nations, and individuals.

Every time I watch someone’s face soften in front of a portrait, it validates that art can open doors that politics keeps closed. These portraits can spark dialogue not through argument, but through compassion. They remind us that the consequences of nuclear violence are human, intimate, and ongoing.

Choosing Humanity

The lessons the hibakusha teach us are urgent: peace is not a distant ideal; it is a daily act of choosing humanity over indifference. It begins with seeing differently, with the courage to look, to feel, and to forgive. The exhibition is their voice travelling across the world, urging us to respond with empathy, care, and moral courage to preserve our lives and that of our planet.

Author’s Note

Gina Langton is Creative Director and CEO of 80,000 Voices and the creative producer of Portraits of the Hibakusha – 80 Years Remembered. She is a practice-led PhD researcher exploring the role of art and cultural diplomacy in creating dialogue around nuclear disarmament. This exhibition has also been shown in Tokyo (2024), as well as in Nagasaki, Fukuoka, and Hiroshima (2025), with the full collection of 52 lenticular portraits reaching more than 50,000 visitors and receiving widespread acclaim.