Hiroshima’s Question: Will We Continue to Live Under the Nuclear Shadow? Such testimony is a reminder that the damage caused by nuclear weapons does not end with the blast. When strategists calculate the value of possessing nuclear weapons, it is this long span of human time that most easily disappears from view. In the Middle East, a zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, first promised in 1995, has still not been established. Supporters of nuclear deterrence point to the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used in war since Hiroshima and Nagasaki as evidence that deterrence works.