Tsutomo Yamaguchi....

...died on 6 January aged 93.

He was the only survivor of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By an unimaginable nightmare he was packing to leave Hiroshima for Nagasaki after a 3 month assignment at the Mitsibushi shipyard when the first bomb fell. He saw it parachuted from the American plane and suffered serious burns although he was 2 miles from the epicentre of the blast.

He managed to make the 200 mile journey to Nagasaki and rejoin his wife and baby son barely stopping to have his wounds treated. And the day he reported back for work the second bomb fell.

Amazingly his wife and son survived with him although his son died of cancer in 2005 aged 59.

His story rightly reminds me of the horrors of nuclear war. Of the MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction principle that somehow kept the USA and Soviet Union from launching first strikes during the Cold War. Of Cuba and its missile crisis in 1962 which seems so long away now.

Yet Tsutomo Yamaguchi's story is a telling and potent reminder of dangers we dare not forget. It brings home what is at stake in Iran and Pakistan.