90 Seconds to Midnight by Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs
Forthcoming | June, 2025
90 Seconds to Midnight | A Hiroshima Survivor’s Nuclear Odyssey by Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, tells the extraordinary life story of Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow, a Hiroshima survivor turned lifelong advocate against nuclear weapons.
Thurlow was a thirteen-year-old girl living in Hiroshima in 1945, when the city was annihilated by an atomic bomb. Struggling with grief and anger, she set out to warn the world about the horrors of a nuclear attack in a crusade that has lasted seven decades.
In 2015, Thurlow sparked a rallying cry for activists when she proclaimed at the United Nations, “Humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.” With that, she shifted the global discussion from nuclear deterrence to humanitarian consequences, the key in crafting the landmark Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Regarded as the conscience of the antinuclear movement, Thurlow accepted the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. With the fate of humanity at stake and with the resolve of her samurai ancestors, Thurlow challenged leaders of the nuclear-armed states. On January 22, 2021, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons went into effect, banning nuclear weapons under international law.
Critical historical events need a personal narrative, and Thurlow is such a storyteller for Hiroshima. 90 Seconds to Midnight recounts Thurlow’s ascent from the netherworld where she saw, heard, and smelled death and her relentless efforts to protect the world from an unspeakable fate. Knowing she would have to live with those nightmares, Thurlow turned them into a force to impel people across the globe to learn from Hiroshima, to admit that, yes, it could happen again—and then to take action.
Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs is a professor of medicine emerita at Stanford University. She is the author of two critically acclaimed books, Jonas Salk: A Life and Henry Kaplan and the Story of Hodgkin’s Disease.
- ISBN-13: 978-1640126305
- 352 pages
- Forthcoming | June 2025
Published by: Potomac Books
