The connection between Hiroshima and Tehran is not one most people would guess. But in the early 2000s, the founders of a Tehran-based NGO called the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support traveled to Japan and stood inside the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. What they saw changed the trajectory of their work. Here was a city that had taken its most catastrophic suffering and turned it into something luminous -- a museum that did not merely memorialize the dead but actively argued for the living. Iran, they realized, had its own parallel agony. During the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988, Iraqi forces used chemical weapons extensively against Iranian soldiers and civilians. Tens of thousands were exposed to mustard gas and nerve agents. Many survived but carried the damage in their lungs, their skin, their eyes. These survivors needed more than medical care. They needed a place where their suffering could speak.
The Tehran Peace Museum opened on June 29, 2007, as both a memorial to Iran's chemical weapons victims and an active center for peace advocacy. The date was deliberately chosen: it coincided with the anniversary of the 1987 gas attack on the city of Sardasht, in West Azerbaijan Province, when Iraqi warplanes dropped chemical bombs on a civilian population. Sardasht holds the grim distinction of being the first city in the world to be attacked with chemical weapons after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The museum was established through collaboration between the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support, the city of Tehran, other Iranian NGOs, and individuals and groups from Hiroshima itself. It sits inside a building donated by the Tehran municipality within the historic Park-e Shahr, the City Park -- one of the oldest public parks in the capital. The location is deliberate: peace, the museum argues, belongs in the middle of daily life.
What sets the Tehran Peace Museum apart from a conventional memorial is its insistence on living testimony. The museum houses a documentary studio where individual stories of warfare victims are recorded and archived. These are not abstract statistics. They are specific people describing specific moments: the taste of the air when the gas came, the years of breathing difficulty that followed, the children born with complications. The peace library collects literature spanning international law, peace implementation strategies, and oral histories from veterans and victims. Among the more striking exhibits are 3D holographic images created from portraits of Iran-Iraq War martyrs, designed by Hesam Bani-Eghbal and his team at Hesam Animation Studio. Permanent and rotating art exhibitions display work from international and Iranian artists, alongside children's drawings -- a reminder that the youngest generation absorbs war's consequences whether or not they lived through it.
The museum's opening ceremony for its new building on June 29, 2011, made the Hiroshima connection tangible. Guests included the director of the Hiroshima Peace Museum, a delegation of Hiroshima atomic bombing survivors, and survivors of the chemical weapons attack on Halabja in northern Iraq -- the 1988 massacre that killed thousands of Kurdish civilians. Iranian activists and war veterans joined them. The gathering was extraordinary in its scope: people scarred by atomic weapons, by chemical weapons, by different wars in different decades, standing in the same room. The Tehran Peace Museum is a member of the International Network of Museums for Peace, and it hosts the Iranian secretariat for Mayors for Peace, the international organization founded in Hiroshima. These institutional connections are more than symbolic. They link Iran's chemical weapons experience to a global conversation about disarmament that stretches from Nagasaki to The Hague.
The museum is not a place of quiet contemplation alone. It functions as an interactive peace center. On April 29, 2012, it hosted an observance of the International Day of Remembrance for all victims of chemical warfare, featuring statements from Iranian chemical weapons survivors, music performances, and the planting of olive trees. The gesture of planting trees on the grounds of a war memorial captures the museum's philosophy: peace is not merely the absence of conflict but an active, growing thing that requires cultivation. In a country whose modern identity has been profoundly shaped by the Iran-Iraq War -- a conflict that killed hundreds of thousands and left a generation marked by chemical exposure -- the Tehran Peace Museum occupies a unique position. It asks Iranians and visitors alike to hold two truths simultaneously: that the suffering was real and immense, and that it must become an argument against future wars rather than a justification for them.
Located at 35.684N, 51.415E in central Tehran, within Park-e Shahr (City Park). The park is visible as a green patch amid dense urban fabric near the southern edge of central Tehran. Mehrabad International Airport (OIII) lies approximately 10 km west. Imam Khomeini International Airport (OIIE) is about 50 km south. Best viewed at medium altitude where the contrast between the park's greenery and surrounding city blocks is apparent. The Alborz Mountains rise dramatically to the north, providing a striking backdrop.