The Nuclear Threat

At five years old, I  the read the headline in the Boston Globe when the morning paper arrived at our home in Natick, MA.  In the boldest letters you can image were the words A-BOMB!  It was the second detonation of a nuclear (Atomic) bomb in the world.  But this bomb killed nearly 90,000 – 146,000 people living in Hiroshima.  Three days later another A-Bomb was dropped on Nagasaki killing between 39,00 – 80,000 people.

The US military was ready to drop a bomb on other Japanese cities every three days, or until they surrendered.

When Dwight Eisenhower heard about the A-Bombs, he said this:

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, for his part, stated in his memoirs that when notified by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the decision to use atomic weapons, he “voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives…” He later publicly declared “…it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”  (Alperovitz, Gar. “The War Was Won Before Hiroshima-And the Generals Who Dropped the Bomb Knew It.” The Nation. 6 Aug. 2015. Web. 7 Aug. 2015.)

Within a few years, a new and more murderous bomb was developed by the US: the Hydrogen Bomb.  Soon, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France has nuclear weapons.  Very soon, these countries designed and perfected Intercontinental missiles capable of delivering H-Bombs anywhere on the Earth.

Presently, Earth is armed with thousands of nuclear weapons.  Here are the leading nuclear bomb nations:

• China: 250 warheads
• France: 290 warheads
• Russia: 1,582 strategic warheads, several thousand non deployed warheads, and 2,000 tactical warheads
• United Kingdom: 120 strategic warheads, total stockpile about 225 weapons
• United States: 1, 597 strategic nuclear warheads, 2,800 non deployed strategic warheads. In total about 4,800 nuclear warheads.

MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction is an US Defense Department military strategy that assures that in a full-scale nuclear exchange, the result would be complete annihilation.  The men who developed and hold on to this theory believe that it has prevented war between the superpowers.  Now, that’s what is mad.  In truth, nuclear war has been diverted by last second decisions that real people had to make to prevent a nuclear holocaust.

This murderous horror that we have lived with for more than 70 years can be summed by this quote from Lifton’s book on climate and nuclear threats.

He writes:

Psychologically speaking, one of the terrible legacies of the twentieth century was our realization that we could annihilate ourselves as a species with our own technology. What resulted in our minds was imagery of extinction.  Lifton, Robert Jay. The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival (Kindle Locations 248-249). The New Press. Kindle Edition.

The Doomsday Clock.  Founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 which sets Midnight as the moment of apocalypse.

It’s now two minutes to midnight.

The clock is a universal indicator of threat to the world from nuclear weapons, climate change, and new technologies.

This past year is not been a good one.  Not only did the US drop out of the Paris Climate Accord, but Trump has threatened to walk away from the Iran Nuclear Deal between Iran and the permanent members of the UN Security Council, as well as Germany and the EU.  Early in the year, Trump and Kim Jong-un staged a war or words and gestures insulting each other, at the cost of the everyone else in the world.  Now it seems that these two want to meet and discuss nuclear weapons.

Would you choose these two to talk about nuclear weapons and the fate of millions of people?

Doomsday Machines. According to work by Daniel Ellsberg, the US and Russia have real Doomsday Machines (DM).  A DM is a system of men, machines, electronics, communications, institutions, plans, training, discipline, practices and doctrine that could within minutes bring about the global destruction of civilization and probably all of human life.  Doomsday Machines have brought the world very close to all out nuclear war several times over the past 5 decades.

In his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (public library) by Daniel Ellsberg, the author explores the question: Does any nation on earth have the right to threaten other nations simply by possessing a system to destroy a country or the world?

The United Nations adopted a treaty in July 2017 that would ban nuclear weapons.  At a UN meeting on to discuss nuclear weapons abolition, none of the nuclear weapons states (US as leader) attended, even though 120 other nations signed the treaty.

Just as we are working to slow the rate that the earth is warming, so too must we work to denuclearize the earth.  Isn’t it interesting that we do talk about denuclearization when it comes to North Korea or Iran, but none of the nuclear nations are willing to look into the mirror and ask, “Do we have the right to keep up our nuclear weapons arsenal?

What do you think?