Tag: nuclear war

Once in the previous century, I actually visited the city of Hiroshima. I was an editor at Pantheon Books and had published a translation of a Japanese volume, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. In it, years later, a few survivors of that city, devastated by the first nuclear weapon used in war on August 6, 1945, none of them artists, had drawn vividly memorable pictures of their experiences accompanied by short, grimly touching descriptions. Mikio Inoue, then 72 years old, for instance, drew an image of a professor he knew and had come upon that horrendous day, the sky still red with flames (“a sea of fire”), almost naked, holding a rice ball in his fist, who had failed to save his wife, trapped under a roof beam. “But I wonder,” Inoue later wrote, “how he came to hold that rice ball in his hand? His naked figure, standing there before the flames with that rice ball looked to me as a symbol of the modest hope of human beings.”

The Japanese editor of that book, amazed that an American would ever have published it, invited me to his country in 1982 and took me to that rebuilt city to visit the all-too-grim museum there dedicated to preserving memories of that nightmarish experience. It was — to reuse a word from the book’s title — a genuinely unforgettable experience for me. And I’m still reminded of the destruction of Hiroshima regularly when, in my neighborhood in New York City, between 105th and 106th street on Riverside Drive, I regularly walk by an impressive bronze statue of Shinran Shonin, the founder of the Jodo Shinshu sect of Buddhism, in front of a local Buddhist temple with this sign: “The statue originally stood in Hiroshima, at a site 2.5 kilometers northwest from the center of the first atomic bomb attack. Having survived the full force of the bomb, the statue was brought to New York in September of 1955 to be a testimonial to the atomic bomb devastation and a symbol of lasting hope for world peace.”

Perhaps, under the circumstances, we should consider it something of a miracle, 80 years later, that the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended World War II in the Pacific, was horrifying enough so that, of all the weaponry that’s been used ever since in humanity’s never-ending war-making, atomic weapons have not been. And yet, unnervingly enough, nine countries have now gone nuclear, and my own country simply can’t seem to stop building (or rather “modernizing“) its already vast nuclear arsenal to the tune of $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years.

It seems genuinely beyond belief, as TomDispatch regular retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore reminds us so vividly today in his — yes! — 115th piece for this site, that our country is still investing an unbelievable fortune in that modernization process for an arsenal already big enough to destroy not just this planet but several others as well. So, take a moment to accompany him briefly into the past and to Cheyenne Mountain as he offers his own countdown on this strange, strange planet of ours

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Diplomacy, like poetry, depends on the precision of language. The stakes are higher, though, because a poorly chosen phrase can accelerate a crisis rather than illuminate a path out of it. Yet here we are: a renewed nuclear arms race may be triggered because the president of the United States appears not to understand what the term “nuclear tests” actually means, and no one in his own administration is prepared to offer clarity to Russia, the only other country capable of ending the world in an afternoon.

Time, as ever, moves faster than our political instincts. The system of strategic stability agreements that shaped the late 20th century has been swept away like autumn leaves on a November sidewalk. Each individual collapse seemed manageable, almost technical. But look back to 2002, when Washington abandoned the 1972 ABM Treaty, and the trajectory becomes unmistakable. Since then, one agreement after another has either died or been deliberately dismantled: the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and most recently, New START. Now the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty of 1996 looks likely to follow.

The lone survivor is the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. But even the NPT’s foundations are loosening. Article VI obliges nuclear powers to pursue, in good faith, negotiations on ending the nuclear arms race. Once those negotiations end, and they effectively have already, non-nuclear states are entitled to conclude that the system no longer protects their interests. Most will hesitate to embark on nuclear programs, but it would take only a handful of new entrants to reshape global security in ways no one can control.

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The last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia — New START — is set to expire on Feb. 5, 2026.

This treaty, which caps the nuclear arsenals of both nations at 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear weapons each, was signed back in 2010, during the administrations of U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. At that time, the two nations were engaged in what proved to be an abortive “reset” of relations.

But the underlying problems which prompted the need for a reset —  NATO expansion, continued U.S. pursuit of hegemony disguised as a “rules based international order” and a general U.S. disregard for arms control as a necessary mechanism of global stability — were never fully addressed, and new problems emerged (such as the reemergence of Vladimir Putin as the president of Russian, Russian intervention in Syria and the conflict in Ukraine) which made a reset impossible.

Instead, relations between the two nuclear-armed world powers worsened, and today the U.S. finds itself in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine that threatens to go nuclear at any moment should either side make a mistake or miscalculation. Both nations find themselves on the cusp of a new nuclear arms race, and the only thing that holds them back is a treaty set to expire and no new treaty on the horizon.

On Sept. 22, Russian President Vladmir Putin, speaking to his Security Council, declared that “to avoid provoking a further strategic arms race and to ensure an acceptable level of predictability and restraint, we believe it is justified to try to maintain the status quo established by the New START Treaty during the current, rather turbulent period.” Putin said Russia is prepared to stick by the treaty’s limits for one more year after it expires.

As of the end of September, the Trump administration had yet to formally respond to Putin’s offer regarding New START. The closest thing to a response was a comment made by President Donald Trump to the press when asked about Putin’s offer. “Sounds like a good idea to me,” Trump told reporters as he departed the White House.

The lack of an official response from the Trump administration regarding a moratorium on retaining the New START caps on deployed nuclear weapons is disconcerting, since the purpose of the moratorium isn’t to simply prevent an arms race in the short term, but also buy time for negotiations that would result in a new treaty framework that takes into account the complexities surrounding the issue of nuclear weapons and arms control today.

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No kid is under a desk anymore — and isn’t that strange when you think about it? After all, when I “ducked and covered” like Bert the Turtle at school in the 1950s by huddling under my desk as sirens howled outside the classroom window, “only” (and yes, I do need to put that in quotation marks, since it was distinctly two too many even then) two countries, mine and the Soviet Union, had nuclear weapons; and only two atomic bombs, all too charmingly dubbed “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” had ever been used (with devastating effect) on August 6th and 9th, 1945, against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtering somewhere between 110,000 and 210,000 people. Imagine that, and imagine as well that the atomic weaponry of today is wildly more powerful and destructive than those two bombs, that nine countries now possess such weaponry, and that my own country is planning to continue to “modernize” its nuclear arsenal to the tune of an estimated $1.7 trillion (no, that is not a misprint) or more in the coming decades.

And my country, along with Israel, also a nuclear power, just launched a series of devastating (non-nuclear) attacks on Iran, supposedly to prevent it from becoming the 10th country to possess nuclear weapons (though it seems distinctly unlikely that the Iranian regime was even trying to produce such weaponry).

All in all, consider it the post-modern equivalent of a miracle that, 80 years after those atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities, such weaponry has never again been used, even as it has continued to grow ever more powerful and spread around the planet.  After all, since the 1980s, it’s been known that a nuclear war between two powers (like India and Pakistan) could cause a global “nuclear winter” that might all too quickly result in the equivalent of the long-term major extinctions of this planet’s past history.

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