Tag: nuclear weapons

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

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading