Consider me an A-bomb baby. I was just a year old when, in the war my father had been part of, my country dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, devastating those two cities and killing more than 200,000 people, including an estimated 38,000 children. Like so many kids of my generation, I would grow up ducking and covering under my desk at school during what were essentially end-of-the-world nuclear drills. When I walked the streets of New York City, I often passed yellow signs indicating fallout shelters (that you could rush into if a nuclear war were to begin). And while a freshman in college in October 1962, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when President John Kennedy announced that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with "a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere," I briefly feared that a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union might leave the east coast of my country (where I was) with its own mushroom clouds.
And yet, how strange. It wasn't a subject that came up in my home. It wasn't something my friends and I really talked about. When I went to war movies with my dad, the world never blew up -- you had to go to sci-fi films to see that -- though in my dreams it sometimes did. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were seldom the subject of programs on TV. I remember only one direct experience of seeing the devastation of Hiroshima. Right next to my apartment building in New York was the Plaza Theater, which regularly showed "art" films, including in 1959 or 1960, French film director Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour (Hiroshima My Love). Fortunately, the manager of that theater took a liking to me and let me into any films I wanted to see. And in that film, as a teenager, I actually did see footage of devastated Hiroshima.
I suspect the strange presence (and absence) of the atomic destruction of those two Japanese cities must have been why, soon after I got to Pantheon Books as an editor in 1976, when a friend sent me the translated British version of a Japanese book, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors, I instantly decided that I simply had to publish it in this country. Those pictures drawn by survivors stunned me, as did the little texts that went with them. ("The condition in which I found my 40-year-old wife on the morning of August 11, 1945. She was badly burned and had developed running sores". She looked just like a ghost because her eyelids were badly burned and swollen" The skin of her whole burned body on which maggots were breeding had the appearance of the crust of a crab.")
And here we are 80 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and another atomic weapon has never been used, but, as TomDispatch regular Eric Ross reminds us today, in a world with nine nuclear powers and undoubtedly more to come, we may indeed be living on borrowed time on Planet Earth. Tom
Eight Decades Later, It Remains One World or None
The End of New START and the Enduring Nuclear Nightmare
By Eric Ross
On February 5th, with the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, the only bilateral arms control treaty left between the United States and Russia, we are guaranteed to find ourselves ever closer to the edge of a perilous precipice. The renewed arms race that seems likely to take place could plunge the world, once and for all, into the nuclear abyss. This crisis is neither sudden nor surprising, but the predictable culmination of a truth that has haunted us for nearly 80 years: humanity has long been living on borrowed time.
In such a context, you might think that our collective survival instinct has proven remarkably poor, which is, at least to a certain extent, understandable. After all, if we had allowed ourselves to feel the full weight of the nuclear threat we've faced all these years, we might indeed have collapsed under it. Instead, we continue to drift forward with a sense of muted dread, unwilling (or simply unable) to respond to the nuclear nightmare. In a world already armed with thousands of omnicidal weapons, such fatalism -- part suicidal nihilism and part homicidal complacency -- becomes a form of violence in its own right.
Given such indifference, we risk not only our own lives but also the lives of all those who would come after us. As Jonathan Schell observed decades ago, both genocide and nuclear war are distinct from other forms of mass atrocity in that they serve as "crimes against the future." And as Robert Jay Lifton once warned, what makes nuclear war so singularly horrifying is that it would constitute "genocide in its terminal form," a destruction so absolute as to render the earth unlivable and irrevocably reverse the very process of creation.
Yet for many, the absence of such a nuclear holocaust, 80 years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is taken as proof that such a catastrophe is, in fact, unthinkable and will never happen. These days, to invoke the specter of annihilation is to be dismissed as alarmist, while to argue for the abolition of such weaponry is considered naïve. As it happens, though, the opposite is true. It's the height of naïvete' to believe that a global system built on the supposed security of nuclear weapons can endure indefinitely.
That much should be obvious by now. In truth, we've clung to the faith that rational heads will prevail for far too long. Such thinking has sustained a minimalist global nonproliferation regime aimed at preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons to so-called terrorist states like Iraq, Libya, and North Korea (which now indeed has a nuclear arsenal). Yet, today, it should be all too clear that the states with nuclear weapons are, and have long been, the true rogue states.
A nuclear-armed Israel has, after all, been committing genocide in Gaza and has bombed many of its neighbors. Russia continues to devastate Ukraine, which relinquished its nuclear arsenal in 1994, and its leader, Vladimir Putin, has threatened to use nuclear weapons there. And a Washington led by a brazen authoritarian deranged by power, who has declared that he doesn't "need international law," has stripped away the fragile façade of a rules-based global order.
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the leaders of the seven other nuclear-armed states possess the unilateral capacity to destroy the world, a power no country should be allowed to wield. Yet even now, there is still time to avert catastrophe. But to chart a reasonable path forward, it's necessary to look back eight decades and ask why the world failed to ban the bomb at a moment when the dangerous future we now inhabit was already clearly foreseeable.
Every City is Hiroshima
With Hiroshima and Nagasaki still smoldering ruins, people everywhere confronted a rupture so profound that it seemed to inaugurate a new historical era, one that might well be the last. As news of the atomic bombings spread, a grim consensus took shape that technological "progress" had outpaced political and moral restraint. Journalist Norman Cousins captured the zeitgeist when he wrote that "modern man is obsolete, a self-made anachronism becoming more incongruous by the minute." Human beings had clearly fashioned themselves into vengeful gods and the specter of Armageddon was no longer a matter of theology but a creation of modern civilization.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Post Article Comment and Rate This Article
