N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , AUGTEMBER 2005
and successful Soviet bluffs about the size and capability of
their forces, and American belief in the possibility of sustaining
technological superiority."
"Spurred on by mass media, the pressure exerted
by the military, scientific and industrial complex played an
enormous part in fashioning the nuclear ethos of the U.S.,
with the USSR inevitably following suit," Lord Zuckerman, who
once headed the British nuclear establishment, wrote just before
his death in 1993. The rational views of scientists, dissenting
politicians and millions of common people who organized against
U.S. nuclear policies "were powerless to prevent the waste of
billions of dollars on unusable or unneeded systems," Zucker
man wrote.
An agreement reached by Soviet Premier Gorbachev
and U.S. President Reagan in 1987 to regulate intermediate-
range nuclear missiles not only marked the end of the era of
East/West confrontation (the Cold War), Zuckerman wrote for
The New York Review of Books; "it was also, even if unpre-
dictably, the catalyst for the political, nationalist and economic
upheavals of the old USSR and what used to be called Mittel
Europa.“
"The nuclear shadow that now hangs over the inter
national scene" is no longer a U.S./USSR nuclear confrontation
"that could utterly devastate the contestants and pollute with
radiation the whole of the northern hemisphere," Lord Zucker
man wrote. "What is urgent now is the issue of proliferation
— the danger of nuclear weapons being made by a country
unsophisticated enough to use them against a neighbor, and
the possibility of nuclear weapons being acquired by a terrorist
organization....That there are now no secrets about how to make
a nuclear weapon has in fact created a future more uncertain
and possibly more menacing than it was in the days of the Cold
War, when we had become accustomed to the knowledge that
nuclear weapons exist without much thought of what the conse
quences would have been had they been used."
The development and use of atomic bombs on Japan
will be disputed long after World War 2 diminishes to history
as ancient as Caesaris campaigns in Gaul. The advent of the
Nuclear Age might always be a topic of debate, although a
thousand years from now the beginning of atomic power will be
as misty as the discovery of fire or the first use of a hammer, two
such useful essentials no one can conceive that humanity ever
functioned without them, which future generations might think
about splitting the atom.
Leo Szilard, described as "the man who has thought
longer and harder than anyone else about the consequences
of chain reaction" and without whom the U.S. might not have
so readily developed an atomic bomb in time for its use against
Japan, argued even before the first test of an atomic bomb in
July 1945 (Trinity') that the nation was "moving along a road
leading to destruction of the strong position (it) hitherto occupied
in the world." He was not referring to a moral advantage but that
American military strength was due to the fact that the U.S. could
outproduce every other country in the world in heavy armaments.
By preparing to test and use atomic bombs, Szilard said the
U.S. would lose that advantage "in just a few years" when
other countries acquired nuclear weapons. He was prophetic:
"Perhaps the greatest immediate danger which faces us is the
probability that our 'demonstration' of atomic bombs will precip
itate a race in the production of these devices between the
United States and Russia."
Szilard echoed Niels Bohr's wish for an open internation
al covenant with nuclear weapons when he said "these decisions
ought to be based not on the present evidence relating to atomic
bombs but rather on the situation which can be expected to con
front us in this respect a few years from now.”
Niels Bohr understood that the bomb was a source of
terror but also a source of hope, "a means of welding together
the nations by their common dread of a menacing nuclear
standoff,” wrote Richard Rhodes in his Pulitzer Prize winning
book The Making o f the Atomic Bomb. 'The problem was not
exchanging information to improve America's moral standards;
the problem was leaders sitting down and negotiating a way
beyond the mutual danger the new weapons would otherwise
instill. The opening up (of knowledge about the atomic bomb)
would emerge out of those negotiations, necessarily to guaran
tee safety; it could not in the real world of secrecy and suspicion
realistically precede them."
Though Rhodes writes that no one "should presume to
judge these men as they struggled with a future" that no one
could "barely imagine," the future they created started off wrong.
Instead of opening up to the world the U.S. denied information
about the bomb to the Russians thereby guaranteeing a nuclear
arms race. The arms race began when the U.S. attempted to
impress Russia with its military might so that it might be more
manageable at the Potsdam conference in May 1945, directly
after the Nazi surrender, and withdraw its troops from Eastern
Europe.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, who ran Los Alamos when it
built the first atomic bomb, thought about "the implications for
mankind for the thing we had created and the wall into the future
we had breached." Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson might
have had it right when he lamented, in Oppenheimer's recollect
ion, 'the appalling lack of conscience and compassion that the
war had brought about...the complacency, the indifference, and
the silence with which we greeted the mass bombings in Europe
and above all, Japan." Oppenheimer said that Stimson felt, "as
far as degradation went, we had had it; that it would take a new
life and a new breath to heal the harm."
Or as General Curtis LeMay, commander of the B-29s
firebombing Japanese cities, put it, "We knew we were going
to kill a lot of women and kids when we roasted a town.” Those
firebombings were used as a basemark for use of the atomic
bomb that, in the words of one government official, the "number
of people that would be killed by the bomb would not be greater
than the number already killed in fire raids." Total death in total
war, as Rhodes called it.
Paradoxically, it was the United States that initially
offered a blueprint for the abolition of nuclear weapons, suggest
ing "the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons
and of all major weapons adaptable to mass destruction..."
The U.S. plan was named after its representative to the
United Nations Atomic Energy Council, Bernard Baruch, who
said in 1946, "The search for the absolute weapon has reached
fruition in this country. But she stands ready to proscribe and
destroy this instrument — to lift its use from death to life — if the
world will join in a pact to that e n d N a tio n s under the Baruch
Plan would be barred from acquiring, developing and possessing
nuclear weapons, and all nuclear materials and production plants
would be placed under international control The Soviets counter
ed with their own ban of nuclear weapons, but the icy chill of the
impending Cold War polarized discussions until, in 1949, the
Soviets test exploded their first nuclear weapon
The Cold War did not completely freeze out the idea of
eliminating nuclear weapons In September 1961, the U.S. and
USSR issued a joint statement agreeing to the "elimination of
all stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, bacteriological, and other
In 1975, as the 30th anniversary of the Hiroshima
bombing approached, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation
solicited from the survivors hand-drawn pictures and written
accounts of the event. The response was enormous. A
selection was shown on television and exhibited in the
Culture Peace Center in Hiroshima and a book was made
from the material, Unforgettable Fire.
Contributors ranged from survivors who in 1975
were in their 80s to those in their 30s. Tsutomu Ojiri, age
36: ‘ I saw the explosion in Hatsukaichi about ten miles
away when I was 5 years old. This is the way I remembered
the explosion in the five seconds before the sound reached
me," and there are five representations of the growing fireball
compared with the brightness of the sun.
This is virtually the only schematic drawing in the
collection. Most resemble Katuo Mastumoro’s, shown above:
“Although we were lying side by side we did not recognize
each other. He heard my voice and said, 'Are you Mr. Matsu-
moro?” It was Mr. Yoshimoto. His face was dark and swollen.
He seemed unable to open his eyes or mouth. The left side of
his face was dark and swollen. He seemed unable to open his
eyes or mouth. The left side of his face, neck, and hands were
burned. Soon we were separated. I was bleeding from my ears,
nose, and mouth..."
-C .S ./M P M c
weapons of mass destruction, and cessation of the production
of such weapons; (and the) elimination of all means of delivery
of mass destruction." This effort, however, was a victim of the
increased heating up of the Cold War which culminated the
following year with the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the
world has so far come to nuclear war.
Still the worst moment of the Cold War (and perhaps
the pivotal moment of human history, which might have ended
there), it is now said that our planet and species were not as
close to obliteration as the participants thought, and a number
of other brushes with nuclear oblivion followed, most publicly
unknown, others from well-publicized systems failures — in
particular a few frightening instances of computer malfunctions
averted breathtakingly close to the point of no return. (A 13 cent
part was said to be at fault in one glitch, an interesting comment
on the price of civilization.)
The Cuban crisis started when the U.S. discovered
Russian nuclear missiles being emplaced on the island in late
October 1962. The Russians claimed they thought the U.S. was
about to invade Havana, which the U.S. has denied (though the
previous year it sponsored the Bay of Pigs fiasco and attempted
several times to assassinate Fidel Castro). President Kennedy
and his advisors demanded the missiles be removed and a naval
blockade was set up to prevent Russian vessels from delivering
any more of the weapons. In a very short time the dispute
reached for the doomsday button. The American myth is that
the Soviet Union backed down from the brink of extinction and
removed its missiles from Cuba. In reality U.S. and Soviet
political leaders cut an 11th hour deal (the Soviets to withdraw
their missiles from Cuba, the U.S. to remove some obsolete
missiles from the Soviet border with Turkey) because the military
juggernauts of both countries were moving inexorably toward
nuclear confrontation.
The United Nations, which was born 60 years ago in the
spring of 1945, helped prevent the Cold War from turning into a
holocaust. The UN provided a valuable though often irritating
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forum for world opinion and was a center for secret crisis negoti
ations The mere existence of the UN often helped diffuse other
wise unendurable pressures in the turbulent years that followed
World War 2.
At a time when the U.S. and USSR were settling into a
Cold War status quo and recognizing a balance of terror that
made it absurd to initiate a nuclear war because both would be
obliterated, communist China, which joined the nuclear club to
the consternation of the two primary superpowers, was accept
ing the discarded notion that nuclear war was not only inevitable
but winnable. This contradiction, and Maoist China's adoption
of Stalinism just as Russia was abandoning it, produced an ideo
logical schism which is considered more profound than any since
Catholicism split between Rome and Constantinople
The nuclear arms race quickened in the Reagan years.
The U.S. readopted its formerly repudiated policy of arming for
a winnable war. The balance of terror became a rapidly shifting
teeter-totter during the early 1980s. New generations of horror
were pokered like chips — and psychologically it seemed that
denial matched the pace of reality in the upper levels of govern
ment: the more bizarre and dangerous the arms race got, so
equally were official dismissals of the fears of holocaust their
actions precipitated
Though the Reagan policy was irresponsible and skirted
oblivion, the renewed and more vigorous than ever arms race
broke the Soviet Union which was already fatally strained by
internal contradictions and ruptures. Russian Premier Mikhail
Gorbachev's remarkable personal appeal might have been a
singular factor that put the brakes on the virtually out of control
rush toward nuclear confrontation. Attempting to save his
crumbling empire, Gorbachev tapped into the great worldwide
angst about nuclear weapons in order to slow down the arms
race which was bankrupting the USSR. He succeeded in ending
the Cold War but the Soviet empire imploded.
Although schoolchildren conducted "Duck & Cover"
drills throughout the Cold War, Americans have been reluctant
to teach their children about nuclear war while building ever
more grotesque weapons. An example is an attempt by Oregon
to establish a curriculum pertaining to nuclear war in the state's
public elementary and high schools. The idea was to develop a
program of the history of the Nuclear Age and the arms race that
so quickly developed, the consequences of the use of nuclear
weapons, the effects upon national economies and ambitions,
and alternate forms of resolving conflict short of war in general.
The issue caused intense and heated debate. Supporters
(mostly Democrats) said teaching children about nuclear
war might be an important step toward averting holocaust.
Opponents (mostly Republicans) said it would create fear
in children and weaken the nation's resolve to defend itself.
Essentially, the people who didn't want kids to know about
nuclear war were those whose policies encouraged it. One state
representative (a Republican) compared nuclear education to
sex education, which he said produced more pregnancies,
abortions and homosexuals than before it was taught.
(A 10 year old girt wrote a letter to an Oregon news
paper after watching a movie about nuclear war that she was
afraid for her future. "I don't want war to happen," she wrote.
"If a bomb does explode, I think I'd rather die than live. Now
when I think of my future I think of nothing. I hope a war will
never happen.")
International concern over skyrocketing nuclear arsenals
finally prompted the United Nations to hold for the first time a
special session on disarmament in 1978. Signed by all UN
members, the conference called on nuclear weapons nations
to focus their efforts on the elimination of nuclear weapons:
“Nuclear weapons pose the greatest danger to mankind
and the survival o f civilization. It is essential to halt and reverse
the nuclear arms race in all its aspects in order to avert the
danger o f war involving nuclear weapons. The ultimate goal in
this context is the complete elimination o f nuclear weapons. The
most effective guarantee against the danger o f nuclear war and
the use o f nuclear weapons is nuclear disarmament and the
complete elimination o f nuclear weapons. “
Humanity will either obliterate humanity or preserve it.
An indication that the species might be worth preserving will be
its courage to try. A species' extinction might begin when
increasing numbers of its members lose hope for themselves
and their future; when they stop their inner clocks because they
perceive life as unbearable or useless. Some lasting effect must
be a result of this hopelessness, a decline, a loss of energy and
will, and the cleverness indispensable for survival.
The human race is not unlike any other life form that
has lived temporarily on Earth. Like its individual members the
species must eventually die, and like a person it can die at any
age or stage of its development. The richness of its past, its
dreams or schemes, its successes and failures, none of these
is a case against death. The very quality that forced human rule
over the Earth, our ruthless and intelligent violence, is the
obstacle to our continued existence. We differ from our extinct
predecessors in that our threatened oblivion is from our own
industry, and in the possibility that we might overcome our
history and survive awhile longer.
Though it lasted less than a generation, the Armistice
of World War 1 was a hope that humanity's addiction to warfare
must finally end because war had become too horrible to bear.
Ironically, that hope accompanied the larger fears of nuclear
annihilation during the Cold W ar that a balance of terror made
war obsolete. That balance, horrible as it was, is considered
preferable to the post-Cold War uncertainty of a wild card
nuclear club that has been released from the restraints of
collective oblivion; rogues are unfettered.
We cannot uninvent nuclear weapons. The knowledge
of them is with us for as long as homo sapiens sapiens defies
its own handicaps and dwells in the galaxy. If we are not smart
enough to contain our atomic goblin our ruined cities will leave
no trace that we once briefly and foolishly ruled Earth.
There is nothing more political than the wish of the
human race to survive upon its home planet. Thomas Jefferson
wrote that the care of human life and happiness and not their
destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good govern
ment. The power of the vote was a recognition by his founder
peers that the usual relationship between citizen and ruler is
hostility The question of whether the United States is any longer
(or ever has been) an open government must not overshadow
the real fact that it still must generally and eventually respond to
essential demands of its majority
A majority begins with one.
It is the great mass of ordinary people who will and must
prevent world suicide It must be done by everyone, beginning
with each one Each of us will die, either privately or as part of
the extinction of the species if we do not arrest the dangers of
nuclear violence There are good reasons we must each die,
primary among them to make room and leave a few resources
for our descendants. What is different now is that we must step
outside our small fears and immediate prejudices and insure a
world for our inheritors There has never been a more personal
or more universal struggle in our history.