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By Richard Rhodes the Twilight of the Bombs Prepared for Delivery At By Richard Rhodes The Twilight of the Bombs Prepared for delivery at Independence, Missouri, on 9 August 2015, the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan Seventy years ago today, in the last days of a terrible war, at 11:02 a.m. on August 9th, 1945, an American B-29 bomber attacked the city of Nagasaki, Japan, with a single bomb of a new kind. Nagasaki had not originally been the bomb’s intended target, but two other targets with higher priority had been obscured by cloud cover. With terrible and accidental irony, the atomic bomb, nicknamed Fat Man, exploded 1640 feet above the Nagasaki factory that made the torpedoes used to attack the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, the event that decided an outraged United States to enter the war. Fat Man, though limited compared to modern nuclear weapons, was the most powerful weapon yet exploded, with a blast yield equivalent to 21 thousand tons of TNT. But it was less a weapon of blast than a weapon of fire. Its fireball, which heated and expanded to a maximum diameter of a half mile and a maximum temperature of 300,000 degrees Celsius, flashed down on the Japanese city and initiated a mass fire, igniting everything combustible up and down the narrow valley where the city ran down to the sea. Within hours, Nagasaki was a burned-out, smoking ruin. Fire more than either blast or radiation caused most of the deaths at Nagasaki, as it had at Hiroshima three days earlier. About 36,000 people died that day. More died later of burns, wounds and radiation poisoning. Not human beings alone died in Nagasaki. Something else was destroyed as well: that shared life Hannah Arendt called the common world. Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children, but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, flags, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses—120 war horses—musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. “The whole of society,” a Japanese study concludes, “was laid waste to its very foundations.”1 Here, today, is not the time and place to debate the morality of those first atomic bombings. My challenge is farther: I’ve been asked to amplify a statement I made near the end of the fourth and final volume of my quartet of histories of the nuclear age. After more than thirty years of studying the impact on the world of the discovery of how to release the essentially unlimited energies contained in the atomic nucleus, I wrote in that final volume, The Twilight of the Bombs, that “If not in my lifetime, probably in the lifetime of my 2 children, and certainly in my grandchildren’s lifetimes, weapons of mass destruction will be outlawed….In time, possession of a nuclear weapon will be judged a crime against humanity. Such a judgment would only codify what is already an evident fact.”2 So. Let’s see what we can make of that. ### There are nine nations in the world today that possess nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Four nations that once possessed them have given them up: South Africa, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The CIA has estimated that some thirty to forty other nations are technically capable of assembling a nuclear arsenal within a period of only a few years or less but have chosen not to do so. That roster includes every nation with an advanced scientific and technological base and access to plutonium or highly-enriched uranium: Japan, all of Western Europe, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Australia and many others—a long list. Ninety-three nations are signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; subtract the five legacy nuclear powers on that list and you have 88 nations that have pledged not to develop nuclear weapons. Almost the entirety of the southern hemisphere is an agreed nuclear-weapons-free zone. Nine such zones in total encompass 56 percent of the Earth’s land area and 60 percent of its 195 nations as well as Antarctica, the world seabed and outer space. Which is to say, under various solemn treaties and other legally-binding agreements, we are about halfway along toward a nuclear-weapons-free world. If half the world wants to eliminate nuclear weapons, what about the other half? Why do the nuclear powers continue to field their dangerous arsenals? Russia and the United States together possess more than 90 percent of the approximately 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world today. (That number, by the way, is down sharply from the world nuclear arsenal at the height of the Cold War, which counted more than 70,000 nuclear weapons.) Russia clings to its nuclear arsenal of 7,300 weapons in part because its military is weak— smaller in size than the U.S. military and with outdated, vulnerable weapons systems—and nuclear weapons are a cheap equalizer. We claim to hold our approximately 4,800 nuclear weapons primarily for deterrence, not for war- fighting.3 Deterrence, as you know, is a theory that evolved in the wake of the realization, early in the nuclear era, that there would be no defense against nuclear weapons—that we are naked to our enemies, and they to us. President Ronald Reagan dreamed of a perfect shield of defensive armaments that would protect us from nuclear attack, but his Strategic Defense Initiative was just that: a dream. Instead of defense, the idea emerged early on that if an arsenal of nuclear weapons could be protected from destruction in an enemy first strike—in a bomb-proof missile silo or in a nuclear submarine hidden deep beneath the sea—and thus be available to attack and destroy the enemy in turn, then no rational leadership would choose to attack in the first place, understanding that it must inevitably also be destroyed. That’s what 3 “mutual assured destruction” meant, the words that form the notorious acronym M-A-D, MAD. The nuclear mandarins who rationalize maintaining nuclear arsenals large enough to destroy the human world invoke deterrence theory to justify their support of nuclear overkill. A refinement of the deterrence doctrine came along later that claimed the opposing nuclear forces had to match up at every level to be credible: if the Soviet Union had bombers, then we must have bombers; if Soviet land-based missiles, then American land-based missiles; if Soviet nuclear submarines, then American nuclear submarines. This convenient refinement allowed all three of our military services to justify dividing the nuclear-weapons budget among them, which they have done. Before that division occurred, in the late 1950s, the Air Force controlled all our nuclear weapons, and by a process of bootstrapping had managed to claim no less than 47 percent of the entire defense budget. By bootstrapping I mean the Air Force controlled targeting in the 1950s, which in turn dictated the number of bombs, which in turn determined the number of aircraft needed to deliver them. That’s how it won 47 percent of the defense budget. The other services woke up to the danger, the nuclear mandarins supplied the credibility theory, and the pie was soon divided, giving us army atomic cannon too heavy for European backroads, a small atomic artillery shell capable of being fired from a recoilless rifle mounted on the back of a Jeep, nuclear air-to-air antiaircraft rockets, navy nuclear torpedoes and depth charges and other such lethal rickrack. The one condition all these varied weapons had in common was that they were designed for nuclear war-fighting. At the same time, at the highest levels of our military and government, everyone understood that introducing nuclear weapons into a conventional conflict would almost certainly escalate that conflict to full-scale nuclear war. As one of the nuclear mandarins confessed privately to the clinical psychologist Steven Kull, “Strategic weapons are political artifacts first. And when they cease to be political artifacts, then they’re entirely irrelevant, entirely without a purpose….The only existence that these weapons have that has any meaning is in political terms. And perception is the only relevant category.” Another mandarin, whom Kull calls a “prominent strategic analyst,” explained the game even more bluntly. “Let’s put it this way,” he told Kull. “All roads in the strategic equation lead to MAD”—that is, mutual assured destruction. “All the other ones [the analyst continues]…are games, are window dressing, and they are window dressing for upmanship….But when you take away all these layers…at the bottom of the thing, basically, is MAD, and no one likes it.”4 McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, summed up the fundamental nuclear impasse in an article in Foreign Affairs in 1969: In light of the certain prospect of retaliation [Bundy wrote], there has been literally no chance at all that any sane political authority, in either the United States or the Soviet Union, would consciously choose to start a nuclear war. This proposition is true for the past, the present and the foreseeable future….In the real world of real political leaders [Bundy 4 continues]…a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one’s own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable.5 You have probably heard discussion during this 70th-anniversary year of the success of nuclear deterrence.
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