The menace of nuclear weapons

Bob Sheak, August 15, 2023

The film “Oppenheimer” focuses on the role played by the brilliant physicist, Julies Robert Oppenheimer, in the creation of the first atomic and plutonium bombs. It suggests that he was at the center of organizing the scientific and technical work on the first bombs. Then after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, he became tormented by the destructive power of the bombs and advocated futilely for international control of these weapons. He lost his security clearance as a result of this position and lived on in relative obscurity without any influence on policy. However, the U.S. remained committed to nuclear weapons, to a first-use policy, helped to precipitate the Cold War, and all this continues to this day.

Here is a summary of what occurred in what became known as the Manhattan Project from the Wikipedia public encyclopedia (https://wikipedia.org/Manhattan_Project).

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“The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with support from the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the bombs. The Army component was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. The project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys. The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939, but employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $24 billion in 2021).^[1] Over 90 percent of the cost was for building factories and to produce fissile material, with less than 10 percent for development and production of the weapons. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

“The project led to the development of two types of atomic bombs, both developed concurrently, during the war: a relatively simple gun-type fission weapon and a more complex implosion-type nuclear weapon. The Thin Man gun-type design proved impractical to use with plutonium, so a simpler gun-type design called Little Boy was developed that used uranium-235. Three methods were employed for uranium enrichment: electromagnetic, gaseous and thermal. In parallel with the work on uranium was an effort to produce plutonium. After the feasibility of the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, was demonstrated in 1942 at the Metallurgical Laboratory in the University of Chicago, the project designed the X-10 Graphite Reactor and the production reactors at the Hanford Site, in which uranium was irradiated and transmuted into plutonium. The Fat Man plutonium implosion-type weapon was developed in a concerted design and development effort by the Los Alamos Laboratory.

The project was also charged with gathering intelligence on the German nuclear weapon project. Through Operation Alsos, Manhattan Project personnel served in Europe, sometimes behind enemy lines, where they gathered nuclear materials and documents, and rounded up German scientists. Despite the Manhattan Project’s tight security, Soviet atomic spies successfully penetrated the program.

The first nuclear device ever detonated was an implosion-type bomb during the Trinity test, conducted at New Mexico’s Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on 16 July 1945. Little Boy and Fat Man bombs were used a month later in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, with Manhattan Project personnel serving as bomb assembly technicians and weaponeers on the attack aircraft. In the immediate postwar years, the Manhattan Project conducted weapons testing at Bikini Atoll as part of Operation Crossroads, developed new weapons, promoted the development of the network of national laboratories, supported medical research into radiology and laid the foundations for the nuclear navy. It maintained control over American atomic weapons research and production until the formation of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947.”

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The German bomb creation goes nowhere

The Manhattan project was launched out of fear that the German military was on the cusp of building an atomic bomb that would enable the German military to turn the war in their favor. As it turns out, Germany abandoned the project in the autumn of 1942.

And the German army surrendered to allied forces after losing ground to the Russians and after British and US ground forces had moved toward Germany and carpet bombed major German cities. The U.S. then turned its attention to the war against Japan. By 1945, US bombers had already extensively carpet-bombed Japanese cities.

Japan becomes the target for the new bombs

The concern of the Truman administration and military leaders was that Japan would not surrender and that it would potentially take tens of thousands of US soldiers to conquer the island nation, causing massive injury and death to US forces. This is a controversial point. In this interpretation, the bombs were dropped to save American lives. Subsequent research and books on the issue document that the Japanese were ready to surrender provided that the Japanese Emperor was allowed to continue without any change in his role. The U.S. commanders insisted on obtaining an unconditional surrender. At the same time, some research on the issue suggests that the U.S. used the bombs to deter the Russian army from invading and occupying parts of northern Japan and to assert US nuclear supremacy. Ward Wilson delves into this still unresolved controversy (https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-Japan-stalin-did).

The genie is out of the bottle

The Russians exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949. Here’s an account from History site(https://history.com/this-day-in-history/soveits-explode-atomic-bomb).

“At a remote test site at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, the USSR successfully detonates its first atomic bomb, code name ‘First Lightning.’” “The atomic explosion, which at 20 kilotons was roughly equal to ‘Trinity….’

“On September 3, a U.S. spy plane flying off the coast of Siberia picked up the first evidence of radioactivity from the explosion. Later that month, President Harry S. Truman announced to the American people that the Soviets too had the bomb. Three months later, Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who had helped the United States build its first atomic bombs, was arrested for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. While stationed at U.S. atomic development headquarters during World War II, Fuchs had given the Soviets precise information about the U.S. atomic program, including a blueprint of the “Fat Man” atomic bomb later dropped on Japan, and everything the Los Alamos scientists knew about the hypothesized hydrogen bomb. The revelations of Fuchs’ espionage, coupled with the loss of U.S. atomic supremacy, led President Truman to order development of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon theorized to be hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

“On November 1, 1952, the United States successfully detonated “Mike,” the world’s first hydrogen bomb, on the Elugelab Atoll in the Pacific Marshall Islands. The 10.4-megaton thermonuclear device instantly vaporized an entire island and left behind a crater more than a mile wide. Three years later, on November 22, 1955, the Soviet Union detonated its first hydrogen bomb on the same principle of radiation implosion. Both superpowers were now in possession of the so-called ‘superbomb,’ and the world lived under the threat of thermonuclear war for the first time in history.”

Other countries develop the bomb

The Arms Control Association provides information on the spread of nuclear weapons by country

(https://armscontrol.org/factssheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat). The contacts at the Association for this article are Kelsey Davenport, Director for Nonproliferation Policy, (202) 463-8270 x102; Daryl G. Kimball, Executive Director, (202) 463-8270 x1070. Here’s some of what they have researched.

“At the dawn of the nuclear age, the United States hoped to maintain a monopoly on its new weapon, but the secrets and the technology for building the atomic bomb soon spread. The United States conducted its first nuclear test explosion in July 1945 and dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945. Just four years later, the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test explosion. The United Kingdom (1952), France (1960), and China (1964) followed. Seeking to prevent the nuclear weapon ranks from expanding further, the United States and other like-minded countries negotiated the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968 and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996.

“India, Israel, and Pakistan never signed the NPT and possess nuclear arsenals. Iraq initiated a secret nuclear program under Saddam Hussein before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. North Korea announced its withdrawal from the NPT in January 2003 and has successfully tested advanced nuclear devices since that time. Iran and Libya have pursued secret nuclear activities in violation of the treaty’s terms, and Syria is suspected of having done the same. Still, nuclear nonproliferation successes outnumber failures, and dire decades-old forecasts that the world would soon be home to dozens of nuclear-armed states have not come to pass.”

“Today, the United States deploys 1,419 and Russia deploys 1,549 strategic warheads on several hundred bombers and missiles, and are modernizing their nuclear delivery systems. Warheads are counted using the provisions of the New START agreement, which was extended for 5 years in January 2021. Russia suspended its participation in the treaty on Feb. 21, 2023; in response, the United States instituted countermeasures limiting information sharing and inspections.

“However, both the U.S. and Russia have committed to the treaty’s central limits on strategic force deployments until 2026.

“New START caps each country at 1,550 strategic deployed warheads and attributes one deployed warhead per deployed heavy bomber, no matter how many warheads each bomber carries. Warheads on deployed ICBMs and SLBMs are counted by the number of re-entry vehicles on the missile. Each re-entry vehicle can carry one warhead.

“The United States, Russia, and China also possess smaller numbers of non-strategic (or tactical) nuclear warheads, which are shorter-range, lower-yield weapons that are not subject to any treaty limits.

“China, India, and Pakistan are all pursuing new ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and sea-based nuclear delivery systems. North Korea continues its nuclear pursuits in violation of its earlier denuclearization pledges.”

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Where the film falls short

#1 – Says little about the effects of the bomb on Japanese civilians and the horrific death and injuries they suffered

Hiroshima

Here’s some of what we learn from the Texas A&M University’s “Narratives of World War II in the Pacific” (https://tamucc.edu/library/exhibits/s/hist4350/page/the-aftermath-of-the-atomic-bomb). The bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.        

“Citizens were unaware of their fate and were going on about their days. Men, women, and children all fell victim to the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. The bombing of Hiroshima caused the deaths of thousands of citizens instantly and more to the nuclear fallout and the lack of infrastructure which would lead to the deaths of many more Japanese civilians due to the devastating destruction by the atomic bomb.”

“The United States main goal for the Atomic Bomb was for it to be used on military targets only and minimize civilian casualties as much as possible. Hiroshima was used by the Japanese Army as a staging area but was also a large city with a population of roughly 410,000 people. Hiroshima was selected for the first bomb to be dropped and to be observed for future bombs that could be used in the future.

“August 6^th, 1945 was a typical morning for Hiroshima. The city was flourishing with activity of people going to work, children playing, and businesses opening. The warning signs began around 7A.M. with air raid sirens which was a common occurrence for the people of Japan and most ignored it. Around 8:14 A.M. however, is when Hiroshima changed forever.”

“Once the initial explosion took place, it is estimated that 60,000 to 80,000 people died instantly due to the extreme heat of the bomb, leaving just shadows of where they once were. Fires broke out and spread rapidly while people were trying to find loved ones as well as figure out what exactly had happened.^[2] The lack of people physically able to fight the fire and the weather increased the fires and the whole city became a blazing fireball all from a single bomb. Not only were people instantly vaporized, the people who did survive the initial blast, succumbed to radiation sickness and would later die a painful slow death. Sometimes symptoms did not reveal themselves until weeks or even years after being exposed to such high levels of radiation.” Over time, at least 60,000 more people died of radiation sickness.

 Nagasaki

Shampa Biswas writes on the bombing of Nakasaki   (https://thebulletin.org/2023/08/what-can-we-learn-from-oppenheimer-about-the-blind-spots-in-nuclear-storytelling).

“Fat Man laid a city [of Nakasaki] to waste, quickly killing between 60,000-80,000 people, the death toll eventually rising to over 130,000. Nagasaki is now the site of an elaborate Peace Memorial whose central story is the victimhood of Japan. It is a deeply moving story, but one told through a nation-making lens, with barely a nod to Japan’s own war crimes or its uneven redressal of the claims of first- and second-generation hibakusha, the surviving victims of the bombing.

“The Nagasaki museum tells its heart-breaking story through photographs and objects: dented household pots, ripped clothing, bones of a human hand stuck to a piece of metal, a replica of the destroyed ruins of the Urakami cathedral at Ground Zero, pictures of scarred and dead bodies and a city leveled flat. It is a story that makes you weep for a devastated past and hope for a more peaceful future.”

Biswis admonishes us.

“We will be well served if Oppenheimer instigates a much-needed public conversation about the dangers of nuclear weapons. We will be better served if the stories we tell about those dangers include the full breadth of nuclear harms and attend to those made most vulnerable by nuclear weapons production, testing, and use.”

A message of concern about nuclear weapons from the UN Secretary General

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres gives the world a message on the 78th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki at the Nagasaki Peace Memorial

(https://press.un.org/en/2023/sgsm21901.doc.htm). Here’s some of what he said.

“This ceremony is an opportunity to remember a moment of unmatched horror for humanity — the use of atomic weapons on Nagasaki 78 years ago.

“The United Nations will continue working with global leaders to strengthen the global disarmament and non-proliferation regime — including through the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  I have pledged to do everything in my power to ensure that the voices and testimonies of the hibakusha continue to be heard.”

“It is in their name — and in memory of what happened here in 1945 — that the Secretary-General has declared that the elimination of nuclear weapons is the United Nations’ highest disarmament priority.  We must never again allow such devastation to occur.

“Despite the terrible lessons of 1945, humanity now confronts a new arms race.  Nuclear weapons are being used as tools of coercion.  Weapons systems are being upgraded, and placed at the centre of national security strategies, making these devices of death faster, more accurate and stealthier.

“All this, at a moment when division and mistrust are pulling countries and regions apart.  The risk of nuclear catastrophe is now at its highest level since the cold war.

In the face of these threats, the global community must speak as one.  Any use of nuclear weapons is unacceptable.  We will not sit idly by as nuclear-armed States race to create even more dangerous weapons.

“That’s why disarmament is at the heart of the recently launched Policy Brief on a New Agenda for Peace.  The Agenda calls on Member States to urgently recommit to pursuing a world free of nuclear weapons, and to reinforce the global norms against their use and proliferation.  Pending their total elimination, States possessing nuclear weapons must commit to never use them.  The only way to eliminate the nuclear risk is to eliminate nuclear weapons.”

#2 – Says nothing about the effects of the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, in New Mexico on nearby residents and how radiation spread across the U.S.

Lesley M.M. Blume, a journalist, historian, and a New York Times bestselling author, most recently of Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, reports on research on the effects of the Trinity atom bomb test on communities in the New Mexico desert, across the country, and even across national borders (https://nytimes.com/2023/07/20/science/trinity-nuclear-test-atomic-bomb-oppenheimer).

“On July 16, when the plutonium-implosion device was set off atop a hundred-foot metal tower in a test code-named ‘Trinity,’ the resultant blast was much stronger than anticipated. The irradiated mushroom cloud also went many times higher into the atmosphere than expected: some 50,000 to 70,000 feet. Where it would ultimately go was anyone’s guess.

“A new study, released on Thursday [July 13, 2023] ahead of submission to a scientific journal for peer review, shows that the cloud and its fallout went farther than anyone in the Manhattan Project had imagined in 1945. Using state-of-the-art modeling software and recently uncovered historical weather data, the study’s authors say that radioactive fallout from the Trinity test reached 46 states, Canada and Mexico within 10 days of detonation.”

“The drift of the Trinity cloud was monitored by Manhattan Project physicists and doctors, but they underestimated its reach.

“They were aware that there were radioactive hazards, but they were thinking about acute risk in the areas around the immediate detonation site,” Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, said. They had little understanding, he said, about how the radioactive materials could embed in ecosystems, near and far. ‘They were not really thinking about effects of low doses on large populations, which is exactly what the fallout problem is.’”

“Determined to fill in the gaps, the team started the study about 18 months ago. Dr. Philippe has extensive background in modeling fallout and was an author of a similar project in 2021 that documented the effects from French nuclear tests.

“A breakthrough came in March, when Ms. Alzner and Megan Smith, another co-founder of shift7 and a former United States chief technology officer in the Obama administration, contacted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There, Gilbert P. Compo, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado and the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory, told the team that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts had only a week earlier released historical data that charted weather patterns extending 30,000 feet or higher above Earth’s surface.”

“Using the new data and software built by NOAA, Dr. Philippe then reanalyzed Trinity’s fallout. And while the study’s authors acknowledge limitations and uncertainties within their calculations, they maintain that ‘our estimates likely remain conservatively low.’”

“The results show that New Mexico was heavily affected by Trinity’s fallout. Computations by Dr. Philippe and his colleagues show the cloud’s trajectory primarily spreading up over northeast New Mexico and a part of the cloud circling to the south and west of ground zero over the next few days. The researchers wrote that there are “locations in New Mexico where radionuclide deposition reached levels on par with Nevada.”

“Census data from 1940 shows that as many as 500,000 people were living within a 150-mile radius of the test site. Some families lived as close as 12 miles away, according to the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. Yet no civilians were warned about the test ahead of time, and they weren’t evacuated before or after the test.”

“The study also documents significant deposition in Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and Idaho, as well as dozens of federally-recognized tribal lands, potentially strengthening the case for people seeking government compensation.

#3 – There were many subsequent above-ground as well as underground tests. The effects?

Lesley M. M. Blume also reports on evidence on the many bomb tests that the U.S. government exploded in the years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing (https://nationalgeographic.com/history/article/us-nuclear-testing-devastating-legacy-lingers-30-years-later). Here’s some of what she reports.

“The United States conducted 1,054 atomic tests—costing more than $100 billion and taking an incalculable toll on humans and the environment.

Citizens in the area of the Trinity bomb test were misled or left uninformed

“None of those living near the Trinity site were warned or evacuated before or after the blast. It had been selected in part for its supposed remoteness from human settlement, but census data from 1940 show that nearly half a million people in New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico lived within 150 miles of ground zero. (Privately acknowledging the “very serious hazard” posed by the blast, the Manhattan Project’s chief medical officer advised that future tests should likely only be conducted where no one lived within a 150-mile radius.) To calm nerves, officials told people that a nearby ammunition dump had exploded. Many learned the truth about the blast only years later, and Trinity test survivors are not among the downwinders eligible for government compensation.”

“Blume points out, “Officials assured those living around the site that the detonations were ‘relatively small in explosive power,’ but some blasts were enormous: Hood was a 74-kiloton bomb exploded in 1957 as part of a larger military exercise in a nearby field involving 2,200 U.S. Marines. In 1962, the 104-kiloton Sedan test—seven times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb—displaced more than 12 million tons of earth and left a hole 1,280 feet wide and 320 feet deep. It has the distinction of being the largest manmade crater in the U.S., and the Nevada Test Site’s Yucca Flat testing region remains the most cratered landscape on the planet, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.”

The testing

Blume writes: “Formerly an iron mining and agricultural community, Cedar City stands about 175 miles east of the Nevada Test Site, where the United States conducted more than 900 nuclear tests from 1951 through 1992. Others were held across the country, including in Colorado, Alaska, and Mississippi. Tests of the U.S.’s biggest nuclear megaweapons were reserved for sites in the Pacific, including one device in the Marshall Islands a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.”

The last test carried out

“The U.S. carried out its last atom/nuclear weapons test on September 23, 1992, with the detonation in Nevada of an approximately 20-kiloton device codenamed Divider. (A kiloton is equivalent to a thousand tons of TNT; the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons.) Just over a week later, on October 2, President George H. W. Bush signed a moratorium on further testing, which has been honored to this day.”

The record of atomic bomb testing in the U.S.

Blume continues. Before the 1992 testing moratorium, the U.S. government tested nearly a thousand nuclear bombs above and below ground in four states, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Mississippi. Tests were also carried out in Alaska. Nevada was the central domestic site. The military “conducted 928 tests over 41 years at the Nevada Test Site.”

“For people living the vicinity of the Trinity test and subsequent testing, the people are sometimes known as “downwinders,” or “people exposed or likely exposed to radioactive fallout during tests.” They “say that the specter of a possible return to testing someday haunts them. In 2020, when the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration was considering resuming nuclear testing, following unsubstantiated assertions by administration officials that China and Russia were testing low-yield nuclear devices, many in Nevada and Utah decried the decision.

“Joe Biden, then a presidential candidate, called the notion “reckless” and “dangerous.” 

A moratorium and the end of atomic/nuclear bomb testing

“In 1958, the United States instituted a self-imposed moratorium on nuclear tests. On October 31, 1958, the United States entered into a unilateral testing moratorium announced by President Eisenhower with the understanding that the former Soviet Union also would refrain from conducting tests (https://acq,osd.mil/ncbdp/nm/NMHB2020rev/chapters/chapter14.html). The Soviet Union resumed testing in September 1961, with a series of the largest number of tests ever conducted.

“On September 15, 1961, the United States resumed testing at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) on a year-round basis and conducted an average of approximately 27 tests per year over the next three decades. These included 24 joint tests with the United Kingdom;¹ 35 tests for peaceful purposes as part of the Plowshare program;² seven to increase the capability to detect, identify, and locate nuclear tests as part of the Vela Uniform³ program; four to study nuclear material dispersal in possible accident scenarios; and post-fielding tests of specific weapons. By 1992, as noted above, the United States had conducted a total of 1,054 nuclear tests. In 1992, Congress passed legislation that prohibited the United States from conducting an underground nuclear test and led to the current policy restriction on nuclear explosive testing.”

“Conceding at last the consequences to humans of aboveground testing, Congress in 1990 passed the first iteration of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act for ‘downwinders’ in designated geographic areas suffering as the result of possible exposure to fallout from leukemia, multiple myeloma, lymphomas, or one or more of 16 different cancers.

“The act, updated in 2000 and extended earlier this year, has distributed more than $2 billion to downwinders and workers at nuclear sites. Previously ineligible downwinders—including those affected by the Trinity test—are campaigning urgently for inclusion. Claudia Peterson is among those who say the act’s recognition and compensation are insufficient for covering medical costs—and paltry compared to nuclear weapons budgets. “No amount of money can compensate for watching a child die,” she says.”

Testing in Pacific Ocean islands in the first decades after Trinity

According to a PBS report, “On March 1, 1954 the United States tested an H-bomb design on Bikini Atoll that unexpectedly turned out to be the largest U.S. nuclear test ever exploded (https://pbs.org/wgnb/americal-experience/features/bomb-us-tests). Named “Bravo,” it “yielded 15 megatons — making it more than a thousand times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”

“The blast gouged a crater about a mile wide in the reef. Within seconds the fireball was nearly three miles in diameter. The illumination from the blast was visible for almost one minute on Rongerik, an island 135 miles east of the burst. It trapped personnel in experiment bunkers and engulfed the 7,500 foot diagnostic pipe array. Physicist Marshall Rosenbluth was on a ship about 30 miles away. He remembers that the fireball, “just kept rising and rising, and spreading… It looked to me like what you might imagine a diseased brain, or a brain of some mad man would look like on the surface… And the air started getting filled with this gray stuff, which I guess was somewhat radioactive coral.” 

“An hour-and-a-half later a similar gritty, snow-like substance began raining down on a Japanese fishing vessel called the Lucky Dragon that was about 80 miles east of Bikini. The 23 fishermen aboard had no idea the ash was fallout from a hydrogen bomb test. When they returned to port two weeks later they were all suffering severe radiation sickness. The radio operator later died. One Tokyo newspaper headline demanded that the U.S. authorities “Tell us the truth about the ashes of death.” 

“Marshall Islanders were also exposed to the fallout. One islander on Rongelap about 100 miles east of Bikini remembers hearing, ‘a loud explosion and within minutes the ground began to shake. A few hours later the radioactive fallout began to drop on the people, into the drinking water, and on the food. The children played in the colorful ash-like powder. They did not know what it was.’” 

The financial cost

Blume quotes an expert. “The testing program easily cost taxpayers more than $100 billion in fiscal 2023 dollars, according to Stephen Schwartz, nonresident senior fellow at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Total spending on U.S. nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs ‘now exceeds $10 trillion and counting,’ he says.

“The human costs, however, are incalculable.”

The danger of a new Cold War

“Experts advise,” Blume writes, “that if a U.S. administration does resume testing, it would risk setting off a new nuclear arms race—as the very first atomic test, in New Mexico, did 77 years ago. During its Cold War nuclear race with the Soviets, the U.S. detonated 1,149 nuclear devices in 1,054 tests—more than those by all seven of the other nuclear-testing nations combined, including the Soviet Union, which conducted more than 700 tests.

“In the U.S.’s bid for nuclear supremacy, populations in the vicinity of test sites became collateral damage from radioactive fallout. Officials in charge of the tests also courted environmental and geological catastrophes, including possible earthquakes, tidal waves, dam breaks, and more.”

Blume continues. “Tests of the U.S.’s biggest thermonuclear bombs—hugely powerful weapons also known as hydrogen bombs or H-bombs—were reserved for the Pacific Proving Grounds, located largely in the Marshall Islands, some 2,400 miles west of Hawaii. The first U.S. H-bomb—codenamed Ivy Mike, with an explosive payload of 10.4 megatons, nearly 700 times that of the Hiroshima bomb—was detonated in 1952. It vaporized the small island of Elugelab, leaving a crater more than a mile long and 164 feet deep.

“Then came Castle Bravo, in 1954, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb exploded at Bikini Atoll. A bomb that size detonated over New York City would cause up to five million deaths and create a fireball nearly two miles wide, according to NukeMap. (In 1961, the Soviets detonated their largest thermonuclear weapon, the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, which had “roughly 10 times the total explosive power unleashed in all of World War II, including both the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” according to nuclear expert Sara Kutchesfahani.)

“‘These multimegaton weapons [were] very dirty in terms of their fallout content,’ Wellerstein says, as quoted by Blume. Clouds from Ivy Mike and Castle Bravo were closely monitored, he adds, ‘and they went around the entire world over the course of a week or so.’ Contamination spread over roughly 7,000 square miles—’the worst radiological disaster in U.S. history,’ according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.”

#4 – Nuclear accidents

There is now a long history of accidents at nuclear weapons’ launching missile sites, both in the US and Russia (formerly the Soviet Union), that came within minutes of starting a nuclear war. This history is painstakingly documented by Eric Schlosser in his book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, and in an article for The New Yorker, titled “World War Three, by Mistake (Dec 23, 2016). You can find the article at: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake.

Schlosser’s main argument is that “harsh political rhetoric, combined with the vulnerability of the nuclear command-and-control system, has made the risk of global catastrophe greater than ever.” He concludes his long article with the following ominous words.

“My greatest concern is the lack of public awareness about this existential threat, the absence of a vigorous public debate about the nuclear-war plans of Russia and the United States, the silent consent to the roughly fifteen thousand nuclear weapons in the world. These machines have been carefully and ingeniously designed to kill us. Complacency increases the odds that, someday, they will. The ‘Titanic Effect’ is a term used by software designers to explain how things can quietly go wrong in a complex technological system: the safer you assume the system to be, the more dangerous it is becoming.”

Fred Pearce devotes an entire book to how accidents, mis-judgements, out-right lies have almost triggered nuclear war. See his book Fallout: Disasters, Lies, and The Legacy of the Nuclear Age. In his book, The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg writes: “every president from Truman to Clinton has felt compelled at some point in time in office – usually in great secrecy – to threaten and/or discuss with the Joint Chiefs of Staff plans and preparation for possible imminent US initiation of tactical or strategic nuclear warfare, in the midst of an ongoing non-nuclear conflict or crisis” (pp .319-322). There were also such instances during the Bush Jr administration and, much more blatantly under Trump, who have talked about bombing North Korea and Afghanistan with nuclear weapons (see Mark Green and Ralph Nader’s book, Fake President: Decoding Trump’s Gaslighting, Corruption, and General Bullsh*t, the chapter on “War and Peace”).

#5 – Nuclear Winter

No nation, no people, can survive an even limited, regional nuclear war with warheads in the present nuclear arsenals. Even a first-use attack by, say, the US to destroy the nuclear-launching capacity of, say Russia, would produce a worldwide catastrophe. The smoke from nuclear bomb blasts would rise into the atmosphere and remain there for an extended period, enough to cripple food production around the world. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter.)

There are no winners in nuclear war. However, the “doctors strange loves” in the Pentagon are busy at designing smaller nuclear weapons that may not themselves produce a nuclear winter. If ever they are exploded, once they are used, they are likely to lead to more bombs being deployed.

#6 – The situation would be horrendous for people and communities in the wake of a nuclear war

Robert Jacobs describes some of the chaos and hardship that would prevail after nuclear war had commenced (https://truth-out.org/news/item/3290-we-cannot-survive-a-nuclear-apocalpse-by-ducking-and-covering).

Jacobs offers this graphic example: “After a nuclear attack, the suggestion that one [a survivor] can go somewhere and find clean water is ridiculous. Or that one could take their contaminated clothes off and simply find uncontaminated clothes nearby. Or that washing your hair one time will remove the systemic dangers of being in a radiologically contaminated environment, and your hair would not simply reabsorb some of that radiation. Or that shampoo would be contaminated, etc.” Jacobs refers to a study by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) which concluded that the radiation produced by a hydrogen bomb “detonated over Washington DC would have the following effects: “not only would everyone in Washington DC be dead from the blast and heat of the weapons, but everyone in Baltimore, Philadelphia and half the population of New York City would soon die of radiation sickness if they did not immediately evacuate.”

#7 – U.S. stays committed to a “first use” policy

Daniel Ellsberg makes this point in his book, The Doomsday Machine.

“Preparation for preemption or for carrying out threats of first use or first strike remains the essence of the ‘modernization’ program for strategic weapons for the last seventy years – prospectively being extended by Presidents Obama and Trump to one hundred years – that has continuously benefited our military-industrial-complex” (p. 324)….“The felt political need to profess, at least, to believe that the ability to make and carry out nuclear threats is essential to US national security and to our leadership in our alliances is why every single president has refused to make a formal ‘no-first-use’ (NFU) commitment” (p. 324)

“…the United States has tenaciously resisted the pleas of most other nations in the world to make an NFU pledge as an essential basis for stopping proliferation, including at the Nonproliferation Treaty Extension Conference in 1995 and the Review Conference since 2000. Moreover, the United States has demanded that NATO continue to legitimize first-use threat by basing its own strategy on them, even after the USSR and the Warsaw Pact had dissolved (and most of the former Pact members had joined NATO. Yet this stubborn stance – along with actual threats of possible US nuclear first use in more recent confrontations with Iraq, North Korea, and Iran – virtually precludes effective leadership by the United States (and perhaps anyone else) in delegitimizing and averting further proliferation and even imitation of US use of nuclear weapons” (324-325)

“UN Resolution 36/100, the Declaration on the Prevention of Nuclear Catastrophe… was adopted on December 9, 1981, in the wake of Reagan’s endorsement of the Carter Doctrine – openly extending US first-use threats to the Persian Gulf – which this resolution directly contradicted and implicitly condemned. It declares in its preamble: ‘Any doctrine allowing the first use of nuclear weapons and any actions pushing the world toward a catastrophe are incompatible with human moral standards and the lofty ideals of the UN.” 

Eighty-two nations voted in favor of it, 41 abstained (under pressure from US), 19 opposed it (including the US, Israel and most NATO member nations) (p. 325)”

Concluding thoughts

In a rational world based on verifiable, scientifically based evidence, the world leaders would be not only taking “practical” steps to reduce the chances of nuclear war but making efforts to ban nuclear weapons altogether. This is not so far-fetched. On July 7, 2017, “some 130 countries” at the United Nations successfully negotiated a treaty to outlaw nuclear weapons and, according to a report by Kennette Benedict for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, “agreed to make the developing, testing, manufacturing, possessing, or stockpiling of nuclear weapons by any state illegal” (https://thebulletin.org/prohibition-nuclear-weapons-treaty-10936). If we are lucky and rational, the U.S. would join the international movement to phase out nuclear weapons.