The nuclear threat unabated

Bob Sheak, August 16, 2024

The story of nuclear weapons begins in the United States. The U.S. government under the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the greenlight for the project to build a bomb to commence, the first atomic bombs were then created and tested, and, under dubious assumptions, the bombs were subsequently used to blow up two Japanese cities, causing massive destruction, death, and lasting radiation illnesses. The testing and development of nuclear bombs continued, as did the costs to people and the environment. Sadly, the U.S. and other nuclear-armed countries are now in the process of “modernizing” their nuclear arsenals. This is despite the fact that the majority of countries in the U.N. General Assembly have voted to ban nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the U.S. unfortunately maintains a “first use” policy with respect to nuclear weapons and Trump will have the power to launch nuclear weapons if he becomes president.

Background

Here is a summary of what occurred in what became known as the Manhattan Project from the Wikipedia online 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Army component was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project.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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Destruction and death

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 on August 9, 1945  (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.”

The genie is out of the bottle

The Russians’ atomic bomb

The Russians exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949 (https://history.com/this-day-in-history/soveits-explode-atomic-bomb).

The US tests the first hydrogen bomb, followed by Russia

“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 get the bomb

The Union of Concerned Scientists keeps a record (https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/worldwide).

“Nine countries possess nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. In total, the global nuclear stockpile is close to 13,000 weapons. While that number is lower than it was during the Cold War—when there were roughly 60,000 weapons worldwide—it does not alter the fundamental threat to humanity these weapons represent.

“For example, the warheads on just one US nuclear-armed submarine have seven times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And the United States usually has ten of those submarines at sea.

“Moreover, nearly all the major nuclear powers—including the United States, Russia, and China—are now significantly increasing their nuclear arsenals in size, capability, or both. This growing new arms race is raising the risk of nuclear war.”

The nuclear stock piles of the U.S. and Russia

“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.”

On the Brink

W.J. Hennigan, writes about national security issues for Opinion from Washington, D.C. He has reported from more than two dozen countries, covering war, the arms trade and the lives of U.S. service members. He reports in this article on how close humanity is to nuclear war

(https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/07/opinion/nuclear-war-prevention.html).

“In the fall of 2022, a U.S. intelligence assessment put the odds at 50-50 that Russia would launch a nuclear strike to halt Ukrainian forces if they breached its defense of Crimea. Preparing for the worst, American officials rushed supplies to Europe.

“Ukraine has set up hundreds of radiation detectors around cities and power plants, along with more than 1,000 smaller hand-held monitors sent by the United States.

Nearly 200 hospitals in Ukraine have been identified as go-to facilities in the event of a nuclear attack. Thousands of doctors, nurses and other workers have been trained on how to respond and treat radiation exposure. And millions of potassium iodide tablets, which protect the thyroid from picking up radioactive material linked with cancer, are stockpiled around the country.

Hennigan continues.

A nuclear playbook

“But well before that — just four days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, in fact — the Biden administration had directed a small group of experts and strategists, a ‘Tiger Team,’ to devise a new nuclear ‘playbook’ of contingency plans and responses. Pulling in experts from the intelligence, military and policy fields, they pored over years-old emergency preparedness plans, weapon-effects modeling and escalation scenarios, dusting off materials that in the age of counterterrorism and cyberwarfare were long believed to have faded into irrelevance.

“The playbook, which was coordinated by the National Security Council, now sits in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the West Wing of the White House. It has a newly updated, detailed menu of diplomatic and military options for President Biden — and any future president — to act upon if a nuclear attack occurs in Ukraine.

The likelihood of nuclear war goes up

“‘At the heart of all of this work,” Hennigan writes, “is a chilling conclusion: The possibility of a nuclear strike, once inconceivable in modern conflict, is more likely now than at any other time since the Cold War [since 1992]. ‘We’ve had 30 pretty successful years keeping the genie in the bottle,’ a senior administration official on the Tiger Team said. While both America and Russia have hugely reduced their nuclear arsenals since the height of the Cold War, the official said, ‘Right now is when nuclear risk is most at the forefront.’”

Hennigan goes on.

If deterrence breaks down, the effects of a nuclear attack

“The toll of a 10-kiloton blast on a military target near a city could be thousands dead, even more wounded. Roads, tunnels and railways are impassable because of debris and destruction. It might be days before rescue workers can venture safely into affected areas.

“Cell towers and utility poles are knocked over and disconnected, causing widespread power failures. The electromagnetic pulse released from the detonation cripples electronic equipment within roughly a one-mile radius from the epicenter.

“The thousands of unburied dead, the open sewage and the fetid water are a breeding ground for disease and growth in insect populations that have a higher tolerance than humans for radiation. Flies appear en masse, laying eggs in corpses and the open burn wounds of survivors.

“The debris churned up by a nuclear blast, along with soot and ash from the raging fires, falls back to earth as thick, black water droplets laced with radioactive material. Black-rain showers can fall miles away from ground zero, staining nearly everything they touch.

“Radiation sickness begins with bouts of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Days or weeks after exposure, people who look fine can suddenly lose hunks of hair, become anemic and weak, and begin bleeding internally. Their immune systems can fail, rendering them helpless against the infectious diseases that start to spread: dysentery, typhoid, cholera.

“Some pregnant women who are near the blast later give birth to babies with microcephaly and other defects. Cancer of all kinds can appear decades later.

“If radioactive contamination from the initial blast passes through the food chain via animals and plant roots, damage to the ecosystem can linger for years.”

“Russia is replacing its Soviet-era hardware with new jets, missiles and submarines. And the other eight nations that have nuclear weapons are believed to be enhancing their arsenals in parts of the world that are already on edge.”

“Now that shared safety net of treaties and agreements is nearly gone. After a decade of diplomatic breakdown and military antagonism, only one major arms treaty between the United States and Russia remains — New START, which Mr. Putin suspended Russia’s participation in last year. The treaty is set to expire in February 2026.”

“That means we are just two years away from a world in which there are no major treaty limits on the number of strategic nuclear weapons the United States and Russia deploy. Already today, because of the New START suspension, the two nations disclose little information about their arsenals to each other and do not engage in talks for further agreements. If nuclear deterrence — however flawed a concept it may be — is to work, transparency about nations’ capabilities is critical. Without better communication, the risk of rapid escalation and miscalculation will grow.”

Nuclear winter – the end game

“Even a limited nuclear war could be catastrophic. A 2022 scientific study found that if 100 Hiroshima-size bombs — less than 1 percent of the estimated global nuclear arsenal — were detonated in certain cities, they could generate more than five million tons of airborne soot, darkening the skies, lowering global temperatures and creating the largest worldwide famine in history.

“An estimated 27 million people could immediately die, and as many as 255 million people may starve within two years.”

“The United States is now preparing to build new nuclear warheads for the first time since 1991, part of a decades-long program to overhaul its nuclear forces that’s estimated to cost up to $2 trillion. The outline of that plan was drawn up in 2010 — in a much different security environment than what the country faces today.

Donald Trump’s Reckless Infatuation with nuclear weapons and a renewed nuclear arms race

Lawrence S. Wittner,Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press), reports on this issue in an article published by Foreign Policy in Focus, July 22, 2024 (https://fpif.org/donald-trumps-infatuation-with-nuclear-weapons).  

Trump has brought the world closer to nuclear midnight

Wittner writes: “Over the past decade and more, nuclear war has grown increasingly likely. Most nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements of the past have been discarded by the nuclear powers or will expire soon. Moreover, there are no nuclear arms control negotiations underway. Instead, all nine nuclear nations (Russia, the United States, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea) have begun a new nuclear arms race, qualitatively improving the 12,121 nuclear weapons in existence or building new, much faster, and deadlier ones.

“Furthermore, the cautious, diplomatic statements about international relations that characterized an earlier era have given way to public threats of nuclear war, issued by top officials in Russia, the United States, and North Korea.

“This June, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that, given the heightened risk of nuclear annihilation, “humanity is on a knife’s edge.”

This menacing situation owes a great deal to Donald Trump.

Trump’s record

“As president of the United States, Trump sabotaged key nuclear arms control agreements of the past and the future. He single-handedly destroyed the INF Treaty, the Iran nuclear agreement, and the Open Skies Treaty by withdrawing the United States from them.  In addition, as the expiration date for the New START Treaty approached in February 2021, he refused to accept a simple extension of the agreement—action quickly countermanded by the incoming Biden administration.

“Not surprisingly, Trump was horrified by the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons―a UN-negotiated agreement that banned nuclear weapons, thereby providing the framework for a nuclear-free world.  In 2017, when this vanguard nuclear disarmament treaty was passed by an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations, the Trump administration  proclaimed that the United States would never sign it.

“In fact,” Wittner continues, “Trump was far less interested in arms control and disarmament than in entering―and winning―a new nuclear arms race with other nations. ‘Let it be an arms race,’ he declared in December 2016, shortly after his election victory. ‘We will outmatch them at every pass.’ In February 2018, he boasted that his administration was ‘creating a brand-new nuclear force.  We’re gonna be so far ahead of everybody else in nuclear like you’ve never seen before.’ And, indeed, Trump’s U.S. nuclear ‘modernization’ program―involving the replacement of every Cold War era submarine, bomber, missile, and warhead with an entirely new generation of the deadliest weapons ever invented―acquired enormous momentum during his presidency, with cost estimates running as high as $2 trillion.”

There’s more.

Trump considers the return of U.S. nuclear weapons testing

“Eager to facilitate this nuclear buildup, the Trump administration began to explore a return to U.S. nuclear weapons testing.  Consequently, it announced in 2018 that, although the U.S. government had ended its nuclear tests in 1992 and President Bill Clinton had negotiated and signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, Trump would oppose U.S. Senate ratification of the treaty. The administration also dramatically reduced the time necessary to prepare for nuclear weapons test explosions. In 2020, senior Trump administration officials reportedly conducted a serious discussion of U.S. government resumption of nuclear testing, leading the House of Representatives, then under Democratic control, to block funding for it.

“Though many Americans assumed that a powerful U.S. nuclear arsenal would prevent an outbreak of nuclear war, Trump undermined this wishful thinking by revealing himself perfectly ready to launch a nuclear attack. During his 2016 presidential campaign, the Republican nominee reportedly asked a foreign policy advisor three times why, if the U.S. government possessed nuclear weapons, it should be reluctant to use them. The following year, Trump told the governor of Puerto Rico that, ‘if nuclear war happens, we won’t be second in line pressing the button.’

“Indeed, Trump came remarkably close to lunching a nuclear war against North Korea. In August 2017, responding to provocative comments by Kim Jong Un, Trump warned that further North Korean threats would ‘be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.’”

“Trump’s threat of a nuclear attack triggered a rapid escalation of tensions between the two nations. In a speech before the UN General Assembly that September, Trump vowed to ‘totally destroy North Korea’ if Kim, whom he derisively labeled ‘Rocket Man,’ continued his provocative rhetoric. Meanwhile, the White House chief of staff, General John Kelly, was appalled by indications that Trump really wanted war and, especially, by the president’s suggestion of using a nuclear weapon against North Korea and, then, blaming the action on someone else.

According to Kelly, the military’s objection that the war would―in the words of Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis ‘incinerate a couple million people’―had no impact on Trump. In early 2018, the U.S. president merely upped the ante by publicly boasting that he had a ‘Nuclear Button’ that was ‘much bigger & more powerful’ than Kim’s.

“What finally headed off a nuclear war, Kelly recalled, was his appeal to Trump’s ‘narcissism.’ If Trump could forge a friendly diplomatic relationship with North Korea, the general suggested, the U.S. president would emerge as the ‘greatest salesman in the world.’ And, indeed, Trump did reverse course and embark on a flamboyant campaign to pacify and denuclearize North Korea, remarking that May that ‘everyone’ thought he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Eventually, however, the U.S.-North Korean negotiations, including a much-heralded ‘summit’ between Trump and Kim, resulted in little more than handshakes, North Korea’s continued development of nuclear weapons, and Trump’s return to public threats of nuclear war―this time against Iran.

“Given this record, as well as Trump’s all-too-evident mental instability, we have been fortunate that, in a world bristling with nuclear weapons, the world survived his four years in office.

“But our good fortune might not last much longer, for Trump’s return to power in 2025 or the recklessness of some other leader of a nuclear-armed nation could unleash unprecedented catastrophe upon the world.

“Ultimately, the only long-term security for humanity lies in the global abolition of nuclear weapons and the development of a united world community.” Such goals seem less and less attainable.”

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Concluding thoughts

It is worrisome that Trump seems to think about nuclear weapons and nuclear war so nonchalantly. Everything we know about him is that he is impulsive, doesn’t read much, hates to lose, wants to be dominant, seeks revenge against his opponents, and wants recognition and acceptance as a great leader, if not a messiah with supernatural abilities.  He is encouraged to adopt a permissive approach to nuclear policies by key allies like the Heritage Foundation and, generally, the big nuclear weapons producers. For example, William Hartung reports on August 6, 2024 on “the Heritage Foundation” proposal to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal (https://commondreams.org/opinion/heritage-foundation-nukes).

There has been “a flood of campaign contributions from ICBM contractors [which]  is reinforced by their staggering investments in lobbying. In any given year, the arms industry as a whole employs between 800 and 1,000 lobbyists, well more than one for every member of Congress. Most of those lobbyists hired by ICBM contractors come through the ‘revolving door’ from careers in the Pentagon, Congress, or the Executive Branch. That means they come with the necessary tools for success in Washington: an understanding of the appropriations cycle and close relations with decision-makers on the Hill.”

Hartung points out, “The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing,” as reported by Hekmat Aboukhater and William D. Hartung (https://counterpunch.org/2024/08/08/inside-the-nuclear-weapons-lobby-today).

It is also of concern that: “all three major nuclear powers are upgrading their nuclear arsenals” and “the one remaining U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control agreement is hanging by a thread.”

Trump’s advisers exacerbate the situation by encouraging him to renew U.S. nuclear weapons testing if he wins the presidency in November, a development that would surely lead to testing by Russia and China (https://nytimes.com/2024/07/05/science/nuclear-testing-trump.html).

A peace-oriented option

Lawrence Davidson, a retired professor of history, wants us to “think about how to build a more peaceful world”

(https://counterpunch.org/2024/08/13/lets-think-about-how-to-build-a-more-peaceful-world). He focuses on how to reform the United Nations and  recommends ending the veto power of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Indeed, “124 UN nations have endorsed a proposal to scrap the veto in connection with genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass atrocities.”