Aug. 6 and 9 mark the 72nd anniversary of the U.S. atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. Two hundred thousand Japanese civilians were atomized in actions said to be militarily necessary to end the war and save a half-million American soldiers’ lives in a bloody invasion to force surrender.
Not so, as I’ve argued in this forum on many Hiroshima anniversaries. I won’t replay the arguments here. A brief quote from the Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower will suffice: “The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
As immoral as those unnecessary killings were, there was a much greater evil to which “the bomb” gave birth: the nuclear threat of collective self-annihilation.
As Albert Einstein prophetically put it: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
A “new thinking” was called for, one that Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell spelled out in their “Manifesto” a decade later at the height of the Cold War (now replete with the H-bomb – a thousand times more powerful than the A-bomb).
The document was signed by Russell, Einstein and nine other eminent scientists from the East and West urging heads of state to acknowledge the universal danger of nuclear war and the need to put the survival of the human family ahead of ideological “victory.”
Human survival for the long term required an end to the nuclear arms race, the abolition of nuclear weapons and, ultimately, the abolition of the institution of war itself. Remarkably, it was a prescription closely approximated in Article 6 of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
It took 40 years, but the “new thinking” eventually took hold and the “unparalleled catastrophe” was averted.
In fact, the chances were shockingly bad at times.
In 1962. President John F. Kennedy put the chance of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis as 50-50. Not good. But 30 years later we learned that it was even worse: Unknown to JFK, the Soviets already had 100 short-range tactical nukes in place (in addition to the medium range missiles yet to be armed) and pre-delegated authority to fire at expected U.S. invading forces, an invasion recommended by all Kennedy’s military advisers and some non-military.
On Oct. 21, 1962, the president finally ordered a “quarantine” around Cuba (i.e. a blockade, an illegal act of war in international law). A Soviet sub armed with a nuclear torpedo was spotted and forced to go deep, hiding for days as the destroyer dropped “depth charges” that put the sub in crisis mode.
The captain, cut off from all communications, thought his sub was doomed and his country already under attack. His duty seemed clear: fire the torpedo and atomize the destroyer and the nearby aircraft carrier.
Three votes were required for the sub to act, but of the other commanders only Vasili Arkhipov courageously refused and eventually convinced the captain the “depth charges” were grenades merely signaling a request to surface and talk (which they were).
They surfaced, communicated with the destroyer and returned home – without inspection. The brush with Armageddon and the heroism of Arkhipov went unknown for 50 years.
In 1990, superpower cooperation and agreements, unthinkable only a couple of years earlier, yielded surprisingly deep cuts in nuclear and conventional deployments. The Cold War had finally thawed. And for a while it seemed additional disarmament would be relatively easy to obtain.
But after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, relations between Russia and the U.S. gradually soured. Clinton decided to expand NATO eastward (contrary to George H.W. Bush’s promise to Gorbachev).
In 2002, George W. Bush abruptly withdrew from the vitally important 30-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (the main preventative to an arms race in space) to place American ABMs near Russia’s borders. In 2003 he forced a halt to the U.N.’s search for “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and waged an illegal war of aggression against it in defiance of the Security Council’s refusal to grant approval.
We now face at least as great a threat from nuclear holocaust as we did during the Cold War.
Some experts say the threat is even greater, given the increased number of nuclear states (now nine), the renewal of Cold War hostilities and the trillion-dollar, 30-year nuclear “modernization.”
The renewed nuclear arms race is a serious matter, and the public silence, certainly in the U.S., only increases the danger.
In the decades since the end of the Cold War, we’ve lost much that became understood during the global anti-nuclear protests and consciousness raising in the 1960s and 1980s
What’s to be done? There are some positive developments that need our support.
First, there is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
In July, the U.N. General Assembly approved the new treaty by a large majority. Sadly, the U.S. and its “friends” – including the Security Council’s five other veto-wielding members (all nuclear weapon states) – boycotted the treaty’s drafting and vote. But the treaty will be open for signature in September and will become legally binding 90 days after being ratified by 50 nations.
This bold, unprecedented action grows out of a long-growing impatience on the part of the vast majority of the 192 parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968. Article 6 – insisted on by the non-nuclear parties – mandates negotiations on a treaty to abolish nukes “at an early date.”
But after nearly 50 years of patient hope, with barely a decade of real progress, the nuclear parties have not promised nuclear disarmament but a renewed nuclear arms race under the rubric of “modernization.”
Second, there are companion bills in the U.S. House and Senate to limit the president’s current authority to initiate a first use of nuclear weapons by requiring congressional approval.
This isn’t nuclear abolition, but it’s a step in the right direction in reducing chances of first use.
Both of these positive developments deserve support, and two organizations can help people get involved: N.H. Peace Action is active throughout New Hampshire and connected with other national peace groups, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is a national organization with international connections advocating nuclear abolition.
The Doomsday Clock featured in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947 is now 2½ minutes till midnight – or doomsday – the closest it’s been in 64 years.
It’s time to act.
(Ray Perkins Jr. of Concord is professor of philosophy emeritus at Plymouth State University and vice chairman of the Bertrand Russell Society board of directors.)