Finally sheathing the nuclear sword
Seventy years ago today, on Aug. 9, 1945, the front page of The Washington Observer had stories about a fatal car accident on Claysville’s Main Street that killed an 18-year-old man, and a 5-year-old killed by a cousin who was playing with a loaded rifle.
And then there was this headline, underneath those two: “Drop Atom Bomb on Nagasaki.”
Three days after the United States unleashed an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, decimating it and killing more than 100,000 people, it unloaded another bomb on Nagasaki, 260 miles to the southwest, reducing it to rubble and killing at least another 75,000 people.
It effectively ended World War II, with Japan quickly surrendering, and it established the United States as the world’s undisputed military colossus. But the celebrations of the war’s end, and the fact that it concluded without an invasion of Japan that could have led to thousands of American casualties, were quickly followed by years of a frigid Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union and palpable terror that the world could be obliterated in a nuclear holocaust. Duck-and-cover drills, fallout shelters and movies like “Dr. Strangelove” and “Fail Safe” inevitably shaped the psyches of people who came of age during that frightening time.
“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness,” President John F. Kennedy said in 1961.
a lot of nuclear weapons loose in the world, and the possibility of one of them inflicting mass destruction is not a worry that we can blithely consign to the days of the hula hoop and the Twist.
Estimates have it there are 16,000 nuclear weapons across the planet today, divided among nine countries: The United States, Russia, France, China, Britain, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea. Countries that had harbored nuclear ambitions, such as Brazil and South Africa, have opted against developing weapons. If the nuclear deal with Iran is signed, and Iran lives up to the terms of the agreement, its efforts to get a bomb will be forestalled. This will mean that, for the first time in seven decades, nuclear proliferation will have essentially ceased.
But what we do have to worry about are nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, or being launched accidentally or as a result of a misunderstanding. In January 1995, Russian officials momentarily believed they were under attack by a submarine-launched ballistic missile, and informed President Boris Yeltsin he had a few minutes to launch nuclear weapons against the United States in retaliation. But it turns out what they believed was a ballistic missile was actually a Norwegian weather rocket. Thankfully, there was a cool head in the Kremlin, and Yeltsin opted against punching in his country’s nuclear codes.
The world might not be so fortunate next time. With thousands of nuclear weapons still out there, we are still living under Kennedy’s “nuclear sword of Damocles.” And the only way for that threat to be diminished is continued reductions in nuclear stockpiles.
As Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, recently noted, “It is difficult to think of a military combat mission that requires even the use of one nuclear bomb. … But the United States has 7,000. This is beyond all logic and military need. Clinging to these obsolete weapons is a vestige of Cold War thinking propped up by contracts and the desire of those with nuclear bases to keep the few thousand jobs they provide. Pandering to these parochial motives and flawed strategies risks catastrophes whose financial and human costs dwarf any conceivable benefits.”
When you think about it, it’s just about miraculous that a nuclear weapon has not been used in an act of war in 70 years. We can only hope our luck, however fragile, holds.