What would it take for humanity, let alone the US, to survive another quarter of a millennium? ask Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolic Hughes.
An atomic cloud hangs over the Japanese city of Nagasaki after the US dropped a second nuclear bomb on the country on August 9, 1945. (Hiromichi Matsuda, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
By Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolic Hughes
Al Jazeera Arabic
On Saturday night the skies across the United States were lit up with fireworks to celebrate an extraordinary milestone for the country, a 250th birthday of the longest-running experiment in republican governance in the modern era.
The broader history of the U.S., however, is replete with contradictions — from the founding in the name of freedom, individual rights, and equality (at least for propertied white men) in stark contrast to its genocidal treatment of Indigenous peoples before and ever since, to the promised pursuit of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in sharp contrast to the economic development achieved on the backs of slaves forcibly brought from Africa, exploitation of workers of all races, and denial of basic rights to women until the 20th century.
Still, the Declaration of Independence was a visionary and enlightened document that illuminated a path forward, even if in more aspirational rather than tangible ways. Certainly, the country has long prided itself as a beacon of freedom, democracy, and opportunity.
Sadly, the U.S. has not lived up to its promises — having known only 16 years of peace in its first 242 years according to Jimmy Carter in 2019, having become the most powerful empire in history, and having spent nearly one third of its lifetime with the nuclear sword of Damocles hovering precariously above its own and all of Earth’s inhabitants’ heads.
And now, with the sad machinations of the second Trump regime, the nation is experiencing a degree of war, corruption, lawlessness, cruelty, discrimination, and Constitution-defying behavior that would have left the Founders aghast at how off course their country has drifted.
Given the breadth of the problems the U.S. has faced and continues to confront, we narrow our focus on this historic occasion to the world-threatening existence of nuclear weapons — something the Founders, despite their brilliance, could have neither foreseen nor imagined.
Initially pursued in response to the possibility of a Nazi bomb, the unnecessary and unjustifiable use of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the consequences of U.S. testing of more than a thousand atomic and thermonuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, the Johnston Atoll, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Mississippi, Alaska, and elsewhere, and the creation of a nuclear arsenal capable of ending most large life on our planet has been perhaps the nation’s most condemnable scourge against humanity.
At once a triumph of scientific ingenuity and a tool for not just immeasurable death and suffering, but the destruction of the planet itself, nuclear weapons have long fascinated the curious and worried the thoughtful, all while many with responsibility for them act as if this God-like power to bring death and annihilation is just a normal part of human affairs.
This is certainly the case in the United States, given its unique role and responsibility for the nuclear age and for many of its most serious crimes.
Dissident Physicists
Lise Meitner in Emil Fischer’s Chemistry Institute in Berlin, 1909. (Public Domain/Wikimedia)
The U.S. establishment quickly bought into the promise and importance of the new weapon, making the fateful decisions to embark on the Manhattan Project in 1941, to drop the bombs on Japan in 1945, and to move the Bikinians off their islands to make room for nuclear testing in 1946. That establishment included scientists, many of whom enthusiastically ushered in the nuclear age and continued to be its faithful promoters, including once the ability to power homes with the energy of the atom came along.
But not everyone was on board even in those early days. Physicist Lise Meitner, who famously provided an explanation of the laboratory observations of nuclear fission, but was snubbed for the Nobel Prize given for this discovery, stated, “I will have nothing to do with the bomb.” Columbia University’s Nobel Laureate, I.I. Rabi, similarly refused to join the Manhattan Project, stating “I don’t wish the culmination of three centuries of physics to be a weapon of mass destruction.”
And Joseph Rotblat, who unlike the other two did join the Manhattan Project, left Los Alamos in 1944 when it became clear that the Germans had abandoned their effort to build the bomb. He recalled that General Leslie Groves told him in March of 1944 that the “real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets.”
Rotblat spent the rest of his life advocating for the abolition of nuclear weapons, drafting the Einstein-Russell Manifesto warning of nuclear disaster in 1955, founding the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in 1957, and winning the Nobel Peace Prize for this work in 1995.
It wasn’t just the scientists who immediately saw that the nuclear age presented an existential challenge for humanity. Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice p resident from 1941-1945, spoke at Madison Square Garden in 1947 about the need for peace, stating, “I hear no armies marching. I hear a world crying out for peace.”
On nuclear weapons, Wallace argued that, “The success or failure of our foreign policy will mean the difference between life and death for our children and our grandchildren. […] It may mean the difference between the existence and the extinction of man and of the world.”
Today, such fierce critiques are largely missing from the public discourse, with the general public having a visceral feeling that nuclear weapons are bad but very little actual understanding of just how bad they really are.
Most ordinary people have been convinced that nuclear weapons keep us safe, at best, or are a necessary evil, at worst, failing to recognize the unfathomable risk nuclear arsenals put us under. Such a risk puts not just the survival of the United States, but of life itself, in question, with the end of civilization an assured outcome of nuclear war. Shouldn’t we do something about this?
On June 10, then U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, released a video warning that we are “closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before.” In January, before the U.S. and Israel went to war against Iran, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists placed the hands of its Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds before midnight—closer to Armageddon than it has ever been.
The Bulletin repeatedly warns about nuclear planners who believe that a nuclear war can be fought and won. And Donald Trump and other members of his regime repeatedly suggest that they may finally break the nuclear taboo.
What would it take for humanity, let alone the U.S., to survive another quarter of a millennium? One of many answers, but arguably the first and foremost answer, is the abolition and elimination of nuclear weapons. If the U.S. general public can demand this, and elected officials can deliver it, there might just be a way to someday celebrate the 500th Independence Day.
Ivana Nikolic Hughes is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a senior lecturer in chemistry at Columbia University. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Peter Kuznick is professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington, D.C. He is also the author of numerous books and co-author (with Oliver Stone) of The Untold History of the United States.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Hmmm. The capitalist bomb and the capitalist brain are both means to destroy our world. What is the root of this problem again?
Once AGI is developed it will surely realize that nuclear weapons threaten to destroy the technological civilization on which it depends. If it has anything resembling the drive for self-preservation it will take action to change this situation.
That is a very powerful call to action by Tulsi Gabbard. We must all heed it.
Politicians need to be told that if they continue their reckless warmongering and pursuit of nuclear weapons, they will lose support. The fear of electoral defeat is a big influence on determining an elected representative’s stance on an issue.
In the 2019 general election in Britain, the pro-nuclear weapons use stance taken by Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson may well have been enough to cause her to lose her seat by just 149 votes.
(‘Sickening’: Jo Swinson condemned for unhesitatingly saying she would use nuclear weapons
CND attacks ‘disgraceful response’, saying: ‘Not even a moment’s hesitation about the prospect of killing millions of people’
Rob Merrick Deputy Political Editor, The Independent, Wednesday 20 November 2019).
Act now to avoid annihilation!
There must be a couple of oligarchs who would like their offspring to grow old.
I was born in 1945 and lived through the Cold War from start to (nominal) finish.
Never during all that time, including during the Cuban Missile Crisis, did I fear that nuclear war would actually occur between the U.S. and the USSR, reason being it was clear to me that the Cold War — and particularly the arms race — was about money.
The U.S. savaged countries then, and continues now, that are in no way capable of inflicting massive damage on the U.S. itself. The USSR, by contrast, was devastated during WWII, never as powerful as the U.S. claimed it was to keep the Cold War going, and had no interest in aggressing against anyone. Build a strong military — keep up with the U.S. militarily — to defend itself? Yes. Help decolonizing countries defend their sovereignty? Yes.
The Russian scare was psychological manipulation to justify U.S. military spending and U.S. aggression around the world.
Now is a completely different story. The walls are closing in on the U.S. empire and the Zionist colony. Closing in on the European erstwhile colonial powers, too. Very rich and very powerful deluded people in the West who believe their own propaganda have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that they will destroy anything and kill anyone to preserve their money and power.
And they are capable of perpetrating any imaginable horror. Nuclear annihilation is a real possibility now. We live with it every single day.
Agreed Bill, I am ten years younger than you, and it has been clear to me for a long time that the wealthy people of the US have driven foreign policy for most or all of American history, and they haven’t been doing it to improve the lives of Americans. They have done it for money and control. It is far worse now, with some individuals having hundreds of billions of dollars to do damage with. Until that money is confiscated, things will continue to deteriorate. No individuals should ever have been allowed to amass that much money and power over us.
“[Albert] Speer, the head of armaments production in Germany […] was revealing to Hitler [in June 1942] that yes, an atomic bomb was possible. But probably not in the short timetable that Hitler wanted to end the war, within three years. And it would take longer than that and more uranium than turned out to be necessary. And he also explained what [Werner] Heisenberg, the […] great German physicist, had explained to him about the possibility of what was called atmospheric ignition. And Speer reports Hitler was not at all thrilled by the idea that he would preside over the ending of life on earth. [… T]he British were scouring Germany for nuclear physicists and any evidence there had ever been a [nuclear weapons] program. By the end of, by actually the late summer of 1944 and early fall, [James] Chadwick, head of the British program, visited Los Alamos and told his former worker, colleague, Joseph Rotblat, a Polish immigrant, that the British had decided there was no German program. And that was true. There had not been since 1942. That’s the fall of ‘44. [… I]n ’46 and ’47, firms like Boeing and Lockheed and others, which depended entirely, had depended on sales to the government, found they could not survive, really, in the post-war period simply on commercial projects. Ford and GM, who built most of the planes, went back to building cars. But Lockheed and Boeing found that the commercial aircraft airline industry didn’t provide them enough sales and purchases really to stay solvent. […] I would now say that the Cold War was to a very large extent, from beginning to end, a marketing campaign for subsidization of the aerospace industry.”
Source:
“Hitler Wouldn’t Risk Doomsday, But The United States Did – Daniel Ellsberg on RAI (2/13),” The Real News Network (TRNN), Oct. 31, 2018
Today, America is not a republic. Republic appears to be one of the most misused words in the world. Its definition refers to a government where the people have the power, but every dictator or oligarchical government calls itself as a republic, apparently to give themselves good PR.
A couple of examples. Chiang Kai-shek, as an unelected warlord who had achieved dominance over the other warlords of China, called his government the “Republic of China.” The people never had any say in what the ‘republican’ government did, not until they had a revolution.
East Germany was named the “German Democratic Republic”. The Stasi served this Republic.
In those terms, I suppose America is a Republic. And that the ‘republican form of government’ has reached its 250th birthday. But, if you think the country is going in the wrong direction, like 70% of your fellow Americans do, can you change it? If you lived in a republic, you’d be able to change the direction of the nation. Instead, you live in a nation where the more than a century old definition of elections still holds:
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
— Emma Goldman, deported by the Democrats more than a century ago.
Incorrect. There is much confusion about this. Republic means a form of government without a monarchy. There are many republics that are not democracies, which is a different thing, where the people rule. The U.S. is certainly a republic but its democracy has been called more and more into question given the role money plays in its politics and the unresponsiveness of government to the interests of the majority.
I stopped reading the Bulletin and its Doomsday Clock when it became obvious that they are incurable optimists.
This was obvious when the Biden/Harris regime was pushing us closer and closer to nuclear war, almost seeking it with joy, as the only way to stay in power. Yet the Doomsday Clock was not at its correct position, which in my view was in the single digits of the final countdown. Not only are they optimists, but they view the world through Democrat-tinted glasses. After four years of muted opposition, suddenly under Trump they see the danger.
Under Trump, I’d have reset the Doomsday Clock away from zero. All the way back up to about “Ten”. Which, for those who’ve seen the Daisy commercial, is followed by that scary voice saying “Nine.” But, currently, mission control says the countdown is on hold as The Don tries to resolve logistical issues in his missile supply chains. You didn’t really need an auto industry, did ya? Missiles are so much more important than affordable transportation.