Haunted by Thermonuclear Nightmares
This month marks the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, the first explosion of an atomic device in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Next month, of course, marks the grim anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of August 6 and 9, 1945. The atomic nightmares of those two cities have morphed into the thermonuclear nightmare of far more powerful nuclear weapons that continues to haunt us still. The U.S. and Russia combined have roughly 11,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various types, most of them far more powerful than those used against Japan 80 years ago.
The short clip of the Trinity test above is all the more haunting because it’s silent and in black and white.
I’ve walked the Trinity test site and co-taught a course at the Air Force Academy on the making and use of the atomic bomb. Walking the site was an eerie experience. I did it in 1992. Once was enough.
So much pressure was applied to get the atomic “gadget” to work that the scientists and government were reckless. Shrouding it all in secrecy didn’t help. The “downwinders” — those who lived in the path of radioactive fallout from the test —they weren’t given much consideration, if any. Certainly, the effects of radiation and fallout weren’t fully known and were likely underestimated. That said, the government should have taken far more care here. Check out the documentary Trinity released earlier this year, which focuses on these “downwinders” and how they suffered from the blast. As one of the interviewees suggests, the government’s attitude may have been that only a few Indians and Mexicans lived in the area, an attitude summed up by “collateral damage,” a common if unseemly euphemism used all too frequently today.
Readers may recall a podcast I did on Trinity and our leaders’ cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons: https://bracingviews.substack.com/p/playing-with-nuclear-matches
Historians will forever debate whether the atomic bombings were necessary or if they served to shorten the war. The documentary “The Day After Trinity” by Jon Else is just superb here. My reading of the events is that there was never any doubt the atomic bomb would be used. Luckily for the Germans, VE Day came before Trinity. But the Japanese were still resisting, so they became the new target.
The only man who could have stopped the bombing was President Harry Truman–and he wasn’t about to stop it. A new president, not even elected, who didn’t even know about the bomb until FDR died: Truman used the bomb because it was the easiest path to take. All pressure was on ending the war as quickly as possible, so why not use the bomb? After all, the U.S. continued its firebombing raids on Japanese cities well after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is the inexorable logic of near-total war. The only consolation is that nuclear weapons haven’t been dropped on a city since 1945. That is one valuable legacy from Hiroshima/Nagasaki: some recognition of the horror unleashed there. Nevertheless, U.S. presidents from Obama to Trump to Biden and Trump again are forging ahead with new nuclear weapons—always in the stated cause of “deterrence,” naturally.
It’s staggering the money dedicated to total destruction in the cause of preventing total destruction. It’s a powerful reason to remember what Trinity unleashed 80 years ago, and the price the Japanese paid at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unless we wise up as a species, it absolutely can happen again at levels of destruction that are simply unfathomable.
Nuclear disarmament, not rearmament, is the only sensible policy here.
Bracing Views 