80 Years of Nukes and No End in Sight
Albert Camus was the first Westerner to question our suicidal capabilities
Eighty years ago, a B-29 bomber dropped a single 9,700-pound bomb carrying a uranium-powered nuclear device on Hiroshima. The blast immediately vaporized 70% of the city, killing 70,000 people and leaving eerie shadows of their bodies etched into the sidewalks. Another 70,000 Japanese perished from radiation sickness, burns, and injuries in the days that followed.
The Hiroshima bombing was widely celebrated in the West, being seen as necessary to bring a definitive end to World War II, but it filled Paris writer Albert Camus with dread.
As editor-in-chief of Combat, a French resistance newspaper started during the German occupation, he published a searing commentary two days after the bombing.
“The world is what it is, which is to say, not much,” he wrote on August 8, 1945. “This is what everyone has known since yesterday, thanks to the tremendous chorus that the radio, newspapers, and news agencies have just unleashed on the subject of the atomic bomb.
“We are told, in fact, amidst a host of enthusiastic comments that any city of average size can be completely razed by a bomb the size of a football. American, English, and French newspapers are full of elegant dissertations on the future, the past, the inventors, the cost, the peaceful evocation and the warlike effects, the political consequences, and even the independent nature of the atomic bomb.
“We will summarize in one sentence: [technological] civilization has just reached its ultimate degree of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide or the intelligent use of scientific conquests…”
The day after Camus’ essay ran, the U.S. dropped another bomb, this one carrying a plutonium device, on Nagasaki, destroying another city and another 70,000 people who lived there.
Whether the Nagasaki bombing was necessary or stemmed from a desire to try out a plutonium bomb — or even if the strike on Hiroshima was needed — has been questioned ever since, with then-General Dwight Eisenhower and Admiral William Leahy among those saying that Japan was on the verge of surrendering anyway.
They did have the desire effect, however. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced surrender on August 15th.
And ever since, humanity has been debating how to prevent the proliferation of nuclear arms. We’ve failed magnificently.
Nine countries now possess over 12,000 nuclear weapons — the U.S., Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.
Of those, India, Pakistan, and Israel started producing nuclear arms as an extension of technology gifted by the U.S. under Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program. Other recipients such as South Africa, South Korea, and Taiwan also embarked on nuclear weapons programs, but dropped them. As noted previously, the Atoms for Peace program also launched the Shah in Iran on his pursuit of atomic devices, which the U.S. and Israel believe that Iran is still pursuing five decades later.
But now some nations that had previously dropped that idea — or that had never even seriously tried to get them before — are seriously considering acquiring nuclear arsenals.
Global Instability Ups the Demand
The ongoing Russia war on Ukraine, which gave up its nuclear stash in 1994 after Russia and the U.S. guaranteed its territorial sovereignty, certainly provides a lesson on why countries would want these weapons as deterrents.
What’s more, earlier U.S. security promises appear uncertain — even U.S. support for NATO is wobbly — and the formerly implied U.S. protection of Taiwan should China attack looks shaky.
So who can blame the governments of Germany, Poland, Turkey, Taiwan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia, among others, for ignoring Camus’ pleas to stay clear of “collective suicide” and instead to publicly wonder if they should join the nuclear club and sit at the big table? Even in Japan — which like Germany, is considered capable of manufacturing atomic arms at short notice — there are calls to invest in modern nuclear weapons, which make the bombs that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like sling shots.
The situation today would certainly confound Camus, who never stopped his harping about nuclear perils. Twelve years after his essay appeared, he won the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature, giving a speech that threw out another moral imperative.
“Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world,” he said from the podium at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm. “Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.”
Sorry, Camus, your generation flubbed it — producing little more than strategies for Mutually Assured Destruction that didn’t halt arms-making and the “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” of 1968, that most every country except, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea has signed, but which has no sharp teeth. (Those who violate it are subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, could be cut off from conventional nuclear suppliers, might be sanctioned, and could end up on a nuclear blacklist.)
And, despite a number of organizations warning that we’re in a very precarious situation — the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is now set at 89 seconds before midnight — the current generation of decision makers, few of whom were alive when the nuclear bombs fell on Japan, is flubbing it, too, with some military strategists even floating the notion of “limited nuclear war.”
You can take Mel out of France, you even take Mel out of Barcelona, but you can never take Camus out of Mel.