Nuclear Weapons and the Moral Imagination

On the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, we should reflect not only on the destruction of that city, but also on the concurrent realization that the Earth has not yet passed a full century with nuclear-armed humans patrolling it. With all of the other problems occupying our present, the shadow of the mushroom cloud can seem like a black and white relic of the paranoia of another world order. We must continue to acknowledge that nuclear weapons are still a new and dangerous technology with catastrophic implications for our time.

When the United States built its first nuclear weapons, it lacked the moral imagination to respect the suffering they would portend. That is to say, it was contemplating an act that had no moral equivalent in history in terms of its scale. That is also to say, the military and its leaders were not ready to be deterred by what they already understood - that the atomic bombs would be incredibly destructive and lethal. They were after all in the business of killing the people they called their enemies.

The U.S. saw the bombs it was to drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as more efficient versions of what had already been done to cities like Tokyo and Dresden. Those kinds of all-out attacks on civilians would later be reckoned by historians as war crimes. At the time, they were considered “necessary” in the logic of total war. Before the U.S. really understand what kind of power it had developed, it had already committed to using all of its power to defeat Germany and Japan.

Did the U.S. military, or President Truman, understand exactly what they were doing when they unleashed Little Boy and Fat Man? They knew they'd be killing thousands of civilians. They ought to have known there would be lasting damage due to radioactive fallout, though it was something that had obviously never been studied before. No one had ever seen a city full of survivors suffer from acute radiation sickness, and later go on to manifest cancer as a direct result. One doubts there could be a full appreciation of the potential for the nuclear trauma to alter Japan's people on a cellular level. The racial prejudice against Asians that prevailed in America, and the blunt categorization of all Japanese as "the enemy", would have diminished any sympathy before the fact.

Only after the atom bombs had been used, did the realization spread that they were capable of so much more than just killing a lot of people. Bombs like these, growing more and more powerful with advances in technology, could render the planet uninhabitable for humans if they were used with the kind of abandon that other bombs were. So non-proliferation became the admonition for nations without nuclear weapons, while the nations that did have them obsessed over testing and building more, for fear that their enemies would build them first.

And that was exactly to be expected, because if humanity's leaders lacked the collective moral imagination to avoid the bloodletting of World War II, and every war that came before it, how could the nations of the world spontaneously and unanimously commit to cooperate on a nuclear policy in the best interests of the planet? Nuclear gamesmanship and the logic of mutually assured destruction were the best our leaders could come up with, and we are amazingly lucky that that policy has "worked" as long as it has.

Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan project, lost his job because he protested that building more powerful weapons, while perhaps diminishing the threat to the security of the United States in the short term, would augment the threat to the safety of the entire world over the long term. It is that kind of morality - to argue for the good of humanity as a whole, rather than the short-term interests of particular populations - that struggled to assert itself in the twentieth century against nationalism and realpolitik. It faces no fewer obstacles today in becoming the dominant mindset among human beings.

There are nine governments in the world that currently have control of a nuclear arsenal. More are interested in gaining one. At this rate it seems incredible that the world would see another seventy five years go by without another deliberate use of these weapons on innocent people - and if it happens, you can be sure the consequences will extend beyond those of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the weapons were smaller and no nation had the ability to respond in kind.

With climate change looming large in threats to the survival of the human race, we should remember that the threat of the atom bomb has never left us. We can’t forget the danger that exists from nuclear war to the habitability of the planet - a danger that can only be lessened by preventing the governments that already have them from engaging in wars of any kind, and only eliminated when all governments have permanently renounced their possession. The imperative to make progress on this front is as strong as that to mitigate and reverse the effects of climate change. Both problems ask much of us and our moral imaginations - and we will be sorry if we don't rise to the occasion.

Seventy five years of geopolitical experience tell us that this is not likely to happen soon. But as long as these weapons exist, there will be a temptation to make history with fire and fury. It is known that the United States is currently considering whether to hold its first nuclear weapons tests since 1992. With that in mind, remember what Donald Trump, the current president of the United States and the man with his finger on the button, has said: “why bother having nuclear weapons if you are afraid to use them?”