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To the editor:
Eighty years ago on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima, 140,000 people were killed, and in Nagasaki at least 70,000 perished. President Truman, returning to Washington from the Potsdam Conference, never gave approval for the bombing of Nagasaki.
The New Yorker in its Aug. 31, 1946 issue published John Hersey’s “Hiroshima.” The article documented the horrors of the nuclear blast. Hersey, for example, wrote that when a man tried to lift a woman, “her skin slipped off in huge glove-like pieces.”
His account addressed both the “human costs” of what Truman called a strategic masterstroke, and the hellish consequences of radiation that government officials had minimized. Albert Einstein a year later explained, “The public, having been warned of the horrible nature of atomic warfare, has done nothing about it and to a large extent has dismissed the warning from its consciousness.”
Today, over 30 years since the end of the Cold War, Trump’s daily onslaught of predatory, deregulated capitalism and the other existential crisis of climate change have overshadowed the risk of a nuclear weapon being used, either by accident, miscalculation or on purpose.
The nine nuclear states refuse to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The U.S., Russia and China are building new weapons systems with Washington carrying out a $1.7 trillion makeover of our nuclear arsenal. America has 3,748 nuclear bombs, comparable to the number held by Russia. The most powerful warheads are almost 80 times more destructive than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The only remaining treaty between Washington and Moscow that limits the number of nuclear weapons expires in six months. Finally, dangerous wars have broken out around the world, and new technologies such as AI create more nuclear risk.
Howard Elterman
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Word Man
With zeal and unfettered determination, China and Russia developed atomic bombs through extensive research and espionage.
The Soviet Union, under Stalin, accelerated its nuclear program after World War II, utilizing intelligence gathered from spies in the Manhattan Project.
China developed the atomic bomb through a combination of early Soviet assistance in the 1950s and its efforts after the withdrawal of Soviet support in 1960. The first successful test occurred on October 16, 1964, marking China’s entry into the group of nuclear-armed nations.
Humans tend to prioritize self-destruction over peaceful coexistence.
The world teeters on the edge of self-destruction, and treaties alone won’t halt nuclear proliferation. Unless humanity transcends self-hatred and embraces self-love, it will be swept away by the tides of time. In this chaotic world, the choice is ours.
Wednesday, August 13 Report this