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nuclear war
A Nuclear Bomb Took My Arms Before I Was Born; We Must Not Let One Take Our Future
I want to be among the last people whose bodies carry the legacy of the nuclear age; whether I am depends on decisions that are still within our reach.
Aug 29, 2026
I paint with a brush held between my teeth or my toes. I was born without arms in 1968 about 100 kilometers from the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in eastern Kazakhstan. My parents’ generation watched mushroom clouds rise over the steppe without being told what the explosions could do to their bodies or their children.
For four decades, the Soviet Union conducted more than 450 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk. The fallout left cancers, disabilities, trauma, and contaminated land. Today, when leaders discuss nuclear weapons in the language of “deterrence” and “strategic balance,” I think of families paying for decisions in which they had no voice. The bomb is not an abstraction to me. Its history is written on my body.
August 29 carries two memories. On that date in 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic device at Semipalatinsk. On the same date in 1991, Kazakhstan closed the test site. At Kazakhstan’s initiative, the United Nations later proclaimed August 29 the International Day against Nuclear Tests. It is not simply a day of commemoration. It is a warning from the past about choices being made now.
In 2026, that warning is urgent. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that the world began this year with 12,187 nuclear warheads. All nine nuclear-armed states continued strengthening their arsenals last year, while up to 2,200 warheads remained on high operational alert. In February, New START, the last treaty limiting the strategic arsenals of the United States and Russia, expired without a successor. In May, the review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ended without consensus for the third consecutive time.
I paint the future I want to see: clean land, an unthreatened sky, and children born without the burden my generation inherited.
The world is not merely failing to disarm. It is learning to rely on the bomb again. There is growing rhetoric that nuclear weapons are the ultimate guarantor of peace and security. In moments of heightened tension, some states and strategic thinkers argue that only nuclear capability can prevent coercion, deter conflict, or preserve sovereignty. This logic of “nuclear reassurance” is being normalized not only in official doctrine but in public debate, where deterrence is recast as stability and restraint is portrayed as risk. Yet this framing erodes the very foundation of non-proliferation. It suggests that safety flows from the possession of the most destructive weapons ever created, rather than from law, diplomacy, and mutual restraint.
A non-proliferation system cannot endure if abstinence is portrayed as vulnerability while possession is equated with safety and status. The NPT rests on a bargain: Non-nuclear states agree not to acquire nuclear weapons, while nuclear-weapon states undertake to pursue disarmament. Both sides must keep their word. Rules cannot bind the weak and excuse the powerful.
Kazakhstan chose another logic. When we became independent, 1,410 Soviet strategic nuclear warheads remained on our territory, giving us what was then the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal. We could have treated them as a shortcut to status or a shield against an uncertain future. Instead, a society that knew the price of radiation demanded a different kind of security. We closed Semipalatinsk, relinquished the weapons, and joined the NPT as a non-nuclear state. That choice did not erase the damage, but it showed that renunciation can be an act of sovereignty and strength.
Kazakhstan has tried to turn that experience into institutions. We helped establish the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone, signed and ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, joined the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and host the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Low Enriched Uranium Bank.
Our message is not “no” to nuclear science. Peaceful nuclear energy, subject to rigorous safeguards, can serve human development. It is “no” to weapons whose effects no border, hospital, or government can control.
The immediate path is clear. The nine remaining states whose ratification is required must bring the test-ban treaty into force. The United States and Russia must negotiate new verifiable limits, and all nuclear-armed states must join the work of reduction. Iran and the United States must restore full IAEA access through an enforceable agreement. More countries should join the prohibition treaty, while nuclear-armed states should engage with it even before they are ready to accede. Nations must also fund healthcare, victim assistance, and environmental repair. Disarmament cannot speak only about the future while abandoning those living with the past.
Some will call a world without nuclear weapons naive. I have learned what is truly naive: believing that thousands of warheads can remain ready for use indefinitely without error, miscalculation, rage, or technical failure. Deterrence requires every leader to remain rational, every warning system to be accurate, and every crisis to stay controlled—forever. Humanity has never met such a standard.
An artist begins with a blank canvas and believes another reality can be created. I paint the future I want to see: clean land, an unthreatened sky, and children born without the burden my generation inherited.
I want to be among the last people whose bodies carry the legacy of the nuclear age. Whether I am depends on decisions that are still within our reach. Kazakhstan turned away from the bomb. The world can do so too.
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The Delusion of Strategic Stability in a Nuclear World
The risks, immorality, and illegality of reliance on nuclear arms.
Aug 16, 2026
Suppose for a moment that reliance on nuclear arms by the United States and other nuclear powers will produce “strategic stability” for the rest of this century. That is, that there will be no nuclear war or war on a major scale between the nuclear powers.
Is that a world we should want to live in, a world where security depends on the potential for the devastation of entire societies, a world where we are supposed to live moral lives in the context of an immoral system of global security? My answer is no.
The question, however, is based on a false premise. It is a fantasy that reliance on nuclear arms can be counted upon to produce stability indefinitely. That can be demonstrated just by looking at today’s conflicts. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in violation of the United Nations Charter was preceded by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to resort to nuclear weapons should Western states intervene in support of Ukraine. Then in the fall of 2022, it was credibly reported that that the Biden administration believed that the Russian government was operationally moving toward the use of nuclear weapons.
The US attack on Iran, another violation of the UN Charter, has been accompanied by President Donald Trump’s bluster about wreaking society-ending devastation on Iran, evoking the possibility of use of nuclear weapons. Whether or not his nuclear bluster is specific and credible enough to be considered a “threat” as a matter of international law, it certainly runs counter to the notion that use of nuclear weapons is out of the question.
A broader view of the Nuremberg principle of individual responsibility is that citizens are acting in accordance with that principle when they take responsibility for preventing nuclear war.
Nuclear deterrence involves the readiness to inflict massive devastation on other societies, even if targets are said to be military. It is planning and preparation for the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity and in some cases crimes against peace. Crimes against peace concern aggressive war. The use of nuclear weapons to initiate an aggressive war would certainly be a crime against peace. But there is a good case that the first use of nuclear weapons by a state defending itself would be so escalatory and disproportionate as to be a crime against peace.
Nazi officials were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They were also convicted of the crime against peace of waging aggressive war, including planning for the war that was carried out.
This was done in accordance with the Nuremberg principle of individual responsibility. Individuals, not only states, can be held accountable for the commission of international crimes.
A broader view of the Nuremberg principle of individual responsibility is that citizens are acting in accordance with that principle when they take responsibility for preventing nuclear war. That can be done in many ways. One is non-violent protest, as took place August 6 outside the Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory in California.
Reliance on nuclear arms by the United States and other states means that the world is in a state of risk, immorality, and illegality. The imperative is to end that state of affairs.
30 years ago, on July 8, 1996, the International Court of Justice released its advisory opinion on the legality of threat or use of nuclear weapons. The court found nuclear threat or use to be generally illegal, especially because such use cannot be reconciled with core principles of international humanitarian law forbidding the infliction of indiscriminate harm and unnecessary suffering. The court was clear that if a use of weapons is illegal, the threat of such use is illegal.
However, the court did not address all circumstances of nuclear use, and did not assess nuclear deterrence. But the court unquestionably recognized the state of at least potential illegality involved in reliance on nuclear arms.
So the court concluded its opinion with an analysis of something it was not asked, the nature of the nuclear disarmament obligation rooted in Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and in UN General Assembly resolutions going back to the 1950s. And the court gave a very strong interpretation of the obligation, finding that the obligation is to pursue in good faith and conclude negotiations on nuclear disarmament.
There have been other important efforts to move the world out of the state of risk, immorality, and illegality. In NPT review conferences beginning in 1995, non-nuclear weapon states extracted commitments from the nuclear weapon states such as reducing the role of nuclear weapons and engaging in verified reductions leading to elimination. If they had been implemented, by now the commitments would have brought the world much closer to the elimination of nuclear weapons, if not all the way there.
In 2017, non-nuclear weapon states negotiated the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). One hundred states are now signatories, not including, however, any nuclear-armed states. Whether the TPNW will serve as a vehicle for the nuclear-armed states to accomplish the elimination of nuclear weapons is open to doubt; they probably would create their own vehicle. Without question, though, the TPNW is a marvelous statement of the principles that should motivate and guide the achievement of a world free of nuclear weapons. The first review conference of the TPNW will be held late this year.
We are currently living in a world of conflict, and especially under Trump, the United States has turned away from the multilateralism that reached its peak in the 1990s with the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. But the reality is that nuclear abolition, probably in conjunction with other arms control and with changes in global governance, is by far the best way to address the risks, immorality, and illegality of reliance on nuclear arms.
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The Nuclear Age Began 81 Years Ago—With Lies; It Could End the Same Way
From the claim that dropping the atom bombs was necessary to end World War II to the fabricated nuclear threats used to justify the 21st century US wars in Iraq and Iran, nuclear weapons have a way of spawning deadly lies.
Aug 07, 2026
The atomic age began with a lie.
Eighty-one years ago this week, a single American airplane, flying almost unnoticed over a Japanese city, dropped a single bomb that destroyed the entire city. Three days later another American plane destroyed a second city.
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 killed 100,000 people outright. By the end of the year another 100,000 succumbed to radiation sickness, burns, and other injuries from the blasts. Over 90% were civilians.
The stated reason for killing all these people was a lie. The claim that we had to drop atomic bombs to avoid the horrific losses US troops would have been suffered in an invasion of the Japanese home islands was false—and American decision-makers knew it when they decided to drop the bombs.
In the face of these unspeakable horrors, the atomic death of 200,000 Japanese civilians stands out because they were the world’s first victims of nuclear warfare—and their unnecessary deaths, excused by a set of lies, ushered in an era of peril for all humanity.
Because the United States had broken Japanese military codes, American intelligence learned in July 1945 that the Japanese government had already contacted the Soviet Union, America’s World War II ally, to discuss surrender. The Japanese hoped, above all, to ensure that the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender did not require the Japanese Emperor to abdicate—a condition that US readily agreed to in the end.
As Gar Alperovitz convincingly explains in his book, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the destruction of the two Japanese cities had to do with emerging Cold War politics, not with avoiding an invasion of the Japanese islands.
Those who made the decision knew that Japan was seeking to end the war and believed that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, after the Allies’ victory in Europe, would likely be enough to precipitate Japan’s capitulation.
A long-hidden, top-secret US intelligence study in 1946 confirmed that the atomic blasts were not what ended the war—it was Russia’s August 8, 1945 declaration of war against Japan and Soviet troop movements.
Because Russia was preoccupied with the life-and-death struggle against Nazi Germany, they had not participated in the war against Japan until then. But in July 1945, at a conference in occupied Potsdam, Germany, President Harry Truman secured Joseph Stalin’s promise to join the war against Imperial Japan.
“Fini Japs when that occurs,” Truman observed in his war-time, hand-written journal in July 1945. “We’ll end the war a year sooner now,” Truman wrote in a letter around the same time. “Think of all the kids who won’t be killed.”
US war leaders confirmed the atomic bombing was not needed. The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces General Dwight D. Eisenhower (later President Eisenhower) concluded that “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary... no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”
Fleet Admiral William Leahy, then Truman’s chief of staff, agreed: “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender... The use of this this barbarous weapon... was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”
Truman did not hesitate to drop the bombs anyway. “The atom bomb was no ‘great decision,’” he said 15 years later.
The World War II era was an age of atrocity. The Second Sino-Japanese War—Japan’s war of conquest against China from 1937 to 1945—caused an estimated 10-20 million deaths. Nazi Germany murdered 6 million European Jews. The Germans also murdered 2 million captured Russian soldiers through starvation. And there was the rape of Nanking, the destruction of Dresden, the 1943 famine of Bengal, and the firebombing of Tokyo and 60 other Japanese cities.
In the face of these unspeakable horrors, the atomic death of 200,000 Japanese civilians stands out because they were the world’s first victims of nuclear warfare—and their unnecessary deaths, excused by a set of lies, ushered in an era of peril for all humanity.
The lies and the dangers did not stop with the end of World War II. As we should have learned, nuclear weapons have a way of spawning lies.
In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, in 2003 the Bush regime constructed the fiction that Iraq had nuclear weapons, as an excuse for invading and occupying the oil-rich nation. But Iraq had neither nukes nor other weapons of mass destruction. The neoconservatives who promoted the invasion of Iraq (and urged President George W. Bush to proceed to invade Iran as well) had manipulated dubious intelligence to promote fears of an imaginary threat.
The price of those lies was high. In the end, the US occupation of Iraq cost the United States trillions of dollars and thousands of US service members’ lives—and caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths.
This year President Donald Trump returned to the right-wing dream of overthrowing the Iranian government, again lying about nuclear weapons to support a completely unnecessary war. Trump and his aides claimed that Iran was on the verge of building a nuclear bomb and was developing long-range missiles that could soon strike the United States. US intelligence agencies confirmed that these claims were both lies.
The persistence of presidential lies about fictional nuclear threats should not obscure the all-too-real dangers of nuclear proliferation.
Citizens who are concerned about threats to our existence on this planet have rightly focused on climate change. But a world increasingly subjected to the stresses of climate change and its impacts—extreme temperatures, sea-level rise, mega storms, uncontrollable fires, crop destruction, drought, famine, refugee flows, and xenophobic politics—is a world in which desperate and megalomaniacal rulers may feel tempted to use thermonuclear weapons. And the nuclear age could end, as it began, with lies.
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81 Years on the Brink of Nuclear Annihilation
When we awaken from this trance and understand that these weapons do not make us safer, but rather are our greatest existential threat, we will be able to work together to lead an international effort to abolish them in a time-bound and verifiable manner.
Aug 06, 2026
On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 am local time, our world changed forever when the US dropped the first atomic bomb used in war over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The immediate death toll was approximately 70,000 with ~140,000 to have died by year's end. Three days later, the US would drop a plutonium bomb over the city of Nagasaki. The immediate death toll there was ~40,000 with ~70,000 to have died by year's end with a combined total of ~210,000. Three weeks earlier, following the atomic bombing of New Mexico with the Trinity test, the nuclear age was thrust upon mankind. The nuclear legacies from victims and survivors of the atomic bombings, Hibakusha, and their history lingers to this day. The legacy extends from the mining for the nuclear materials and its impact on local communities to the processing, testing, use, storage, and waste management, as well as the impacts and risks of nuclear power to this day.
Amnesic of past history and events, the United States initiated a new arms race beginning in 2010 with then-President Barack Obama‘s “grand bargain“ to garner favor with the Republican Congress to ratify the New START Treaty. Following our lead, all of the remaining nine nuclear nations are working to modernize their stockpiles as well.
With the advent of artificial intelligence programs already utilized by President Donald Trump’s Department of War and the race to bring this technology to war, we move ever closer to the brink of nuclear war, either by intent, miscalculation, mistake, or cyber attack using disruptive technologies. This fact was recognized by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, moving their Doomsday Clock forward this past January to 85 seconds to midnight.
In order to survive, we must awaken from the myth of deterrence, realizing it for what it is, the greatest driver of the arms race. The unexamined assumptions that these weapons must exist is blatantly false. We know how to build these weapons, and we know how to disassemble them. From a height of roughly 64,000 weapons in 1986 we have reduced global stockpiles to approximately 12,187 currently. We also know that even a “limited nuclear war“ in a remote region of the world, for example, between India and Pakistan, using less than one half of 1% of global stockpiles, will result in a global nuclear famine. This could potentially result in up to 2 billion deaths on the planet due to the catastrophic climate change that would follow.
The Hibakusha have a mantra of “never again.” We owe a debt to the Hibakusha, their memory, and future generations to demand the complete abolition of these weapons.
When we awaken from this trance and understand that these weapons do not make us safer, but rather are our greatest existential threat, we will be able to work together to lead an international effort to abolish them in a time-bound and verifiable manner.
What is required in this race to save ourselves is the political courage and will to do so. Thankfully, there is hope both internationally and nationally. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been ratified by 75 nations and signed by 25 additional nations representing a majority of the global population. Here at home the Back From the Brink grassroots movement currently has endorsing congressional resolutions. There are 70 members of Congress, who have endorsed House Resolution 317 and Senate Resolution 323.
The Hibakusha have a mantra of “never again.” We owe a debt to the Hibakusha, their memory, and future generations to demand the complete abolition of these weapons. We must demand our elected officials endorse this campaign or move out of the way for those who will.
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Nuclear Abolition Is Possible, and We Must Act to Make It a Reality
During this August 6-9 time, numerous events and actions are taking place across the US and worldwide calling for nuclear abolition. I hope you who read this can join in one such action where you reside.
Aug 06, 2026
“The development of nuclear weapons signifies not a country’s elevation to greatness, but its descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.”—A-bomb survivor Setsuko Thurlow, Nobel peace prize ceremony for ICAN, December 2017
This August 6-9 marks the 81st anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons, having committed the unspeakable sin and crime in 1945, thus ushering in the nuclear age.
Rather than repenting for the evil of building and using nuclear weapons, making reparations to the victims, and promising to eradicate its nuclear program, the US government has instead made nuclear weapons the cornerstone of its military policy. This policy holds that the United States must be prepared to use any military means necessary, including nuclear weapons, to protect and ensure its “vital” national security and geopolitical interests.
The US nuclear weapons program was conceived under a shroud of secrecy that continues to this day, and without the consent of the US people. Beginning with the Manhattan Project in 1940, the US has spent over $9 trillion on its nuclear weapons program.
The nuclear challenge before us is great, but not insurmountable.
To date, the US government refuses to adopt a “no first-use” nuclear policy, declaring it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the case of conflict. Therefore, a US president could unilaterally order a nuclear attack at any time. According to peace advocate and author Joseph Gerson, the US has prepared or threatened to use nuclear weapons against adversaries an estimated 30 times to bolster its aims.
Moreover, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review includes planning for limited nuclear war by developing low-yield nuclear weapons to counter an adversary’s limited use of nuclear weapons in any conflict. The US government is now continuing a several decades long process to modernize its nuclear arsenal at a cost of nearly $1 trillion. Instead of funding vital human needs programs, this exorbitant expenditure (along with the $1.5 trillion 2027 military budget) constitutes a direct theft from the poor! The US, along with the eight other nuclear nations, refuse to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which now deems nuclear weapons illegal under international law. To date, 75 nations have ratified the TPNW.
On January 27, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight, the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. This is due to the existential threats of nuclear war and the climate crisis, AI, and worsening world tensions and other perils. The Ukraine war has further aggravated the nuclear threat between Russia and NATO.
The nuclear threat is further exacerbated by recent threats against Iran by President Donald Trump, including to “blast Iran into oblivion” and “back to the Stone Ages,” and his warning: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
As a leading nuclear superpower, the US practices a double standard by calling on other nations to disarm while, at the same time, it refuses to disarm and instead is rapidly expanding its own arsenal.
AI technology also increases the risk of nuclear war. A study by King’s College London published earlier this year revealed that AI models used in 21 simulated nuclear crises escalated the conflict by threatening nuclear war in 95% of 329 turns of play.
As we confront the nuclear peril today, it is imperative that we hear and heed the testimony of those who were directly impacted by nuclear weapons. Since 1945, the Hibakusha has urgently called on all the nuclear nations to abolish nuclear weapons stating that “humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.” Additionally, people of faith and conscience have actively opposed and resisted nuclear war preparations, including those of blessed memory such as Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who immediately condemned the 1945 bombing; Bishop Tom Gumbleton (first bishop president of Pax Christi USA); Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ; Philip Berrigan—all Pax Christi USA teachers of peace—Thomas Merton, OCSO; Sr. Anne Montgomery, RSCJ; Fr. Carl Kabat, OMI; Sr. Ardeth Platte, OP—as well as peacemakers today like Pax Christi USA teachers of peace Elizabeth McAlister and James and Shelley Douglass, plus Fr. Steve Kelly, SJ, and so many more!
Throughout the Nuclear Age, different church denominations, faith leaders, and organizations and groups, including International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Back from the Brink, and Warheads to Windmills have also called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. And there have been countless non-violent actions for nuclear disarmament and ending war. Since 1980, plowshares peacemakers have enacted the biblical prophecy of beating swords into plowshares by hammering and using others symbols to literally begin the process of disarmament. I have been blessed to be part of two plowshares actions.
Catholic leaders have made significant statements regarding the use of nuclear weapons and present nuclear peril.
- In 1972 St. Pope Paul VI stated, “It is unthinkable that no other work can be found for hundreds of thousands of workers than the production of instruments of death.” In 1976, he described the atomic bombings of Japan as a “butchery of untold magnitude.”
- In 1976, Fr. Richard McSorley, SJ said, “It’s a sin to build a nuclear weapon.”
- In 1981, Seattle’s Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, the 1987 Pax Christi USA teacher of peace, stated: “Trident is the Auschwitz of Puget Sound… I say with deep sorrow that our nuclear war preparations are the global crucifixion of Jesus… the final crucifixion of Jesus, in the extermination of the human family with whom he is one.”
- In 1982, Bishop Leroy Matthiesen, the 2009 Pax Christi USA teacher of peace, told Catholics in his diocese who worked at the Pantex nuclear weapons plant in Amarillo, Texas, “In the name of the God of peace, quit your jobs.” In making this appeal, he said he would try to offer financial assistance to any defense worker who would quit.
- In 2017, for the first time ever, a pope condemned the very possession of nuclear weapons as immoral. Pope Francis declared: “Nor can we fail to be genuinely concerned by the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices. If we also take into account the risk of an accidental detonation as a result of error of any kind, the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned. For they exist in the service of a mentality of fear that affects not only the parties in conflict but the entire human race…”
- In 2020 Pope Francis reiterated, “The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral, as I already said two years ago.”
- Pope Leo has since continued his predecessor’s stance of calling for nuclear disarmament.
- On January 11, 2022, Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico and recipient of the 2026 Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace award, released a landmark pastoral letter: “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace-A Conversation Towards Nuclear Disarmament.“
- There has also been the development of a new partnership of US, Japanese, and South Korean bishops. Last year they declared: “On the solemn occasion of the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II, Catholic bishops from the United States, Japan, and South Korea have come together in Hiroshima to call for a world free of nuclear weapons. Representing the Partnership for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons, the bishops joined with atomic bomb survivor organizations to honor the memory of those who perished, to stand in solidarity with survivors, and to urge the global community to reject the possession, use, and threat of nuclear arms.“
Last year, to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings, more than 500 people and 60 organizations in the US signed an Apology Petition to the Japanese people calling on the US government to apologize to Japan for the atomic bombings and pledge to ratify the TPNW. The mayor’s office of Nagasaki, Nihon Hidankyo (the main Hibakusha organization and 2024 Nobel Peace Prize recipient), and Catholic clergy and religious in Japan acknowledged receiving this petition and expressed their great appreciation.
Most recently, the groundbreaking “Rome Declaration for an Unarmed and Disarming Peace in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear and Autonomous Weapons, New Digital Protocols, and Emerging Models of Digital Development,” was signed by over 200 Nobel laureates, leading AI innovators, and global academics.
Nuclear weapons are immoral and illegal, and no follower of Jesus should be involved in their production, financing, or use of them! The Catholic Church and all churches have a crucial role to play in helping to bring about a disarmed world. What if the church leadership in all denominations were to call on all Christians in the military nuclear chain of command to refuse orders to kill and use nuclear weapons, and publicly support those who do so? What if the churches could take the lead in calling for the conversion of arms industries to non-military production, while advocating for full and just protection of workers’ rights during the transition process? What if the church would provide material resources for those who quit their jobs for reasons of conscience? And what if the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and all Catholics—clergy, religious, and laity—and Christians in the US demanded that the US government ratify the TPNW? These efforts would go a long way to help create the climate necessary to bring about real disarmament.
Followers of the non-violent Jesus, who commands us to love and never to kill, cannot allow nuclear weapons, death-dealing technologies, and idols of death to ever be normalized, and must reject any ideology or theology that justifies war, genocide, and even omnicide. We need to adopt non-violent practices, as many are doing today, as a primary means to respond to conflict, to resist systemic violence and injustice, and advocating non-violent civilian defense as an alternative to militarized-based national security.
The nuclear challenge before us is great, but not insurmountable, for with God, and people acting on their faith convictions, all things are possible. History bears out this truth. I join with many peacemakers worldwide who believe that nuclear abolition can happen, and who are acting to make it a reality. During this August 6-9 time, numerous events and actions are taking place across the US and worldwide calling for nuclear abolition. I hope you who read this can join in one such action where you reside.
On September 4, 1989, six peacemakers and I participated in the Thames River Plowshares action in New London, Connecticut. We were able to swim and canoe to the docked USS Pennsylvania, the 10th Trident, and hammered and poured blood on the hull. Three of us, including myself, were able to climb on top of the submarine where we prayed for the abolition of nuclear weapons. From aboard this most destructive weapon, I believed then, as I do now, that if people have the faith to believe that disarmament is possible, and act on that faith, it can occur. Now is the time to act!
This article was first published on the Pax Christi USA web site.
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The Rulers of the Nuclear Powers Are Slow Learners
Unless there is an advent of new, less hawkish rulers, a movement revival, or both, a nuclear war seems likely.
Aug 06, 2026
Although 81 years have passed since the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, the rulers of major nations continue their reckless march toward a nuclear holocaust.
The nine nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), possessing some 12,100 nuclear warheads, are all busily upgrading and expanding their nuclear weapons arsenals at an accelerating pace. Nuclear weapons spending rose to an all-time high of $119 billion in 2025―a 19% increase over the preceding year. The US government alone, which accounted for more than half of this spending, is embarked on a $1.7 trillion, decades-long nuclear weapons buildup.
As the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has observed, “This overwhelming spending on nuclear weapons shows a willingness to research, develop, finance, and build tools to exterminate humanity.”
Moreover, international nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements among the nuclear powers have collapsed. Russia and the United States own 86% of the world’s nuclear weapons and, although they signed numerous treaties in the past to limit or reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals, the last of these treaties, New START, expired this February.
Today, most rulers of the nuclear powers are nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian, with no interest in nuclear disarmament. Instead, they are busy readying their nations for a disastrous nuclear war.
The accelerating nuclear arms race is accompanied by repeated threats of nuclear war. Russian officials are particularly notorious in this connection. According to the Voice of America, from early 2022 to late 2024 Russian officials publicly issued 135 nuclear threats, with 27 of them coming from President Vladimir Putin. But America’s President Donald Trump has also publicly and repeatedly threatened other countries with nuclear destruction, as has North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Early this year, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, assessing this deteriorating situation, moved the hands of their famous “Doomsday Clock” to 85 seconds to midnight, the most dangerous setting in its history.
Of course, there have been a great many warnings that nuclear weapons portend global disaster, including many beginning right after the shocking annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Seldom, if ever,” reported CBS radio commentator Edward R. Murrow, “has war ended leaving the victors... with such a realization that... survival is not assured.” The Chicago Tribune warned that a future atomic war would leave the world “a barren waste, in which the survivors... will hide in caves.” In France, the resistance leader Albert Camus declared that the modern world had “reached the last degree of savagery,” in which nations were faced with the prospect of “collective suicide.”
As nuclear fear swept around the world, large numbers of people sought to avert catastrophe. Some called for dramatically strengthened global governance to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war, while others, with the same goal in mind, championed nuclear disarmament. Speaking on behalf of the newly-formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, Albert Einstein typified this popular uprising by arguing that “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive.”
Over subsequent decades, the anti-nuclear movement ebbed and flowed, but, at times of mass mobilization, it had an important effect on nuclear weapons policies. Naturally, the leaders of many nations felt the allure of nuclear weapons, especially after thousands of years of human history in which national security often seemed to rest upon military strength. Nevertheless, as indicated by opinion polls and massive demonstrations, anti-nuclear agitation inspired revulsion against nuclear weapons and nuclear war among large portions of the public. Consequently, most governments decided not to build nuclear weapons or even to deploy them on their territory.
Hard-pressed by anti-nuclear campaigners and public opinion, even the small number of governments that built nuclear weapons found themselves unable to resist agreement on nuclear arms control and disarmament measures. Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush were not nuclear “doves” when they entered office, but, in response to popular pressure, they took significant action to curb nuclear dangers. Some government officials, like Mikhail Gorbachev, even became fervent converts to the anti-nuclear cause.
As the 20th century came to an end, however, progress in rolling back the nuclear menace began to unravel. Popular protest declined, and nuclear disarmament organizations dwindled in size. By contrast, conservative and militarist forces grew more assertive, blocking US Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, demanding the building of new nuclear weapons, and derailing Barack Obama’s initiative for creating a nuclear weapons-free world.
Although nuclear disarmament organizations were on the defensive during the early 21st century, they retained enough strength to produce one major victory. Joining together in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, they cooperated closely with officials in small, non-nuclear nations to produce a series of United Nations conferences on nuclear issues. Then, at the 2017 conference, the national delegates voted 122 to 1 to adopt the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which banned nuclear weapons. Entering into force in January 2021, the treaty has been signed, thus far, by 100 countries―a majority of the world’s nations.
Even so, the situation remains dire. Today, most rulers of the nuclear powers are nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian, with no interest in nuclear disarmament. Instead, they are busy readying their nations for a disastrous nuclear war. Not surprisingly, none of them is willing to sign or even abide by the TPNW. Although the anti-nuclear movement continues to oppose their priorities, it remains weak and unable to halt the momentum toward nuclear catastrophe.
Thus, unless there is an advent of new, less hawkish rulers, a movement revival, or both, a nuclear war seems likely.
Admittedly, it’s possible that, when a calamitous nuclear war does occur, it will finally convince even the slow learners among government officials that the nuclear age requires new thinking about international relations. Unfortunately, that recognition will arrive too late to matter, for such a war will snuff out most life on Earth.
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The Genocidal Weapon and the Nuclear Exception
Today we live as prisoners consigned to a permanent death row, having organized our world not around a commitment to collective sanity, safety, and security but around the perpetual preparation for collective destruction.
Aug 06, 2026
It has been 81 years since the atomic bombings delivered an unmistakable message. From the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humanity was faced with a choice that Martin Luther King, Jr. would later describe as one between “non-violent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.” The intervening decades have made our answer painfully clear.
As a result, today we live as prisoners consigned to a permanent death row, having organized our world not around a commitment to collective sanity, safety, and security but around the perpetual preparation for collective destruction. The nuclear threat has predictably returned to the center of world politics, from Ukraine and Taiwan to Palestine and Iran.
American and Israeli officials have called for the use of nuclear weapons in Gaza, which during the ongoing genocide has already been subjected to equivalent of 13 Hiroshimas. And in the context of the second disastrous and criminal war in the region this century, waged ostensibly, and counterproductively, to preserve a system of nuclear apartheid, President Donald Trump has never disavowed his genocidal threat against Iran that “a whole civilization will die.”
It is therefore clear today that we can hardly take refuge in the comforting fiction that the collapse of the Soviet Union had consigned the specter of atomic holocaust to history. And it is our inability to confront nuclear weapons for what they truly are which has helped produce the present crisis. From their first use, the atomic bombs were immoral and illegal. Within a matter of years, such weapons would come to be described, in the words of their own architects, as a “weapon of genocide,” one which serves no military end beyond the slaughter of civilians.
The supreme irony is that the nuclear age and the postwar international order entered into force together, as the legal regime intended to prevent atrocities was born under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.
As such, states that possess nuclear weapons cannot be understood as guardians of the international order, represented by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, but as its greatest threats, outcasts from law and humanity. They are, in the words of Daniel Ellsberg, adherents to no recognizable ethics other than perhaps “a form of Satanism, a worship of unbridled power that gives national leaders the right to gamble with forces that can undo creation.”
Yet instead of banning the bomb, the postwar international legal order accommodated it, failing to proscribe nuclear weapons, as it has for chemical and biological weapons. The result has been a world in which the capacity to exterminate millions, even billions, of people is treated not as the ultimate international crime but as the ultimate marker of international prestige and a currency of geopolitical power. So long as some states insist upon the legitimacy of their own atomic arsenals then, efforts to abolish them will remain, however well-intentioned, little more than “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Why then, despite the obvious reality that nuclear weapons are prima facie illegal, that they violate the most fundamental tenets of international humanitarian law, making a mockery of its principles of distinction and proportionality, has the law failed even to signal its opposition to the bomb?
The Failures of the 1996 ICJ Advisory Opinion
There have been numerous, often tepid, attempts to resolve the contradiction at the heart of the nuclear exception. The most significant came 30 years ago this summer, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its 1996 Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons. Although the Court affirmed that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would “generally be contrary” to international law, it ultimately preserved the nuclear status quo by declining to rule definitively on their legality “in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”
Nuclear states could therefore continue to justify their continued possession of these apocalyptic weapons through the familiar language of military necessity. The result was a legal ambiguity that left nuclear powers free to claim a right to initiate nuclear war in response to an asserted existential threat, as countries like the United States and Israel regularly inflate to advance their imperial policies. The law would then be left to determine, only after the fact, assuming any courts remained amid the ruins, whether the slaughter of millions of civilians had, in fact, been permissible.
But why did the World Court equivocate at such a critical historical juncture? The Cold War had recently ended, and with it seemingly the geopolitical and ideological confrontation that had long legitimized the logic of mutually assured destruction. Arms reduction agreements were underway, and several countries were abandoning their nuclear ambitions. A path toward the elimination of nuclear stockpiles appeared, however briefly, to be within reach.
Yet as scholars have argued, this was less a missed opportunity to challenge the nuclear powers than an ideological inability to confront the broader questions posed by nuclear weapons. A legal order ostensibly designed to restrain violence had, from its inception, collided with weapons that defy any standard of morality and legality. Faced with this contradiction, the court retreated into an act of institutional self-preservation. The effort has proved futile, as evidenced by the continuing impunity of powerful states and increasingly brazen attempts to dismantle the broader framework of international law.
Nonetheless, as Martti Koskenniemi has argued, had the ICJ actually declared nuclear weapons categorically illegal, it would have “put the court and the whole system of law it represents in a collision course with the politico-military system of the nuclear age.” In this confrontation, “the law could hardly prevail.” Recognizing this, “an opinion underwriting an absolute prohibition would have condemned the law to irrelevance already in advance.”
More fundamentally, the international legal system could scarcely have resolved the question. The imperatives of great-power politics had long stunted the court's ability to function. By elevating military necessity into a doctrine through which states could justify their actions, the law came to function not as a constraint but as a source of legitimacy for state violence. As Koskenniemi observes, citing philosopher Thomas Nagel, once mass violence can be deemed permissible under certain criteria, other considerations can then “be brought to bear to ease the consciences of those responsible for a certain number of charred babies.”
The Birth of the Bomb and the “International Order”
This failure was not the World Court’s alone. The problem had been embedded in the postwar legal order from the beginning. On August 8, 1945, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France ratified the London Charter establishing the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Hours later, the United States destroyed Nagasaki with a second atomic bomb, just three days after Hiroshima. The supreme irony is that the nuclear age and the postwar international order entered into force together, as the legal regime intended to prevent atrocities was born under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.
Many of the earliest voices of conscience presenting the most forceful condemnations came from the political left. Those such as Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell, Dwight MacDonald, and Norman Cousins denounced the bombings in the days and weeks that followed. Yet opposition was by no means confined to one side of the political spectrum.
Conservative critics also challenged the decision. David Lawrence, editor of US News, rejected attempts to justify the bombings. Try as we might, he insisted, we can “never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations, though hesitating to use poison gas, did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women, and children.” Journalist Felix Morley similarly denounced this “act of atrocious revenge,” concluding that Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted, in effect, an American Buchenwald.
If the law is to come to mean anything, it must bind the powerful before it punishes the powerless.
Religious leaders also lent their moral voices. A coalition of Christian clergy representing a range of denominations issued “unmitigated condemnation” of the “reckless and irresponsible” decision, warning that we “will receive judgment before God and before the conscience of humanity.” One of these signatories, A. J. Muste, would in subsequent years distill this sentiment into a single, provocative sentence: “If Dachau was a crime, Hiroshima is a crime.”
While public opinion, both domestically and internationally, increasingly moved toward abolition, culminating in the first resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly calling for the elimination of atomic weapons, US leaders had little intention of relinquishing their God-like powers. They brushed aside the warnings of scientists and statesmen who argued that this brief window, before other nations acquired the bomb, offered perhaps the only opportunity to prohibit nuclear weapons before catastrophe became permanent.
Instead of being prohibited, the bomb was rendered outside the law. At Nuremberg and Tokyo, the US established a legal exceptionalism that insulated nuclear weapons, and the strategic bombing that first made them conceivable, from meaningful scrutiny. Prosecutors opted to omit these crimes entirely, rendering them beyond the reach of law. Universal justice, in short, was subordinated to political expediency.
Many in the courtroom recognized the contradiction. At Tokyo, the atomic bombings loomed large over the proceedings. If individuals, rather than states, could be held criminally responsible for atrocities committed in war, as Nuremberg established, then American officials who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should face similar judgment. Otherwise, the tribunal would rest on an irreconcilable double standard. As the defense pointedly put it, “We know the name of every man whose hands loosed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; we know the chief of staff who planned that act; we know the chief of the responsible state.”
American officials acknowledged that they had certainly been no strangers to criminality during the course of the war. In his opening statement, Chief Justice Robert Jackson remarked that “the Germans have taught us the horrors of modern warfare,” but the Allies were far from “dull pupils.” Telford Taylor, Allied chief prosecutor, similarly noted that prosecutors had deliberately avoided litigating the bombing of civilians because the scale of indiscriminate Allied bombing far exceeded any similar such forms of aerial warfare carried out by the Axis states.
Taylor later conceded that the bombings were war crimes but were rendered “tolerable in retrospect only because their malignancy pales in comparison to Dachau, Auschwitz, and Treblinka.” The physical and psychological distance afforded by aerial warfare, and the public apathy it cultivated, could hardly legitimize such violence, even as it was increasingly accepted by many Americans. To the contrary, Taylor wrote, had “Allied ground forces [entered] German and Japanese towns with guns blazing, and [killed] off the infants who survived the bombing,” few would have dared defend such policies.
The Legacy of Nuclear Exceptionalism
The legal silence surrounding aerial and atomic bombing at Nuremberg and Tokyo has constrained efforts to impose meaningful legal limits on indiscriminate attacks against civilians ever since. In Gaza, Israeli officials have repeatedly invoked the Allied bombing campaigns to argue that if that was not deemed criminal, neither is Israel today. The precedent established in the aftermath of the Second World War has therefore continued to legitimize the laying waste to cities, reinforcing the logic that first made nuclear weapons conceivable.
While there have been additional efforts to challenge this exceptionalism, they too have fallen short in the face of US empire. The most significant was Japan’s 1963 Shimoda decision, in which the Tokyo District Court concluded that the atomic bombings had violated international law. By then, however, Japan had been pacified, first through occupation and then through its incorporation into the US Cold War order, leaving it with neither the political will nor the institutional means to pursue accountability.
This dynamic in postwar Japan reflects a broader reality: The bomb has long functioned as a tool of empire. As W.E.B. Du Bois warned at the dawn of the atomic age, if power could be maintained through atomic bombs, then “colonial peoples may never be free.” The nuclear order that emerged after 1945 has vindicated that position. It has always rested on an unmistakable hypocrisy. States that insist nuclear weapons are indispensable to their own security, many of them the colonial powers of yesterday and the imperial powers of today, simultaneously demand that the rest of the world accept permanent vulnerability at the hands of nuclear-armed states. Its governing principle is simple: Do as we say, not as we do.
But this blatant hypocrisy cannot coexist with a functioning international legal order, which, as has become increasingly clear in recent years, is crumbling before our eyes. At Nuremberg, Chief Justice Jackson warned that the only hope of those responsible for atrocities was “that international law will lag so far behind the moral sense of mankind that conduct which is crime in the moral sense must be regarded as innocent in law.” Eight decades later, his words have become an equal indictment of the nuclear age. If the law is to come to mean anything, it must bind the powerful before it punishes the powerless. The survival of international law, and perhaps life on Earth itself, depends on whether that principle is finally applied to the world’s most powerful states.
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The US, Korea, and Japan Share an 80 Year Nuclear Nightmare
Over 70,000 Koreans were exposed to the two atomic bombs incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people forcibly removed from their homeland by the Japanese and sent to work in these cities.
Aug 04, 2026
On the right corner of my desk, next to my laptop and always in eyeshot, sits a metal model of an atom bomb I assembled from a kit, a model of “Little Boy,” the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima. The model is made from aluminum alloy parts and is a one-twelfth scale of the original atom bomb, about nine inches long. The ad for the bomb contained a video with dramatic music showing the model spinning through the air as it falls toward its imagined target.
“Perfect for collectors,” the ad boasted. “A must-have for history enthusiasts. Very enjoyable assembly process.”
Toward the bottom of the ad, perhaps as an afterthought, perhaps recognizing the implications of marketing such a murderous model, was the following: “By assembling this model, you can understand the history and moral issues of nuclear weapons and trigger thoughts about the future of the world.”
The kit came with a tiny screwdriver, two dozen tiny screws, a sanding rod, glue, and decals. The aluminum alloy parts were in molded plates. The model even had a metal cart to assemble that the bomb sits on so it can be pulled around your desk, pretending you’re getting ready to load it onto the Enola Gay and extinguish a city in a flash.
The bomb wages war against the future.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, the real “Little Boy” exploded with a flash 2,000 feet above the city of Hiroshima, which sits on the Ota River delta on Hiroshima Bay. The Ota River has six channels splitting Hiroshima into islets. Bomb victims staggered toward these channels to throw themselves into the water hoping to extinguish their burning bodies. The channels became so clogged with bodies that others couldn’t squeeze in. Some people, closer to the hypocenter, were vaporized, reduced to shadows seared into stone. Temperatures on the ground reached 4,000°C.
As we once again approach that fateful day of August 6, it is important to recognize that not just the US and Japan are intertwined in a nuclear nightmare that has lasted over 80 years, but also 70,000 Koreans who were exposed to the two atomic bombs incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people forcibly removed from their homeland by the Japanese and sent to work in these cities. Japan colonized Korea in 1910 and for decades used Koreans as they saw fit, from Comfort Women to slave labor. The Koreans then became atomic bomb victims, despite their country not being at war with the United States. They are among the unintended victims, the forgotten victims.
This November in Seoul, South Korea, the surviving Korean bomb victims will testify at a People’s Tribunal holding the US accountable for war crimes. Lawyers from around the world have been preparing legal briefs and will argue the case. The US government is invited to appear as the defendant at the tribunal. The Republic of South Korea has also been asked to appear as a witness.
Once let loose, an atomic bomb keeps on killing, generation after generation, the cancers passed down to those not even born when the bombs first exploded. The Korean atomic bomb victims, as well as the Japanese, have horrific stories testifying to this. Children of the bomb. Atomic maladies. The bomb wages war against the future.
The second atomic bomb that was dropped on August 9, incinerating another Japanese city, had a different nickname. That bomb had an even bigger belly and used plutonium rather than uranium. They called it “Fat Man.” The same ad for the model of the “Little Boy” atom bomb had a second ad inducing you to buy “Fat Man.” It is another one-twelfth scale model of the original, this one weighing 6.2 pounds when completed. I declined the offer to buy and build it. One was repellent enough.
The US currently has 5,277 nuclear warheads. Russia has 5,449. China, approximately 600. France and the UK have about 250 each and Israel has about 90. India, Pakistan, and North Korea bring up the rear with a few nukes each. In total there are over 12,300 nuclear warheads spanning the globe. The Korean atomic bomb victims stand as ready reminders of what happens when these things are unleashed.
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Picturing Armageddon: US Government Responses to Nuclear War Movies
A feature film based on Annie Jacobson’s terrifying non-fiction book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, is now in pre-production with Dune director Denis Villeneuve at the helm. Looking back at how previous films about nuclear Armageddon have been received may give us a glimpse of how the current administration will respond to it.
Jul 25, 2026
In the recent Netflix movie, A House of Dynamite, an intercontinental ballistic missile of unknown origin is detected streaking across the Pacific on a course that, in less than 20 minutes, will turn Chicago to ash. Efforts to shoot the missile down fail, as the ground-based interceptors, or GBIs, miss their target and, as the seconds count down, the president, played by Idris Elba, has only seven minutes to decide how to respond. The consequences of his decision, which the film leaves open, could mean the end of human civilization and even most life on Earth.
What was the official response to the film? A week before it streamed, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) produced a memo attacking the film’s credibility. America’s GBIs, they said, are much more accurate than portrayed in the movie, with a 100% success rate. (The Center for Arms control puts that figure at 55% in carefully controlled tests.) And an article published by the West Point-based Modern War Institute argues that the film’s premise is flawed since no adversary would launch just a single missile at the United States.
It was also judged illogical that the president’s choices were limited to “surrender” or “suicide”—the latter meaning all-out nuclear war. The country could absorb the loss (meaning the 10 million inhabitants of Chicago) and respond only after the missile’s source had been determined. Finally, as the MDA memo helpfully pointed out, the plot of A House of Dynamite is “fictional” and “intended for the entertainment of the audience.” In other words, it’s just another disaster movie.
These themes are not new to governmental pronouncements on films about nuclear war. In the 1959 feature On the Beach, Gregory Peck plays the captain of a submarine that is America’s last surviving naval vessel as it docks in Melbourne, Australia after the entire Northern Hemisphere has been wiped out in a nuclear war—and a cloud of deadly radioactive fallout is inexorably making its way south. After a brief stay and with the inevitability of death by radiation poisoning, the crew votes to return to the US and die at home.
Which way will the Trump administration go in response to Nuclear War: A Scenario the movie? If the film is faithful to the book, it should have an even more devastating impact than The Day After.
Two weeks before the film’s worldwide release, the United States Information Agency produced an “Infoguide” stating that the film was “highly fictionalized and contains scientific inaccuracies.” It argued that, because fallout diminishes rapidly, it would only affect countries directly attacked or those nearby. Moreover, shelters and decontamination measures were effective against fallout and, as far away as the Southern Hemisphere, “if any protection at all were needed, an ordinary basement would suffice.” A later Infoguide reporting on the premier noted: “Most critics review [the] film as pure drama and there has been little emphasis on social and political significance.” In other words, no big deal.
Five years later, in 1964, Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, starring Peters Sellers in three different roles, was released. In this dark comedy, a psychotic Air Force General orders the B-52 bombers under his command to attack the Soviet Union, sparking a concerted but unsuccessful effort by the president and his advisers to recall the planes. As a single B-52 gets through and the plane’s pilot rides a nuclear bomb down to its target, it is revealed that the Soviets have a yet-to-be announced “Doomsday Machine” that, upon the country being struck by a nuclear weapon, will automatically trigger the detonation of a massive array of cobalt bombs whose radiation will render the Earth uninhabitable for a century.
Although obviously a farce, the film was panned as “juvenile, offensive, and inaccurate.” As reported in The New Yorker: “An expert at the Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the film ‘impossible on a dozen counts.’ A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: ‘Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.’” (These assertions are in doubt following the disclosure of the policy of “pre-delegation,” in force at the time, which gave authority to commanders to deploy nuclear weapons in circumstances where the president could not be reached.)
Two decades later, in the feature film Wargames, Matthew Broderick plays a teenager who successfully hacks into the Pentagon’s supercomputer. Unwittingly, he mistakes its nuclear war command and control function for a computer game—and nearly triggers global thermonuclear war.
This time, the government response was quite different. After viewing the film, President Ronald Reagan asked his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if something like that could really happen. After a review, the president was told that, not only was the premise of the film realistic, “the problem is much worse than you think.” Fifteen months later, National Security Directive NSD-145 was issued, launching a sweeping governmental effort to improve cybersecurity.
Later in 1983, the television movie The Day After, which reached a record-breaking 100 million viewers, was the first American film to attempt a realistic depiction of the aftermath of a nuclear attack on an American city. The story revolves around a doctor, played by Jason Robards, as he tries to deal with the horrific effects of blast, fire, and radiation on the citizens of Lawrence, Kansas—targeted because of its nearby nuclear missile silos.
In this case, the response was mixed. The White House initially discouraged the making of the film. The Pentagon urged—unsuccessfully—to have the script make clear that the Soviets fired first and later refused to allow the filmmakers to use stock footage of real nuclear detonations. Henry Kissinger criticized the film as “simple minded” and in danger of leading the country to “make policy by scaring ourselves to death.” But the film’s graphic portrayal of the effects on the population of an American city could not be dismissed as easily as some of its predecessors, and Reagan wrote in his diary, “It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed.” It has been argued that the film influenced him to soften his Cold War rhetoric and to meet with Mikhael Gorbachev in Iceland in 1986, where the complete abolition of nuclear weapons was discussed. Unfortunately, that meeting ended without agreement; however, a year later, subsequent negotiations led to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which resulted in the elimination of a whole class of nuclear weapons.
Which way will the Trump administration go in response to Nuclear War: A Scenario the movie? If the film is faithful to the book, it should have an even more devastating impact than The Day After. With today’s sophisticated special effects, it will, no doubt, create hyperrealistic imagery and make the absolute absurdity of nuclear war manifest. But will the administration call it unrealistic, inaccurate, alarmist or just fiction, as with On the Beach, Doctor Strangelove, or A House of Dynamite? Or will they see it as a prompt to take this existential threat seriously and move to reduce or eliminate the world’s nuclear stockpiles?
Regardless of the response, the movie should motivate us all to work to build a constituency for change in order to end the madness and build a saner world.
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Trump Says He’s the Most Powerful Man Ever: He Is, and That’s a Big Worry
President Donald J. Trump’s “sole authority” to launch the US nuclear arsenal, which could kill billions of people and destroy life on Earth as we know it, means that he is the most powerful man ever; this should be of profound concern.
Jul 20, 2026
As William Perry, former secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, and Tom Collina state in The Button: “Within minutes, with just one phone call, President Trump could unleash up to a thousand nuclear weapons, each one many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. It would be the end of civilization... For President Trump, starting nuclear war is about as easy as sending a tweet.”
US policy, which invests “sole authority” in the president to launch nuclear weapons, crystallizes the utter absurdity of the nuclear predicament that we have lived under for 81 years. Contrary to popular belief, there is no “button.” Instead, there is a military aide, who carries a 40-plus pound briefcase, referred to as the “nuclear football” (officially called the Presidential Emergency Satchel), which follows the president 24/7/365, whenever he is away from fixed command centers. The fact that the president can use the football to launch US nuclear weapons at any moment, day or night—without having to consult or listen to anyone—beggars belief. Clearly, the ability to start a nuclear war that could destroy most life on Earth should not be entrusted to one person, especially one known to be erratically capriciousness and highly unstable.
Inside the nuclear football is a secure communications device that allows the president to order a launch, as well as a “Black Book,” outlining pre-planned presidential options for targets, delivery systems, and estimated casualties. It originally contained a heavy set of war plans, but after Jimmy Carter complained that it was too complicated for the extremely short time frame, it was simplified into a menu of strike options for either limited strikes or full retaliation, presented as a “one-page, cartoon-like menu.” One of Clinton’s aides quipped that it was like a “Denny’s breakfast menu.”
There is also a small laminated card, called the “biscuit,” with unique codes which are used to establish the president’s identity. If the president were to decide on a nuclear launch, he would read the codes over secure communications to the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon or one of its alternates. Once authenticated, the president's will is converted into a “highly encrypted, time-sensitive message called the Emergency Action Message, which includes the authentication codes, the strike option, timing details, and the codes to unlock the weapons.” It is then transmitted by the US Strategic Command Headquarters located in a bunker under the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, again by secure communication, to land-based intercontinental ballistic missile launch control centers, ballistic missile submarines, and air force strategic bombers, each with their own authentication and launch procedures. A full nuclear launch order can be executed in 5-15 minutes.
The only way to truly overcome the total absurdity of the incredibly reckless situation that we have created for ourselves during the nuclear age is to recognize the danger and to collectively “get our act together” to work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Presidents often keep the biscuit in a pocket, which has presented problems: Carter inadvertently sent his to the dry cleaners in a suit pocket; Clinton lost it altogether for several months. When Ronald Reagan was taken to hospital after an assassination attempt, he was stripped of clothing and the biscuit was later found by the FBI in a hospital trash can.
Once the nuclear football is opened, the president would have less than 10 minutes to absorb the information inside, review the options, and make a decision. Other sources suggest it would be six minutes. As Reagan lamented: “Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon? How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?”
Indeed, there have been concerns about several presidents during the nuclear age: John F. Kennedy was on heavy pain medication for back pain; Richard Nixon was drinking too much due to the strain of the Watergate investigations. (At one point, he threatened, “I can go back in my office and pick up the telephone and in 25 minutes, 70 million people will be dead.”) Lyndon B. Johnson alternated between manic energy and bouts of gloominess. At the end of their terms, Reagan had early-stage Alzheimer’s and Joe Biden’s clarity of thinking has also been questioned. But of all the 14 presidents who have been in office in the nuclear age, Trump’s stability has been the most extensively questioned. As reported by The New York Times, “Never before in modern times has the stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated—and with such profound consequences.”
Most presidents had previous experience with nuclear issues: 9 of 14 had military experience before taking office; five served as vice president; several served in other parts of the executive branch; and more than half, in Congress. Trump had none of this prior experience.
When Trump took charge of the nuclear football for a second time in 2025, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who had previously introduced legislation to Congress against “sole authority,” stated:
As Donald Trump returns to the White House, it is more important than ever to take the power to start a nuclear war out of the hands of a single individual and ensure that Congress’ constitutional role is respected and fulfilled. We must put guardrails on presidential authority to start nuclear war. We must never again entrust the fate of the world to just one fallible human.
Upon receiving a nuclear briefing just before their inauguration, presidents are often horrified by the awesome responsibility. Dwight D. Eisenhower was “visibly shaken”; Kennedy asked, “And we call ourselves the human race?” Carter recounted that, as president, the horror “was constantly on my mind.” George H.W. Bush stated, “I had no idea we had so many weapons... What do we need them for?” Barack Obama told a close adviser, it was “one of the most sobering experiences of my life.” Trump said, “a very sobering moment... very, very scary.” But as Perry and Collina comment, “While that statement might sound reassuring, Trump also asked, on several occasions [during his first term] ‘If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?’”
Indeed, during both terms, Trump has occasionally appeared to threaten their use. In 2017, when he and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, were in a tense standoff, Trump said: “North Korea, best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” When Kim boasted that his nuclear button is “always on my table,” Trump tweeted in return, “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is much bigger & more powerful than his, and my Button works!”
During the current ongoing war with Iran, Trump has also made a number of extremely ominous threats, the worst of which was probably on April 7 when he posted on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Following this post, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote to the White House physician on April 10, citing the above comments and requesting an evaluation of Trump due to “signs consistent with dementia and cognitive decline” and “increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged, and threatening tantrums.” No answer was received.
On April 14, Raskin submitted legislation to Congress to establish a nonpartisan “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office.” Such a mechanism is allowed by the 25th Amendment as an alternative to the vice president and Cabinet deciding whether the president should be removed from office (which is currently unlikely since Trump’s Cabinet members were selected because of their extreme loyalty). The legislation is still in committee.
On June 18, Raskin again wrote to the White House physician demanding that he comply with his previous request; provide a complete list of all medications and dosages; identify each of the 22 medical providers and their specialty that Trump saw during his May 26 examination at Walter Reed; and publicly release the complete results of this visit—again, without response.
Although the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule” forbids psychiatrists from offering public opinions about the diagnosis and mental health status of public figures they have not examined, many have argued that the rule is poorly conceived and that there is an overriding “duty to warn.” In this spirit, a group of 36 senior neurologists, forensic psychiatrists, general psychiatrists, and mental health professionals experienced in the diagnosis of cognitive disorders and evaluation of dangerousness, who had signed an earlier statement in 2024, issued an update on April 30 of this year.
They cited examples of Trump’s “marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganized and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during crucial public proceeding. Grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility... claims that his decision-making authority is unlimited—with no need to consider domestic and international laws and constrained only by his ‘own morality.’ Severely impaired judgment and impulse control... Significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications—e.g., 150 social media posts in one night.”
They conclude:
It is our professional opinion that the behaviors of Donald Trump, tragically, are neither momentary lapses nor political theater. It is our professional opinion that they reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline... For the reasons cited above, emphasizing that he presents a clear and present danger to our country and to the world, it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the president of the United States, and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.
On six occasions since 2016, Markey and Lieu have introduced legislation entitled the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, which would reallocate the responsibility for launching nuclear weapons from the president to Congress when the US is not being attacked. It would require Congress to explicitly approve any first nuclear strike by the US before federal money could be spent on the attack. So far it has not been adopted.
If the Democratic Party wins a majority in the next Congress, the Markey and Lieu bill or Raskin’s bill could be passed. If the latter is adopted, the use of Article 25 might become politically possible. Alternatively, it is also remotely conceivable that Trump could be impeached, convicted, and removed from office. But the concern remains as to whether this is soon enough to spare the world the possible use of Trump’s “sole authority”—given his deteriorating cognitive abilities.
Of course, the only way to truly overcome the total absurdity of the incredibly reckless situation that we have created for ourselves during the nuclear age is to recognize the danger and to collectively “get our act together” to work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons.
As Jonathan Schell sums up in The Fate of the Earth: “The machinery of destruction is complete, poised on a hair trigger, waiting for the ‘button’ to be ‘pushed’ by some misguided or deranged human being or for some faulty computer chip to send out the instruction to fire. That so much should be balanced on so fine a point—that the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment—is a fact against which belief rebels.”
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