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nuclear weapons
Trump: the Personification of the End of History?
Donald Trump is sending the US down the tubes in double time, and, in the process, potentially taking much of the rest of the world with him.
Aug 22, 2025
Sometimes I dream—in the sense of a nightmare—about bringing my parents back to this all too strange world of ours to tell them about… yes, of course, Donald J. Trump. They died long before The Apprentice even made it onto TV early in this century, so—best guess—though they also lived in New York, they undoubtedly had never heard of him.
My mother died in 1977 when Donald Trump was 31 and Jimmy Carter was president; my father in 1983 when Trump was 37 and Ronald Reagan was president. But nothing, not even Richard Nixon, could have prepared them for a Trump presidency, not once but (yes!) twice.
Mind you, my father was a salesman and, in that sense, he might have understood something about Trump, including his ability to sell himself to all too many of the rest of us so damn successfully, again not once but twice—and if he has anything to do with it, maybe (but “probably” not) a third time, too. My parents could never have imagined, however, that the country which, at my mom’s birth, had Theodore Roosevelt as president and, in the years to come, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, among others, would have elected a madly self-referential ex-salesman with six bankrupt businesses in his past to the White House not once, but—yes, again!—twice.
I think my mother, a professional political and theatrical caricaturist, might have grimly laughed and then gone to her easel to turn him into her caricature of the ages. She would undoubtedly have caught his strange essence, as she did that nightmarish Trumpian figure of her moment (though he never had the same power to devastate our world), Sen. Joe McCarthy.
Under the circumstances, here’s my new phrase for this global moment of ours: We—and I mean all of us on Earth—are in Trumple deep.
And believe it or not, there is indeed some appropriate history here. Great powers—and after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended in 1991, this country seemed to be a great power like no other, possibly ever—do come and go. Indeed, the going can be bizarre and disorienting. But when they come, it often seems as if they might be here forever and a day. And of course, in that now distant moment when the Soviet Union suddenly unraveled and China had not yet risen, the US did appear to be The Great Power (and capitals and italics are indeed appropriate), the only one left on Planet Earth.
At the time, in fact, it felt as if this country might actually prove to be the Ultimate Great Power, the Greatest of All. Who then could have imagined that, not quite a quarter of a century later, the US would, in its own fashion, have gone to the dogs, that it would be ever more—and yes, we do need some new words to describe this increasingly stranger, more disturbing world of ours—tariffyingly alone on an increasingly resentful and hostile planet? And mind you, I’m not just thinking about countries like Brazil, India, and Switzerland that are deeply ticked off by Donald Trump’s soaring tariffs and so much else. Who then could have imagined that we were already heading for the historical edge of what may prove to be the ultimate cliff of history? Who, then, could have imagined that Donald J. Trump—that living, breathing symbol of ultimate decline—would indeed become this country’s president, not once but—yes, again (and again)!—twice?
Honestly, in those nearly 25 years, how did the seemingly greatest power in history become something like an all-too-grim planetary laughing-stock—or do I mean totally frightening-stock?
Of course, in a fashion my parents couldn’t have imagined once upon a time, Donald Trump may be the ultimate… Wait, what word or words am I searching for here? I wonder if it or they even exist. He’s almost too strange for the ordinary language we’re used to, while—though who yet knows?—it’s at least possible to imagine that he might prove to be the personification of the end of history. The last president, so to speak.
After all, though in my parents’ time humanity already had the ability to do this planet in, thanks to the atomic weapons that ended my father’s war, who would have imagined then that we humans had already come up with a second, slow-motion way to do the same thing—I’m thinking, of course, about climate change—while essentially not noticing for decades. Nor could they have imagined that, once the long-term destructiveness of global warming became more apparent, the American people would elect a president dedicated to the very substances, fossil fuels, that are slowly transforming this planet into a giant fire hazard, heat condominium, and flooding nightmare first class.
The Final Act?
I mean, imagine this: even if the atomic weaponry that has spread to nine countries is never used again—and don’t count on that when the Russians and the Americans have only recently implicitly or explicitly threatened to employ just such weaponry, while the last nuclear treaty between those two countries is scheduled to run out in February 2026 (oh, and my country is also planning to invest another $1.7 trillion in “modernizing” its nuclear arsenal in the decades to come)—the burning of fossil fuels, a slow-motion version of atomic warfare, has now become the heart and soul(lessness) of the potential devastation of planet Earth. After all, last November, Americans reelected a man who, in a fashion that could hardly have been blunter, ran his third campaign for president as a “drill, baby, drill” candidate. It was, in fact, his main election slogan. And since retaking the White House, he has indeed backed to the hilt the idea of increasing this country’s production of coal, oil, and natural gas. In fact, he only recently reached a tariff deal with the European Union in which he forced the EU to agree to purchase $250 billion worth of American natural gas and oil annually in the years to come. Who cares that US energy exports to all buyers globally in 2024 added up to (and what a word to use in this context!) only $318 billion?
As John Feffer recently put it all too accurately, “Trump uses tariffs like a bad cook uses salt. It covers up his lack of preparation, the poor quality of his ingredients, the blandness of his imagination. It’s the only spice in his spice rack.” Indeed, that couldn’t be more on target, unless, of course, you start to think of climate destruction as a kind of spice, too.
Worse yet, he has proven all too grimly a man of his word. Under him, for instance, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is being turned into an outfit that will essentially protect nothing whatsoever. As David Gelles and Maxine Joselow of the New York Times reported recently: “Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, this week proposed to repeal the landmark scientific finding that enables the federal government to regulate the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. In effect, the EPA will eliminate its own authority to combat climate change.”
He has, in short, brought us to what might be considered the ultimate cliff of history and is, in essence, putting a potentially devastating tariff on Planet Earth.
The only thing that the Trump administration now has to do is change that outfit’s name to the Environmental Destruction Agency, or EDA, since it’s already doing everything it can to halt wind and solar power projects of any sort in this country. And as Gelles and Joselow also report, it has recently “dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship analysis of how climate change is affecting the country. In May, Mr. Trump proposed to stop collecting key measurements of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as part of his 2026 budget plan.”
In short, right now the very idea of a “great” power seems to be heading for the dustbin of history, and that Cold-War-ending moment in 1991 appears ever more like a fantasyland of the first order. Yes, much that’s all too familiar is still ongoing on this planet of ours, including endless wars. But what a time to have made Donald J. Trump president of the United States again. Under the circumstances, here’s my new phrase for this global moment of ours: We—and I mean all of us on Earth—are in Trumple deep.
In truth, the very phrase “great power” might as well now be “grape power.” And mind you, given the strange ingenuity of humanity, don’t for a second assume that there isn’t a third way of doing us all in as well, even if we don’t yet know what it is.
Worse yet, don’t for a second imagine that President Trump is alone on planet Earth. Just consider Vladimir Putin, the Russian ruler who decided that the best way to go in 2022 was to invade a neighboring country and simply never stop fighting there. (Yes, I know, I know… NATO did seem to be creeping up on Russia in those years, but still…) And what about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who simply can’t stop slaughtering Gazans and utterly devastating that microscopic 25-mile strip of land—with American weaponry no less—while potentially starving thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of Gazans to death? (And while you’re at it, don’t forget that war itself is one of humanity’s most effective ways of putting yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and heating this planet further!)
Putting a Tariff on Planet Earth?
It’s not exactly a pretty picture, is it? And mind you, I haven’t even mentioned the ongoing disasters in Sudan or Somalia, or so much else on this unsettled and unsettling planet of ours. Nor have I mentioned the one major country that seems to fit none of the above categories, being neither at war, nor in decline, nor headed by some distinctly strange and unnerving version of humanity, and that, of course, is China. There can be no question that it is indeed a significant power and, once upon a time, would undoubtedly have been considered the next great power to loom over Planet Earth.
And give the Chinese some credit. While not acting globally in the usual fully imperial fashion, they have been moving to create ever more green energy—in fact, installing more wind and solar power than the rest of the world combined. And yet, that country is also a carbon disaster, using more coal than almost all the other countries on this planet put together and still planning to install startling numbers of new coal power plants. So, a “great” power? Not exactly, not on this ever-less-than-great planet of ours.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is sending the US down the tubes in double time (and, in the process, potentially taking much of the rest of the world with him). He has, in short, brought us to what might be considered the ultimate cliff of history and is, in essence, putting a potentially devastating tariff on Planet Earth.
We face what could—not even a quarter century after the United States appeared to stand alone and all-powerful on this planet of ours—be something like the last act in the drama (the tragedy?) of human history.
Under the circumstances, the question, of course, is: Why can’t we humans seem to learn what truly matters on this increasingly endangered planet of ours?
I sometimes feel like a bewildered child when I think about what we’re now doing to our world—a child with no parents around to explain what’s happening. And 79-year-old Donald Trump catches that mood of mine exactly as, having just turned 81, I watch him visibly begin to move into an altered state of personal decline, while ensuring by his acts (and those of his minders) that this planet continues to head for hell in a handbasket.
In the past I’ve suggested that his middle initial J should be changed to a D for decline. But now that seems almost too mild to me as we face what could—not even a quarter century after the United States appeared to stand alone and all-powerful on this planet of ours—be something like the last act in the drama (the tragedy?) of human history.
And yes, I still do have the urge to call my parents back from the dead, hoping they might be able to explain us humans and our ever-stranger ways to their son. I suspect that, on returning to this eerie world of ours so many decades later, my mother might find it to be the ultimate caricature.
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A Hiroshima Survivor Reminds the World Why History Must Not Repeat Itself
Eighty years have passed since the bombing of Hiroshima, when Kodama’s life and the world changed dramatically. She has not forgotten that day, but she said looking at today’s conflicts, it seems like the world has.
Aug 21, 2025
Michiko Kodama was only seven years old when the world’s first nuclear weapon was dropped on her hometown of Hiroshima. Since then, she has dedicated her life to ensuring that her generation remains the only victims of a nuclear holocaust.
“When you witness something like this, you think how can I live? Am I allowed to live? But, I’m glad I’m alive,” Kodama said. “I’m glad I had the life I wanted, and I think it’s because I can tell the stories of those who have passed away.”
Kodama is the assistant secretary general of Nihon Hidankyo, an organization composed of Hibakusha, the Japanese word that refers to the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In 2024, Nihon Hidankyo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their advocacy work on nuclear nonproliferation.
“To fight against nuclear weapons is to preserve life because it is the weapon that is capable of completely destroying the entire Earth. It’s the weapon that’s capable of stopping time,” Kodama, 87, said.
“The atomic bombs that I experienced 80 years ago were like babies compared to today’s nuclear weapons,” said Kodama.
Eighty years have passed since the bombing of Hiroshima, when Kodama’s life and the world changed dramatically. She has not forgotten that day, but she said looking at today’s conflicts, it seems like the world has. And she’s determined to continue reminding the world of the terrors of nuclear weapons.
She remembers being under her desk as the bomb hit. She saw a flash of light followed by an extreme wave of heat. Somehow she survived along with her classmates. She recalled the horrific sight of people who had come to her families’ suburb to try and get relief from the epicenter. People who had been so badly burnt that their skin was coming off their flesh.
“These sorts of images show the differences between conventional weapons and nuclear weapons. It’s just a weapon that is so inhumane, so indiscriminate that we just should not have it,” Kodama said.
The Doomsday Clock, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created in 1947 to measure how close the world is to man-made catastrophe, signals that the world has moved closer to nuclear catastrophe than it ever has been. In January 2025, the clock was moved one second closer to midnight, sending a stark signal to the global community that we are moving closer toward the brink of nuclear holocaust. The clock currently looms at a mere 89 seconds to midnight.
“I fear that World War III will turn into a nuclear war,” she said.
Nine countries currently have nuclear weapons, and many more are seeking to get it as a deterrent.
“I think it’s a huge mistake,” Kodama said. “Nuclear weapons and humans, and of course the Earth, cannot coexist. I know this from personal experience.”
In June 2025, the US bombed Iran’s nuclear sites out of fear they were getting closer and closer to developing a nuclear weapon. Experts said that Iran’s aspirations will not stop and that other countries could follow its example
“In the span of two weeks, Iran was bombed by two nuclear powers, the US and Israel. That could lead to a perverted logic in which developing the nuclear bomb is seen as their only way to be safe from further attacks,” said Thomas Countryman, president of the board at the Arms Control Association.
Kodama warned that more countries with nuclear weapons would only increase the likelihood that a nuclear holocaust would take place.
Kodama described apocalyptic scenes from when the bomb first hit in the center of Hiroshima. People riding on Hiroshima’s famous tram instantly turned to charcoal; those that didn’t die instantly had their skin stripped off from the heat of the ground, and many ended up jumping in the river for relief where they also died.
Although she was one of the fortunate ones to survive the bombing, the consequences of the bomb continued well after August 6 for Kodama.
“I’ll be a victim of the atomic bomb until I die. Yes, I can’t escape the fact that I was a victim of the atomic bomb” Kodama said.
For example, Kodama recalled how she faced discrimination within Japan as a survivor and was told that would have to live alone without getting married because people at the time did not want their future generations “mixed” with those that survived an atomic bomb. Moreover, even after she married and had kids, her daughter suddenly died at 45 after contracting cancer, which Kodama believes was passed down from herself.
Her mother, father, and two brothers, one of whom was born after the bombing Hiroshima, also died of cancer which she attributed to the effects of radiation exposure.
However, even with the devastating effects of Hiroshima, Kodama warned that the bomb dropped 80 years ago would only cause a fraction of the damage that today’s weapons could inflict.
“The atomic bombs that I experienced 80 years ago were like babies compared to today’s nuclear weapons,” said Kodama.
In fact, just 20 days before the bomb exploded she moved from the center of Hiroshima to a suburb. Everyone in her former school was killed. Kodama noted that in some ways she was lucky because the Hiroshima bomb didn’t completely destroy life.
“When the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, it was said that no plants would grow for 80 years, but the following year, those trees in the garden sprouted young shoots,” Kodama said. “If something like that were to happen again, no plants would really grow. They wouldn’t grow for 80 years, or even a hundred years. It would be impossible to survive.”
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What Would It Mean to Remember Hiroshima Without Hypocrisy?
There is no true way to meaningfully honor its memory while so many countries, including the one that dropped the first bomb, actively prepare for future nuclear war.
Aug 12, 2025
On August 6, 2025, the world marked the 80th anniversary of the American destruction of Hiroshima. As in decades past, Hiroshima Day served to honor the first victims of atomic warfare and to reaffirm the enduring promise that their suffering would not be in vain, that they and the residents of Nagasaki, devastated three days later in 1945, would be the last places to endure such a fate.
Within that commemorative framework, Hiroshima has been effectively rendered an abstraction and reduced to a cautionary tale. With the involuntary sacrifice of that city and its inhabitants, humanity was offered a profound lesson. In the ruins of Hiroshima, the world confronted a vision of nothing less than its own potential end. And awareness of that apocalyptic possibility emerged almost immediately. The very next day, in fact, the American newspaper PM, based in New York, ran an article speculating on the catastrophic consequences of an atomic bomb detonating in the heart of that very city.
For the first time, thanks to Hiroshima, human beings became an endangered species. People everywhere were presented with an existential choice between the quick and the dead, between one world and none. Humanity could recover its moral bearings and pursue the abolition of nuclear weapons and the renunciation of war, or accept the inevitability that such man-made forces would ultimately abolish most or all of us. (Think “nuclear winter.”) Only through the former could we hope for collective redemption rather than collective suicide.
In our annual ritual of remembrance, Hiroshima is recalled not so much as a site of mass slaughter, but as a symbol of peace, hope, and resilience, a testament to our professed commitment to “never again.” Yet this year, such sanitized appeals of official memory rang increasingly hollow. After all, eight decades later, humanity (or at least its leadership) continues to demonstrate that it learned remarkably little from the horrors of Hiroshima.
At this moment, the history of the bomb needs to be reconsidered, not as an isolated development in an increasingly distant past but as inextricably linked to broader questions of mass violence now, including in Gaza.
What, after all, could it mean to commemorate such a moment in a world where today not one, but nine nuclear-armed states hold humanity hostage to the threat of sudden, total annihilation? Worse yet, today’s arsenals contain thousands of thermonuclear weapons, some of them up to 1,000 times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Worse yet, those arsenals are being “modernized” regularly, the American one to the tune of $1.5 trillion or more as a significant portion of our national resources continues to be siphoned away from meeting human needs and redirected toward preparations for (in)human destruction.
Worse yet, all too many of those weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, poised to extinguish life on Earth in what Daniel Ellsberg, the man who long ago released the top-secret Pentagon Papers, once described as a “single, immense hammer-blow to be executed with the automaticity of a mousetrap at almost any provocation.”
Under this country’s current launch-on-warning posture, President Donald Trump (and any president who follows him) holds sole, unquestioned authority to initiate a retaliatory nuclear strike, with as little as six minutes to decide following an alert about a possible nuclear attack (despite a well-documented history of false alarms). This scenario also presumes that the U.S. would only be acting in “self-defense” in response to a nuclear strike by another nation, although mutually assured destruction renders such concepts obsolete. In reality, that assumption is far from certain. Washington (unlike, for example, Beijing) has never adopted a no-first-use policy and continues to reserve the right to initiate a nuclear strike preemptively.
Moreover, what does it mean to remember Hiroshima in a world where, while no atomic bomb has been dropped on Gaza, the tonnage of “conventional” explosives unleashed there is already equivalent to six Hiroshima bombings? As the nuclear abolitionist organization Nihon Hidankyo, composed of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, warned in the lead-up to being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024, the suffering of Gaza’s children all too eerily mirrors their own experiences in Hiroshima.
That city is therefore not merely a past atrocity but an open wound, not simply a lesson of history but an ongoing nightmare. There is, in short, no true way to meaningfully honor its memory while so many countries (my own included) actively prepare for future nuclear war.
At this moment, the history of the bomb needs to be reconsidered, not as an isolated development in an increasingly distant past but as inextricably linked to broader questions of mass violence now, including in Gaza. Such an approach, in fact, would reflect the way the bomb was originally understood by many of the scientists who built it, sensing that it would prove to be what some of them would soon describe as “a weapon of genocide.”
Destroying Cities and Calling it Peace
After those two atomic bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtering up to 210,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians by deliberate design, most Americans responded with relief. Echoing the official narrative, they celebrated the bomb as a triumph of scientific ingenuity and a “winning weapon” associated with bringing a swift and decisive end to World War II, the bloodiest conflict in human history.
Decades of historical scholarship have demonstrated that such a narrative is largely a myth. In the aftermath of those two bombings, a carefully constructed postwar consensus quickly emerged, bolstered by inflated claims that those two bombs were used only as a last resort, that they saved half a million American lives, and, perversely enough, that they constituted a form of “mercy killing” that spared many Japanese civilians. In reality, clear alternatives were then available, rendering the use of nuclear weapons unnecessary and immoral as well as, given the future nuclearization of the planet, strategically self-defeating.
Nonetheless, a war-weary American public overwhelmingly endorsed the bombings. Postwar polls indicated that 85% of them supported a decision made without their knowledge, input, or any form of democratic oversight. Notably, nearly a quarter of respondents expressed a further vengeful, even genocidal disappointment that Japan had surrendered so quickly, denying the United States the opportunity to drop “many more” atomic bombs (although no additional atomic weapons were then available).
It remains unclear whether, had they been ready, Washington would have used them. Despite President Harry Truman’s public posture of steely resolve, his private reflections suggest a deep unease, even horror over their use. As Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace recorded in his diary, Truman had “given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, all those kids.”
Why, then, were most Americans not similarly horrified? As historians John Dower and Ronald Takaki have shown, such exterminationist sentiments were fueled by anti-Asian racism, which framed the Pacific War in the American imagination as a race war. But perhaps more important, the way had been paved for them by the normalization of the practice of devastating area bombing, or more accurately, the terror bombing of both Nazi Germany and Japan.
Over the course of the war, the United States and Great Britain had “perfected” that indiscriminate method of destruction, targeting civilian morale and the collective will and capacity of a nation to sustain its war effort. This came despite the fact that President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly condemned the aerial bombardment of civilian infrastructure before the U.S. entry into the war as “inhuman barbarism.”
As Daniel Ellsberg observed, when it came to the rapid erosion of ethical restraints under the exigencies of an existential war, “liberal democracies… in fighting an evil enemy, picked up the methods of that enemy and made them into a private ethic that was indistinguishable really from Hitler’s ethic.” That moral collapse would be evident in the devastation wrought upon the German cities of Hamburg and Dresden, as well as in the similar destruction inflicted by the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities.
That descent into “barbarism” was not lost on contemporary observers. Reflecting on the 1943 Allied bombing of Hamburg, outspoken pacifist Vera Brittain described the destruction as a scene from “the evil nightmare of a homicidal maniac” and as “irrefutable evidence of the moral and spiritual abyss into which Britain and her rulers have descended.” She warned that such actions stemmed from a selective and hypocritical blindness, observing that, “in the Nazis and the Japanese we recognize cruelty when we see it, yet that same cruelty is being created, unperceived, amongst ourselves.”
And such a recognition wasn’t confined to pacifists but extended to policymakers. In response to the devastation caused by the “conventional” bombing campaign against Japan, including the burning to death of as many as 130,000 people in Tokyo in a single night in March 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson warned that, if such attacks continued, “we might get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” (The New York Times reported that the bombing of Tokyo may have killed as many as 1-2 million people. While not necessarily accurate, such reporting reflected a broader desensitization to mass death that had come to define the logic of total war, as well as a growing public tolerance among Americans for urbicide, the city-scale slaughter of civilians.)
On Nazi and Nuclear Holocausts
Not everyone in the Allied nations shared in the prevailing atmosphere of apathy or even jubilation over those nuclear bombings. Before the second bomb struck Nagasaki, French philosopher Albert Camus expressed his horror that even in a war defined by unprecedented, industrialized slaughter, Hiroshima stood apart. The destruction of that city, he observed, marked the moment when “mechanistic civilization has come to its final stage of savagery.” Soon after, American cultural critic Dwight Macdonald condemned the bombings in Politics, arguing that they placed Americans “on the same moral plane” as the Nazis, rendering the American people as complicit in the crimes of their government as the German people had been in theirs.
American scholar Lewis Mumford likewise regarded that moment as a profound moral collapse. It marked, he argued in 1959, the point at which the U.S. decided to commit the better part of its national energies to preparation for wholesale human extermination. With the advent of the bomb, Americans accepted their role as “moral monsters,” legitimizing technological slaughter as a permissible instrument of state power. “In principle,” he wrote, “the extermination camps where the Nazis incinerated over 6 million helpless Jews were no different from the urban crematoriums our air force improvised in its attacks by napalm bombs on Tokyo,” laying the groundwork for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If we don’t dedicate ourselves to building a world without war and without nuclear weapons, sooner or later we will undoubtedly witness just such devastation on a global and irreversible scale.
The specter of Nazism has always loomed large over the atomic bomb. It was, after all, the fear of a Nazi bomb that first catalyzed the Manhattan Project that would create the American bombs. While the fall of the Nazi regime preceded the use of atomic weapons on Japan by nearly three months, as soft-spoken astronomer Carl Sagan once observed, the ideological imprint of Nazism was etched into the littered landscape of charred bodies and scorched earth of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It endured in the brutal logic of total war carried forward through the ensuing Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union and culminated in the grotesque accumulation of nuclear arsenals with tens of thousands of world-destroying weapons poised to obliterate humanity.
In a 1986 keynote address before the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem, “The Final Solution to the Human Problem,” Sagan argued that Hitler “haunts our century… [as] he has shattered our confidence that civilized societies can impose limits on human destructiveness.” In their mutually reinforcing preparations to annihilate one another, erase the past, and foreclose the possibility of future generations, he concluded, “the superpowers have dutifully embraced this legacy… Adolf Hitler lives on.”
Lacking Hitler, Sagan suggested, Washington and Moscow imposed his image on each other. This was necessary because “nuclear weapons represent such a surpassing evil that they can be justified only by an equally evil adversary.” Humanity, he warned, was then locked in a downward spiral into a moral abyss reminiscent of a Greek tragedy. “When we engage in a death struggle with a monster, there is a real danger that we ourselves will, by slow and imperceptible changes, become transmogrified into monsters. We may be the last to notice what is happening to us.”
This influence was evident in the fact that fear of a Nazi bomb had served as the initial impetus for the Manhattan Project and that the future nuclear state would share certain characteristics of the Nazi regime. As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described it, such a state would rely on “the genocidal mentality,” a psychological willingness, combined with the technological capacity and institutional planning necessary to, under certain circumstances, deliberately destroy entire human populations.
No More Hiroshimas
In concluding his 1986 address, Carl Sagan warned that World War II had never truly ended. And in a sense, it hasn’t ended even today, given that nine countries now possess such world-destroying weaponry. After all, were a nuclear war to happen in the years to come, a scenario the most powerful states have spent the past 80 years preparing for and making ever more likely, the Allies will have retroactively lost the war. In the radioactive ruins of what was once Washington and New York, Leningrad, Moscow, and Beijing, New Delhi, and Islamabad, no less potentially across much of the rest of this planet, we would witness “the fulfillment of Hitler’s last and maddest vision.”
Such a future is anything but hypothetical. It may, in some sense, already be unfolding around us. It takes no great imagination to envision Hiroshima in the wreckage of Gaza or in the increasingly bombed-out cities of Ukraine. And that’s just a hint of the future, were nuclear weapons ever to be used. If we don’t dedicate ourselves to building a world without war and without nuclear weapons, sooner or later we will undoubtedly witness just such devastation on a global and irreversible scale.
To survive as a species and preserve our humanity, we must, as Dwight Macdonald urged us in August 1945, begin to think “dangerous” thoughts “of sabotage, resistance, rebellion, and the fraternity of all [people] everywhere.” Only then could we commemorate Hiroshima Day without the hypocrisy of talking peace while endlessly preparing for a world-ending war. Only then could we begin to fulfill the enduring promise of never again, no more Hiroshimas.
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