Going Nuclear, To The End

THE UNITED STATES was the first country to invent, discover, or whatever you want to call it, nuclear bombs, using imported European scientists, just as American culture itself is largely a European import. No sooner had the U.S. successfully completed its high speed high stakes war time development of the atom bomb, than it used it in anger, twice, against the Japanese civilian population, killing as many as half a million people in the process. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were entirely unnecessary for the world War Two effort, despite what Americans have told themselves and taught their children in history classes for decades. Months before the bombs were dropped, Japan was offering to negotiate a surrender, but the United States government conveniently ignored the offers, preferring instead to demonstrate its vast military strength in its new weapons, and its determination to dominate the post war world. There is no conceivable way the U.S. could ever have kept other nations from developing their own nuclear bombs, despite the American preference to maintain a permanent monopoly on the deadly weapons. England, France, China, and the soviet Union, the victors in world War Two, soon had their own bombs, their permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council, and the new post war order in which might, as always, makes right. Over the decades four other countries have joined the nuclear club: India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea, for a total of nine nuclear powers. And that is where we stand today. Frighteningly, the nine nuclear powers happen to be among the nine traditionally most belligerent, aggressive nations on Earth, fittingly, perhaps, and perhaps the reason why these are the ones who possess the weapons. The basics of nuclear technology are known to any graduate student in nuclear physics. There is no reason to suspect or expect that all other of the world's nearly two hundred nations couldn't at some point join the nuclear club - if they wanted to. As we speak, the situation now, and the likely future atomic bomb situation, looks bleak. Pakistan and India seem almost destined to engage in nuclear war, as do North and South Korea and the United States. All this talk about Iran and North Korea being kept from having atomic bombs is quite beside the point. The point is, nobody on earth should have them, especially the United States, which, recall, is the only nation so far to have used them in actual warfare, and that in the most criminal, unjustifiable manner imaginable. Experts on nuclear armaments unanimously agree on two things. The first is that it is a virtual miracle that there has been no further nuclear warfare in the world since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Secondly, it will be an even greater miracle if nuclear warfare does not eventuate, somewhere, within the relatively near future, as climate change cause ever greater international competition for basic essential resources, and strains the lobal economy to the breaking point, producing billions of desperate people and a world of combative, bankrupt nations, ready, willing, and able to do whatever they think necessary to obtain the resources they need for national survival. Our only hope is to reach an international agreement, the sooner the better, to banish all nuclear weapons from the planet, verifiably, by, say, the year twenty fifty. The problem is not Iran and North Korea. The problem is everybody. The problem are we.