The little-known dangers we live with

Opinion

We have spent 80 years under the shadow of the atomic bomb. The first atomic weapons obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, at the close of the Second World War.

As with the Holocaust, the generation of atomic witnesses is almost all gone, and the perpetrators have already left the stage. Unlike the Holocaust, however, those atomic victims lack the public memorials and current reminders of a horror that should never be allowed to happen again.

Unfortunately, “Never Again” is hardly the motto of militaries around the world. Ever since 1945, we have lived under the shadow of the same horror being repeated on a larger, even a global, scale.

The Doomsday Clock, kept by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, continues to creep closer to midnight. At its start in 1947, we were seven minutes away from global catastrophe; now, as of Jan. 28, 2025, we are 89 seconds away, one second closer than the year before.

While the Doomsday Clock continues to focus primarily on the likelihood of nuclear annihilation, it has evolved. That ominous clock now also assesses other various mass extinction possibilities, both biological and ecological, any of which might (in their turn) also trigger a nuclear event.

If you are one of those people who think nuclear war is survivable — limited to some unfortunate place somewhere else — you need to read Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario. It is a detailed, step-by-step timeline of how the world as we know it — including ourselves, everything and everyone we value — could be erased in the time it takes you to shower and eat breakfast in the morning, all without warning.

The tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, however delivered and whoever controls them, are also many thousands of times more than would be needed to trigger global extinction on a geological level. We would be goners, like the dinosaurs, and if some higher life form eventually develops from the cockroaches that always survive, they might dig up our fossils in amazement some day, too.

Yet there are few university courses anywhere in Canada that focus on the nuclear threat, past or present. We continue to suffer from cultural amnesia — deliberately encouraged, even cultivated, and terribly dangerous. We are not safer because we don’t know or talk about the bomb.

Worse, what people know about the bomb these days shies away from the horror of what happened, and what is likely someday to happen again. Deceptive stories have rendered nuclear weapons an acceptable and reasonable military option. Nothing could be further from the truth — then or now.

For example, the bomb was not needed to end the Second World War. Japan had already made overtures toward peace — and been ignored. There is no evidence then-U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt ever intended such a weapon to be used — he died before the Trinity test demonstrated what the bomb would do.

The Allies had definite information by early 1944 that there was no Nazi bomb, nor anything like the Manhattan Project. There never was evidence that Japan had made any similar effort. In other words, there was no enemy nuclear threat, whatsoever, long before Alamogordo.

Then-vice-president Harry Truman apparently knew little or nothing about the Manhattan Project until he became president in April 1945. He learned that the U.S. had spent about US$2 billion developing a weapon that had not yet been used. So, with planes following to record the events, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, not to end the war, but to demonstrate the bomb and so (coincidentally) ensure his election as president in 1948.

As far as the American military knew, the bomb just made a bigger bang with less effort. There was no clear understanding of radiation or its lethal effects, and early Japanese reports of the aftermath were dismissed as propaganda. Had 20 bombs been ready, 20 would have been dropped.

Nor were they concerned about causing civilian casualties — the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities actually killed more people than the two atomic bombs.

I will stop there, but much more could be said. Looking ahead to the post-war period, the lies, disinformation and utter ignorance associated with the nuclear arms race and its inevitable consequences are stunning. That we are all still here is evidence of luck rather than intention.

Since the early 1980s, we have known that whatever was not immediately destroyed would suffer through a global “nuclear winter,” perhaps for decades — a toxic, radioactive ice age, in which nothing healthy could grow. Worse, even a few weapons detonated in the right northern cities might be enough to trigger that same nuclear winter.

Despite this, we still dither, allowing politicians and their military sidekicks, without challenge, to game the consequences of global nuclear genocide.

After 80 years under the shadow of the bomb, the world is much more dangerous today. You need to find out why, and do something about it, before that Doomsday Clock strikes midnight.

Peter Denton writes from his nuclear-free home in rural Manitoba.