The Bomb

As I wrote in my last blog New Belongings posted on April 1st, I recently joined the Union of Concerned Scientists. In previous decades this Cambridge, MA based group had been in the forefront of the campaign in America to abolish nuclear weapons, but I joined the organization recently because it has also taken up the cause of climate change. But little did I know the strange coincidence of events that would have me pondering this issue of nuclear weapons again, more than since my student days.

Back then in the late fifties and early sixties we had the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in Britain founded and led by Canon John Collins (1905 – 1982) an Anglican clergyman, who in the late seventies I would have the privilege of meeting at a reception in Cambridge, MA.

Then in October 1962 we had the Cuban Missile crisis. By then I was a graduate student at Glasgow University and took part in a truly historic debate that began at noon on the most crucial day of the crisis – October 26^th when many thought this might well lead to a nuclear war. Our debate went on for eleven hours!  That week was a nail-biting time with many of us wondering if this was it. I can still see Menzies Campbell, later to be leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, holding forth for nuclear disarmament; and Donald Dewar, later to be First Minister of Scotland, but then as chairman of the debate, using his authority to order a pause at 9 pm so that we could listen to the news on a radio because the situation was so intense. The following morning Kruschev backed down and the Soviet ships carrying missiles to Cuba turned around.

Since then things on this matter seemed to improve. Reagan met Gorbachev in Reykjavik in 1986 leading to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987. Many of us then assumed that neither the Russians nor the Americans were crazy enough to want their own countries destroyed. This policy is known as ‘mutual assured destruction’ or MAD, yes, quite. Well, it’s worked up till now.

All this has been brought into focus for me in recent days however due to a series of strange personal coincidences. On April 10th I watched the CBS program 60 Minutes. One of the items was about the final 28 pages of the 9/11 Report that have never been released and considered top secret. At question, and it is thought that these 28 pages might throw some light on it, is how did a bunch of young Arab men who spoke little English manage to come into America and in very short time take flying lessons, and then as we all know fly American airliners into the Twin Towers in New York and into the Pentagon.  According to the 60 Minutes report part of what these 28 pages have covered up all these years is that some of the terrorists received help from at least one person in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Los Angeles - their point of entry.

As I heard these lines on 60 Minutes I was reminded of some words of that big-mouthed Republican front-runner in a recent interview. When he becomes President he said he would stop financing the defense budgets of countries like Saudi Arabia and South Korea and simply give them all some nuclear weapons !  I know - he’s nuts, but he is still the Republican front runner .

Then if all this wasn’t enough, the next day I started into a new book that I’d bought at a sale recently without taking full note of its content but taken by its title: The Fate of the Earth. The author is Jonathan Schell (1943 – 2014) and was written in 1982, winning the LA Times Book Prize. As I started in I soon realized it was about nuclear weapons, how they work, their destructive power, and the likelihood of their being used, and strongly advocating for nuclear disarmament. Then that same evening - April 11^th I turn on the news and there’s John Kerry our Secretary of State making the first visit by such a senior American government official to Hiroshima, and clearly shaken by what he saw in the city and its museum to the nuclear blast that killed 140,000 people on August 6th, 1945. The report pointed out that there are now thousands of nuclear weapons in the world.

Schell’s 1982 book describes in graphic detail the incredibly powerful affects, based on what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the many tests of much larger bombs, including the more devastating hydrogen bomb, that nuclear weapons have - blasting power, mind boggling heat, and then the continuing spread of deadly radioactive substances. It is not a pleasant read.

Hiroshima after a very small atomic bomb

A modest one on down-town Boston would destroy everything inside route 128, our ring road; a not very big one would flatten the whole of Manhattan. Schell goes on giving mind-shattering details like these. Basically, he concludes that both Russia and America have enough nuclear weapons and sophisticated delivery systems to destroy ALL the cities and large towns in each other’s country. Weather patterns would then distribute the radiation to the rest of the world.

But, what struck me about this 1982 book is that there is no mention of the possibility of some terrorists getting hold of one or two such weapons.  Could ISIS get hold of one? One thinks of Russia with its corrupt government, and the former Soviet states one or two of which are struggling with their economies and chaotic governments; we hope we’ve stopped – for the present – Iran from building the bomb; and then there’s the nut-case in North Korea. And we trust that all the thousands of nuclear weapons in America are in safe, sane hands.

The homemade bombs in Paris and Brussels did horrific damage, literally blowing some people to pieces. A major atomic bomb blast would be a BILLION times greater!  All it needs is just one in the hands of a suicide bomber who isn’t at all worried about ‘mutual assured deterrence’; in fact is looking forward to instant passage to heaven. I just hope and trust that all governments in possession of nuclear weapons are taking sufficient precautions.

But quite simply, humanity cannot continue to live on into the future indefinitely without an effort to rid ourselves of these monsters worldwide.   

OK I’ve said enough.  But yes, there are times when I’m shit worried. And now I’m going to read a book about the gorgeous wonders of nature.