The inventor of the atomic bomb, the subject of Christopher Nolan’s new film, was the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism.
Portside typically aims at reviewing books offering a radical, cogent POV. This is not the case for the book here, a political slapdash whose trade-promoted author justifies if not glorifies mass slaughter in promoting war aims and imperial ventures.
Fire in the Anthropocene has become the physical equivalent of endless nuclear war. A new, profoundly sinister nature is rapidly emerging from our fire rubble at the expense of landscapes we once considered sacred.
Taken together, or alone, the reasons offered in defense of the bomb do not justify the massacre of civilians. We debase ourselves, and the history of civilization, if we accept that Japanese atrocities warranted an American atrocity in reply.
75 years ago today the United States unleashed nuclear destruction on Japan and the world. “Nuclear war is a raging, insatiable beast whose instincts and appetites we pretend to understand but cannot possibly control.” Nothing justifies these weapons
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The use of the atomic weapon must be seen as a continuation and a start: the nuclear continuation of the conventional terror bombing of Japanese civilians, and the start of a new “cold war.”
Against all odds, 122 countries agreed in July to ban nuclear weapons. At the heart of the United Nations treaty is an explicit ethical goal: to protect peoples of the world from the humanitarian catastrophe that would ensue if nuclear weapons were employed. Once 50 states ratify the treaty, it will enter into international law. The United States, the only country to use nuclear weapons, dropped the first atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945 at Hiroshima, and Aug. 9 on Nagasaki.
The anniversary of the United States dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki compels us to think more deeply about the continued existence of nuclear weapons.
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