The Bomb fell 80 years ago today.
That’s right — The Bomb. It has to be capitalized.
At the time of the Manhattan Project, the US was only one of at least five nations working on building their own Bomb. This holy land only was able to do it because it was, at the time, the richest nation on the planet. It cost $20B in 1945 dollars to build America’s first nukes. No other country could spare that kind of cash as they were busy clothing, feeding, arming, and transporting millions and millions of people here and there to kill millions and millions of other people.
The US and the UK, working together, reasoned that, since many of the world’s smartest nuclear physicists were from Germany, Hitler’s Reich probably was racing to be the first to build a Bomb. Hitler, history has shown us, didn’t think all that much of the then-theoretical weapon. Of course, we had no way of knowing that at the time so we had to beat the Nazis to it.
By the time Lt. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, physicist/administrator J. Robert Oppenheimer, and their crew finally put together a working Gadget, Germany had been crushed. In mid-July, 1945, new US President Harry S Truman was scratching his head, trying to strategize an end to the war with Japan. His advisers estimated more than a million US soldiers would be casualties and tens of millions of Japanese would be starved, bombed, bayoneted, blown up, or shot to death were we to invade the Japanese mainland. Truman’s diplomats warned him the Soviet Union was itching to get its hands on a good half of Japan once Stalin’s empire joined the war. Truman political advisors counseled him that if we didn’t use The Bomb to shorten the war and Americans learned about the cost and efficacy of the thing, they’d crucify the president. All were compelling reasons to drop The Bomb on Japan.
Let’s do it, Truman decided.
How, we wonder at this remove, could anybody do such a horrifying thing? It’s easy to condemn Truman’s decision in 2025. In 1945, officials around the world were busy counting the more than 50 million human beings already slaughtered in the war. Killing huge numbers of people was the norm.
Of all humanity’s sins, our species’s development of nuclear weapons might turn out to be the evilest. That is, of course, if there’s anybody left to rank Homo sapiens‘s sins should we again decide to fling nukes at each other.
Very few people who actually remember World War II and the dropping of The Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are left. In fact, Bill Clinton was the first US president who hadn’t fought in the war, and he took office more than 30 years ago.. The horrors of WWII, it can be assumed, kept the globe’s post-war leaders from getting too mouthy with each other for fear that things might spiral out of control.
Today’s leaders have no such historical guardrail.
Donald Trump and Dmitri Medvedev, Russia’s former president and prime minister, have been throwing threats at each other of late. They’ve been making references to their Bombs, implying each has the capability and will to incinerate the other. Post-World War II leaders with personal memories of that that horror never resorted to such threats. Even when the US and the USSR stood at the brink of nuclear armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis, neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev blabbed about nuking each other. Just uttering the words was seen as dangerous, rather like saying Candyman three times in a row. Or is it five? No matter.
Li’l Duce, who is unapologetically — even proudly — unaware of history, has no healthy fear of his country’s or his foe’s nukes. Historians tell us every time a new US president takes office, he is humbled — and petrified — as he’s apprised of our nuclear capability and the apocalyptic havoc using them would unleash. Not Li’l Duce, numerous observers have noticed. Even so theatrical a macho-man as Ronald Reagan, became convinced we — meaning all Earthlings — had to reduce our nuclear stockpiles once he was put abreast of their numbers and megatonnage. When Trump took office in 2017, he began crowing that we ought to build thousands more of the things.
Humans have only used two Bombs in anger. We have, though, exploded them thousands of times in “test shots” to remind the Other Guy that we have them. It’s been 80 years since we dropped the first nuke on a city. It’s almost beyond belief that we’ve never used them again following the Nagasaki bombing three days later. I chalk that good fortune up, mostly, to dumb luck.
Now, it’s the leaders who are dumb. Our luck might be running out.