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On February 5th, with the\u00a0expiration<\/a>\u00a0of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, the only bilateral arms control treaty left between the United States and Russia, we are guaranteed to find ourselves ever closer to the edge of a\u00a0perilous precipice<\/a>. The renewed arms race that seems likely to take place could plunge the world, once and for all, into the nuclear abyss. This crisis is neither sudden nor surprising, but the predictable culmination of a truth that has haunted us for nearly 80 years: humanity has long been living on\u00a0borrowed time<\/a>.<\/p>\n In such a context, you might think that our collective survival instinct has proven remarkably poor, which is, at least to a certain extent, understandable. After all, if we had allowed ourselves to feel the full weight of the nuclear threat we\u2019ve faced all these years, we might indeed have collapsed under it. Instead, we continue to drift forward with a sense of muted dread, unwilling (or simply unable) to respond to the nuclear nightmare. In a world already armed with\u00a0thousands of omnicidal weapons<\/a>, such fatalism \u2014 part suicidal nihilism and part homicidal complacency \u2014 becomes a form of violence in its own right.<\/p>\n Given such indifference, we risk not only our own lives but also the lives of all those who would come after us. As Jonathan Schell\u00a0observed<\/a>\u00a0decades ago, both genocide and nuclear war are distinct from other forms of mass atrocity in that they serve as \u201ccrimes against the future.\u201d And as Robert Jay Lifton once\u00a0warned<\/a>, what makes nuclear war so singularly horrifying is that it would constitute \u201cgenocide in its terminal form,\u201d a destruction so absolute as to render the earth unlivable and irrevocably reverse the very process of creation.<\/p>\n Yet for many, the absence of such a nuclear holocaust, 80 years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is taken as proof that such a catastrophe is, in fact, unthinkable and will never happen. These days, to invoke the specter of annihilation is to be dismissed as alarmist, while to argue for the abolition of such weaponry is considered na\u00efve. As it happens, though, the opposite is true. It\u2019s the height of na\u00efvet\u00e9 to believe that a global system built on the supposed security of nuclear weapons can endure indefinitely.<\/p>\n That much should be obvious by now. In truth, we\u2019ve clung to the faith that rational heads will prevail for far too long. Such thinking has sustained a minimalist global\u00a0nonproliferation regime<\/a>\u00a0aimed at preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons to so-called terrorist states like\u00a0Iraq<\/a>,\u00a0Libya<\/a>, and\u00a0North Korea<\/a>\u00a0(which now indeed has a nuclear arsenal). Yet, today, it should be all too clear that the states with nuclear weapons are, and have long been, the true rogue states.<\/p>\n A nuclear-armed Israel has, after all, been committing genocide in Gaza and has bombed\u00a0many of<\/a>\u00a0its neighbors. Russia continues to devastate Ukraine, which\u00a0relinquished<\/a>\u00a0its nuclear arsenal in 1994, and its leader, Vladimir Putin, has\u00a0threatened<\/a>\u00a0to use nuclear weapons there. And a Washington led by a brazen authoritarian deranged by power, who\u00a0has declared<\/a>\u00a0that he doesn\u2019t \u201cneed international law,\u201d has stripped away the fragile fa\u00e7ade of a rules-based global order.<\/p>\n Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the leaders of the seven other nuclear-armed states possess the unilateral capacity to destroy the world, a power no country should be allowed to wield. Yet even now, there is\u00a0still time<\/a>\u00a0to avert catastrophe. But to chart a reasonable path forward, it\u2019s necessary to look back eight decades and ask why the world failed to ban the bomb at a moment when the dangerous future we now inhabit was already clearly foreseeable.<\/p>\n Every City is Hiroshima<\/strong><\/p>\n With Hiroshima and Nagasaki still smoldering ruins, people everywhere confronted a rupture so profound that it seemed to inaugurate a new historical era, one that might well be the last. As news of the atomic bombings spread, a grim consensus took shape that technological \u201cprogress\u201d had outpaced political and moral restraint. Journalist\u00a0Norman Cousins<\/a>\u00a0captured the\u00a0zeitgeist<\/em>\u00a0when he\u00a0wrote that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cmodern man is obsolete, a self-made anachronism becoming more incongruous by the minute.\u201d Human beings had clearly fashioned themselves into vengeful gods and the specter of Armageddon was no longer a matter of theology but a creation of modern civilization.<\/p>\n In the United States, of course,\u00a0a majority<\/a>\u00a0of Americans greeted the initial reports of the atomic bombings of those two Japanese cities in a celebratory fashion, convinced that such unprecedented weapons would bring a swift, victorious end to a brutal war. For many, that relief was inseparable from a lingering desire for retribution.\u00a0In announcing<\/a>\u00a0the first atomic attack, President Harry Truman himself declared that the Japanese \u201chave been repaid many fold\u201d for their strike on Pearl Harbor, which inaugurated the official American entry into World War II. Yet triumph quickly gave way to a more somber reckoning.<\/p>\n As the scale of devastation came into fuller view, the psychological fallout radiated far beyond Japan. The\u00a0New York Herald Tribune<\/em>\u00a0captured a growing unease when it\u00a0editorialized that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cone forgets the effect on Japan or on the course of the war as one senses the foundations of one\u2019s own universe trembling a little\u2026 it is as if we had put our hands upon the levers of a power too strange, too terrible, too unpredictable in all its possible consequences for any rejoicing over the immediate consequences of its employment.\u201d<\/p>\n Some critics of the bombings would soon begin to frame their concerns in explicitly moral terms, posing the question: Who had we become? Historian Lewis Mumford, for example,\u00a0argued<\/a>\u00a0that the attacks represented the culmination of a society unmoored from any ethical foundations and nothing short of \u201cthe visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased to worship life and obey the laws of life.\u201d\u00a0Religious leaders<\/a>\u00a0voiced similar concern.\u00a0The Christian Century<\/em>\u00a0magazine typically\u00a0condemned<\/a>\u00a0the bombings as \u201ca crime against God and humanity which strikes at the very basis of moral existence.\u201d<\/p>\n As the apocalyptic imagination took hold, others turned to a more self-interested but no less urgent question: what will happen to us? Newspapers across the country began\u00a0running stories<\/a>\u00a0on what a Hiroshima-sized bomb would do to their downtowns. Yet\u00a0Philip Morrison<\/a>, one of the few scientists to\u00a0witness<\/a>\u00a0both the initial Trinity Test of the atomic bomb and Hiroshima after the bombing, warned that even such terrifying projections underestimated the danger.<\/p>\n Deaths in the hundreds of thousands were,\u00a0he insisted<\/a>, far too optimistic. \u201cThe bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or twos. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands.\u201d And given the effect of radiation, those who made \u201cremarkable escapes,\u201d the \u201clucky\u201d ones,\u00a0would die<\/a>\u00a0all the same. Imagining a prospective strike on New York City, he wrote of the survivors who \u201cdied in the hospitals of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and Saint Louis in the three weeks following the bombing. They died of unstoppable internal hemorrhages\u2026 of slow oozing of the blood into the flesh.\u201d Ultimately, he concluded, \u201cIf the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together\u2026 there is only one sure future. The cities of men on earth will perish.\u201d<\/p>\n One World or None<\/strong><\/p>\n Morrison wrote that account as part of a broader effort, led by former Manhattan Project scientists who had helped create the bomb, to alert the public to the newfound danger they themselves had helped unleash. That campaign culminated in the January 1946 book\u00a0One World or None<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(and a\u00a0short film<\/a>). The scientists had largely come to believe that, if the public had their consciousness raised about the implications of the bomb, a task for which they felt uniquely responsible and equipped, then public opinion might shift in ways that could make policies capable of averting catastrophe politically possible.<\/p>\n Scientists like Niels Bohr began\u00a0calling on<\/a>\u00a0their colleagues to face \u201cthe great task lying ahead,\u201d while urging them to be \u201cprepared to assist in any way\u2026 in bringing about an outcome of the present crisis of humanity worthy of the ideals for which science through the ages has stood.\u201d Accepting such newfound social responsibility felt unavoidable, even if so many of those scientists wished to simply return to their prewar pursuits in the insulated university laboratories they once inhabited.<\/p>\n As physicist\u00a0Joseph Rotblat<\/a>\u00a0observed, among the many forms of collateral damage inflicted by the bomb was the destruction of \u201cthe ivory towers<\/a>\u00a0in which scientists had been sheltering.\u201d In the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that rupture propelled them into public life on an unprecedented scale. The once-firm boundary between science and politics began to blur as formerly quiet and aloof researchers spoke to the press, delivered public lectures, published widely circulated articles, and lobbied members of Congress in an effort to secure some control over atomic energy.<\/p>\n Among them was\u00a0J. Robert Oppenheimer<\/a>, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the bomb was created, who\u00a0warned that<\/a>, \u201cif atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world\u2026 then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima,\u201d a statement that left some officials perplexed. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, who had known Oppenheimer as both the director of Los Alamos and someone who had\u00a0directly sanctioned<\/a>\u00a0the bombings,\u00a0recalled<\/a>\u00a0that \u201che seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent,\u201d adding, \u201cthe guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet the scientists pressed ahead in their frantic effort to avert future catastrophe by preventing a nuclear arms race. They insisted that there was no doubt the Soviet Union and other powers would acquire the weapon, that any hope of a prolonged atomic monopoly was delusional, and that espionage was incidental to such a reality, since the\u00a0fundamental scientific principles<\/a>\u00a0needed to build an atomic bomb had been established by 1940. And with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the secret that a functioning bomb was possible was obviously out.<\/p>\n They argued that there would be no effective defense against a devastating atomic attack and that the U.S., as a highly urbanized society, was uniquely vulnerable to such \u201ccity killer\u201d weapons. With vast, exposed coastlines, they warned that such a bomb, not yet capable of being delivered by a missile, could simply be smuggled into one of the nation\u2019s ports and lie dormant there for years. For the scientists, the implications were unmistakable. The age of national sovereignty had ended. The world had become too dangerous for national chauvinism, which, if humanity were to survive, had to give way to a new architecture of international cooperation.<\/p>\n Teaching Us to Love the Bomb<\/strong><\/p>\n Such activism had its intended effects. Many Americans became more fearful and wanted arms control. By late 1945,\u00a0a majority<\/a>\u00a0of the public consistently supported some form of international control over such weaponry and the abolition of the manufacturing of them. And for a brief moment, such a possibility seemed within reach. The\u00a0first resolution<\/a>\u00a0passed by the new United Nations in January 1946 called for exactly that. The publication of John Hersey\u2019s\u00a0Hiroshima<\/em><\/a>\u00a0first as a full issue of the\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>and then as a book, with its intense portrayal of life and death in that Japanese city, further shifted public sentiment toward abolition.<\/p>\n Yet as such\u00a0hopes crystallized<\/a>\u00a0at the United Nations, the two global superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were already preparing for a future nuclear war. Washington continued to\u00a0expand its stockpile<\/a>\u00a0of atomic weaponry, while Moscow accelerated its work creating such weaponry,\u00a0detonating<\/a>\u00a0its initial atomic test four years after the world first met that terrifying new weapon. That Soviet test, followed by the\u00a0Korean War<\/a>, helped extinguish the early promise of an international response to such weaponry, a collapse aided by deliberate efforts in Washington to ensure that the United States grew its atomic arsenal.<\/p>\n In that effort, former Secretary of War\u00a0Henry Stimson<\/a>\u00a0was coaxed out of retirement by President Truman\u2019s advisers who urged him to write one final, \u201cdefinitive\u201d account defending the bombings to neutralize growing opposition. As Harvard president and government-aligned scientist\u00a0James Conant<\/a>\u00a0explained to Stimson, officials in Washington feared that they were losing the ideological battle. They were particularly concerned that mounting anti-nuclear sentiment would\u00a0prove persuasive<\/a>\u00a0\u201camong the type of person that goes into teaching,\u201d shaping a generation less inclined to regard their decision as morally legitimate.<\/p>\n Stimson\u2019s article,\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/em>\u00a0in February 1947, helped cement the\u00a0official narrative<\/a>: that the bomb was a last resort rooted in military necessity that saved half a million American lives and required neither regret nor moral examination. In that way, the opportunity to ban the bomb before the arms race took off was squandered not because the public failed to recognize the threat, but because the government refused to\u00a0heed the will<\/a>\u00a0of its people. Instead, it sought to secure power through nuclear weapons, driven by a paranoid fear of Moscow that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. What followed were decades of preemptive escalation, the continued spread of such weaponry globally, and, at its height, a global arsenal of\u00a0more than 60,000<\/a>\u00a0nuclear warheads by 1985.<\/p>\n Forty years later, in a world where nine countries \u2014 the U.S., Russia, China, France, Great Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea \u2014\u00a0already have nuclear weapons<\/a>\u00a0(more than 12,000 of them), there can be little doubt that, as things are now going, there will be both more countries and more weapons to come.<\/p>\n Such a global arms race must, however, be ended before it ends the human race. The question is no longer what is politically possible, but what is virtually guaranteed if we refuse to pursue the \u201cimpossible.\u201d Nuclear weapons are human creations and what is made by us can be dismantled by us. Whether that happens in time is, of course, the question that now should confront everyone, everywhere, and one that history, if there is anyone around to write or to read it, will not excuse us for failing to answer.<\/p>\n\n