Nuclear Jamboree: Stories about the Bomb
A former colleague of mine was stationed on a nuclear submarine during the attacks in New York on September 11, 2001. I’ll never forget when he told me that his submarine had misinterpreted orders and nearly launched nuclear missiles from the bottom of the sea. At the last minute, the orders were corrected and the missiles were powered down. Nuclear war had been narrowly averted.
Needless to say, I didn’t sleep that night.
The world changed forever with the deployment of the first atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. A new weapon with awesome destructive power had been unleashed. Yet the U.S. military considered nuclear weapons just another weapon. Dwight Eisenhower compared A-bombs to ‘bullets’ that could be shot like any other ordnance, wielded strategically to further military objectives.
This complacent attitude changed with the detonation of the first thermonuclear bomb. Popularly called a hydrogen bomb, the American H-bomb test obliterated a Pacific island. A Soviet test some nine months later gouged a hole in the Kazakh desert, singeing birds along the way and raining radioactive fallout for 6,000 square miles. These 15 megaton weapons were several hundreds of times more powerful than the A-bomb.
The standard nuclear warhead today is less than 500 kilotons and no new weapons have been developed in the U.S. since 1992. However, some 30,000 remain, down from 68,000 in the 1980s. The detonation of 100 megatons will be enough to create a nuclear winter and destroy all life on earth. We are still in danger.
Large nuclear warheads are incapable of discriminating between civilian and military targets, making them inherently violate of the Geneva conventions and other principles of war law, including proportionality. Nuclear weapons are therefore one of the world’s most primary human rights concerns.
Like it or not, nuclear weapons have captured our imagination — just like this strip from the inimitable Calvin & Hobbes — for over fifty years.
I’ll be reviewing stories about nuclear weapons over the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, check out John Lewis Gaddis’ phenomenal book The Cold War for an excellent survey of nuclear warfare.
Or read manga legend Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s graphic short story Hell on-line for free at the PEN American Journal.
–Deji Olukotun
Photo credits: Spectators, wikipedia; Bill Watterson, Homocidal Psycho Jungle Cat (1994)
