As long as there are countries, there will be borders, and as long as there are borders, there will be disputes and wars over those borders. And as long as there are nations wanting to push their borders and their influence and control beyond their legitimate jurisdictions, warlike situations will arise, and wars will break out.
It is therefore only natural that armaments and armies should become part of the life and the rubric of imperilled nation-states in order to safeguard their borders and the identity of their people. And it is no surprise that aggressive nation-states arm themselves to further their belligerent intentions.
But how is one to justify the raising, testing and deploying of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, weapon-carriers, and systems which cannot but, by their very nature, spill over onto other lands and populations, totally uninvolved in the dispute or tension? Under what authority, political or moral, or under what reasoning, logical or ideological, can a country or an entity use such weapons, which do not and cannot know the limits of deterrence and will devastate swathes of humanity unconnected with the original impulse to secure deterrence? Nuclear weaponisation for enhancing security is a fallacy, for one nation trying to secure it will only embolden its opposite number to do the same, making the exercise an absurd game ad infinitum.
Can it be said that this is a collateral risk that cannot be helped? How is one to justify the making of death machines that cannot but, by the spread of visible plumes and invisible energies, put humanity itself at great, devastating risk?
These questions posed by hopeless commonsense to careless intelligence, now made even more careless by getting to be artificial and creating a new era, after BCE and CE as BAI and AAI, arise now for a compelling reason. Eighty yesterdays — August 9 — ago, an atom bomb named Fat Man was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki by a US aircraft. The bomb killed some 39,214 civilians instantly, in one flash of mass decimation.
Fat Man.
One of the two pilots in the cockpit of the bomber, Charles Sweeney, after dropping off the bomb, is believed to have said to his co-pilot, “What have we done?”
Three days earlier — on August 6, 1945 — another atom bomb, an enriched uranium ‘gun-type fission weapon’ named Little Boy, had been dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It killed 64,500 instantly.
Little Boy.
This name was chosen because the design of this machine of death was shorter.
In this eightieth year of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we cannot but recall Oppenheimer invoking the Bhagavad Gita’s mrityusarvaharshchaham (10.34), meaning “I am the
all-devouring death”. That is in the loftiest imaginable Sanskrit spoken by the Gitacharya in the sizzle of mass deaths. But a searingly honest and scorchingly spontaneous response to the first flare, the July 16 Trinity test, is the self-chastising outburst of another physicist at the site, Kenneth Bainbridge, who described himself and his kind with the words: “We are sons of bi***es now…”
Fat Man, Little Boy…
Sons of…
Eighty years on, we may reflect on the Trinity test and the two bombs that fell over Japan with history’s eyes of self-mortification. But we cannot do so with that alone, for in the intervening eight decades, though no bombs have been dropped on any human population, nine nation-states with nuclear prowess have, in the name of deterrence but with the play of many kinds of hubris, made that fire, furiously. Back in 1945, only the United States of America held nuclear weapons with aircraft that could deliver them — no more than a small hangar-ful. But today, these nine states are, in order of nuclear weapons in their stocks: Russia (4,309), the US (3,700), China (600), France (290), Great Britain (228), India (180), Pakistan (170), Israel (90), North Korea (50), amounting to a total of 12,331. Where a dozen would do to turn our planet into vapour, we have a thousand dozen. Who said nuclear policy believes in moderation? It is quite a whole hogger.
Let no one tell us that the Earth has been and is safe, earthlings need not worry at all, fears of a nuclear blaze are a nightmare meant merely to scare for ‘Look, has a single bomb been dropped anywhere in this wide world since Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Not one. Not one tiny one with even a negligible nuclear yield.’
That is so but let us note that since 1945 till now, while no nuclear bombs have been directed at human habitations and delivered on human heads, there have been not a hundred, not five hundred, not a thousand, but over 2,121 tests using 2,476 nuclear devices of which over 500 were in the atmosphere and over 1,300 underground. All have been the real thing going off, not simulations. Poisoning, pulverising, striking our planet-home’s air and its innards with partial paralysis from their nuclear yields, these tests have polluted the atmosphere, hurt the Earth, convulsed the seas. And it is because they have done so that the world has seen arms controls and test bans, partial as well as with longer impact. So, to say that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world has not experienced nuclear harm is delusional.
There is one important nuclear truth that is overlooked. Eighty years ago, the US could bomb Japan without any fear of nuclear retaliation. Today the scene is different. One nuclear device going off will, by almost inevitable reaction, trigger a nuclear reaction by or on behalf of the affected nation. Nuclear weaponisation is inherently gregarious. And it is that oxymoron or oxymorons: it is innately homicidal and inherently suicidal. It decimates and self-annihilates in an Advaitically fluxed pralaya.
On June 22 this year, for its ally, Israel, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, locked in battle with Iran, the US bombed with non-nuclear devices many nuclear sites in Iran, and the US president, Donald Trump, said the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities. This was done by air, to stop Iran from turning into a nuclear weapons state.
President Trump has told the world it is so peeved by the statements of the former Russian president and deputy-president of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, that it has sent two nuclear submarines to “be positioned in the appropriate regions” in response. Medvedev has replied to that in kind.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has more than once spoken of the nuclear option being there for him to use, against Ukraine.
So… this 80th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not about commemorating a crime against humanity but chastising the criminality of continuing nuclear mindsets being so blinded by geopolitical egoisms.
We have a need to mourn 1945 but more, we have to heighten alertness for 1945 is right upon us, this 2025. We are all in potential Hiroshimas and Nagasakis. I said earlier in this column and will repeat that it is natural and right for nations to be prepared to defend themselves against aggression and, now, against the ogre of terrorism. But are we going to let this defence preparedness stay within its proportions or turn it into nuclear manoeuvres that can spiral out of control and annihilate humanity? How strong is the ‘No First Use’ policy today? Trump, Putin, Netanyahu are not superhuman. They are like any other human being, fallible. The secrecy surrounding the internal processes in North Korea makes the nuclear perils growing there even more dangerous. The access of non-State players to nuclear decision-making in Pakistan is anyone’s guess.
Do we know that nuclear terror or error, or the same from the other factories of mass destruction around us, could so work as to leave no one
to even remember to say: What have we done?
