Cleaning Out the Basement of My Life - TomDispatch.com

Cleaning Out the Basement of My Life - TomDispatch.com Frida Berrigan, Against Forgetting February 4, 2024 Imagine this: once there were just two of them produced by a single country, the United States. I'm thinking, of course, of the atomic bombs dropped with such devastating effect on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. Now, there are roughly 13,000 such weapons in our world held by nine countries, two of which, Russia and Israel, are presently at war. Last year, a key Russian official even briefly threatened to use what's now called a "tactical" nuclear weapon (though it would undoubtedly have been more powerful than either of those 1945 bombs) should the war in Ukraine go badly. Given the seemingly unstoppable urge of us humans to make war on each other, it seems genuinely miraculous that, despite the endless production and spread of such weaponry and the fact that neighboring enemy countries, specifically India and Pakistan, possess them, no nuclear weapon has been used since August 1945. Still, the threats continue. Only recently, the leader of the latest nuclear-armed nation, North Korea, implicitly threatened to obliterate his southern neighbor, while almost all the nuclear powers on the planet, including the U.S., continue to improve (if such a word can even be used) their nuclear capabilities. No wonder the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently decided to keep what it calls its "doomsday clock" at 90 seconds (yes, 90 seconds!) to midnight. But here's the strange thing. Although the United States possesses more than 5,000 nuclear weapons, fear of nuclear war has largely vanished from this country. When I was a kid in the early 1950s and Russia was quickly developing its own nuclear arsenal but couldn't yet deliver such weaponry in any effective fashion to this country, I can still remember "ducking and covering" under my school desk like Bert the Turtle to practice protecting myself from a nuclear attack on New York City. Today, no one ducks and covers or even seems to think much about nuclear war. Oh, wait, let me amend that statement slightly. TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan, whose parents were famed anti-nuclear activists, hasn't managed like so many of us to banish from her brain the phenomenon that could someday devastate this planet in an almost unimaginable fashion. If only more people in this strange world of ours still had nuclear weapons on their minds. Tom