The Triad Is Not the Trinity - TomDispatch.com

The Triad Is Not the Trinity - TomDispatch.com William Astore, Nuclear Armageddon Is Us June 6, 2024 It was truly another world. I'm thinking of my childhood years when to "duck and cover" under our school desks, imagining that those modest structures might somehow protect us from an atomic blast, was a normal part of life. And when you walked the streets of New York then, you couldn't miss the yellow signs for "fallout shelters" or, if you picked up a magazine, disputes over backyard nuclear shelters. (Yes, we were then living in a bunker culture.) And in those years, of course, the U.S. and the Soviet Union practically had it out in a nuclear fashion in the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was at college when, on October 22, 1962, President Kennedy came on the air to tell us that Soviet missile sites were being prepared on the island of Cuba with "a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere," and I genuinely feared I might be blown away. Those were the years when I wasn't faintly atypical in imagining that I might someday become burnt toast. As I wrote once upon a time: "No one could mistake the looming threat: global nuclear war. Few of us listeners had seen the highly classified 1960 SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) in which the U.S. military had made its preparations for a massive first strike of 3,200 nuclear weapons against the communist world. It was supposed to take out at least 130 cities, with estimated casualties approaching 300 million, but, even without access to that SIOP, we -- I -- knew well enough what might be coming. After all, I had seen versions of it, perfectly unclassified, in the movies, even if the power to destroy on a planetary scale was transposed to alien worlds, as in that 1955 science fiction blockbuster This Island Earth, or imputed to strange alien rays, or rampaging radioactive monsters." Later in life, while working in publishing, I put out a book by Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima blast, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. I then visited that city (with the Japanese editor of the book) and viewed, in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the scorched lunch box of an atomized child, among other unforgettable horrors. So many years later, I find it strange that you can wander our world without, when it comes to nuclear weapons, even imagining ducking, no less covering. It matters little that such weaponry has spread beyond the U.S. and Russia to seven other countries or that, as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore makes painfully clear today, the U.S. is once again expanding and (what a horrifying term) "modernizing" its nuclear arsenal in an unnerving fashion. Only the other day, while walking in my New York neighborhood, thinking about this all-too-strange nuclear world of ours, I wandered (as I sometimes do) past a more than life-sized statue of a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist monk, Shinran Shonin, in front of a local Buddhist church. I suddenly noticed a plaque there that said, in part: "The statue originally stood in Hiroshima, at a site 2.5 kilometers northwest from the center of the first atomic bomb attack. Having survived the full force of the bomb the statue was brought to New York in September of 1955 to be a testimonial to the atomic bomb devastation and a symbol of lasting hope for world peace." World peace? If only. And with the devastation that those two atomic bombs brought to Japan in 1945 and knowing that today even the sort of "tactical" or battlefield nuclear weapons Vladimir Putin is now threatening to use in Ukraine can be far more powerful, let Astore take you deep into the genuinely human madness of our nuclear world. Tom