Washington’s Cult of the Bomb |
Components of a U.S. B83 thermonuclear weapon. Photograph Source: Chuck Hansen – Public Domain
The first of the bombs used against Japan, the one that flattened Hiroshima, produced a blast equivalent to about 15,000 tons of TNT and killed tens of thousands of innocent people in minutes. Fast-forward to the ‘70s: the United States’ B83 bomb “is by far the most destructive weapon in the US nuclear arsenal,” capable of producing an explosion about 80 times stronger than the one used against Hiroshima. And we have seen nuclear weapons even more fathomlessly destructive: the Soviet Union produced a weapon, called Tsar Bomba, whose “detonation was astronomically powerful—over 1,570 times more powerful, in fact, than the combined two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Today’s nuclear bombs do not operate the way that the “fat man” bombs of WW2 did, but use bombs like those as triggering devices to set off much larger explosions. It’s important for us to understand that a nuclear exchange today could well end human civilization. It could even end human life altogether. Given the power of today’s nuclear weapons and the capacity to compound that power using modern delivery systems, we are in totally uncharted territory. Anyone who says that the destruction could be controlled or hemmed in is lying: as we will discuss, even much smaller and less sophisticated weapons consistently produced explosions that are far larger than expected. The nuclear warheads of our time belong in a different category conceptually from those the U.S. government used on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Today’s bombs are qualitatively different in their destructive power.
Among the most remarkable, if little-known, defining features of American nuclear testing has been the consistent inability of supposed experts to accurately predict the power or consequences, in either the short or long term, of the explosions. In the short term, the blasts were consistently larger and more damaging than expected, with larger radiuses, more fallout, and higher TNT equivalents. In the long term, so-called experts have consistently (and I think, given the surrounding facts, quite intentionally) under-stated and under-counted the health consequences associated with the nuclear fallout associated with the explosions. From where I sit, it seems nuclear weapons have now embodied a quasi-religious or cultic death fetish, and I think this has seeped into politics and ideology in a number of ways. This stands to reason. With God long dead, with politics uglier and more nihilistic by the day, billionaires more delusional by the second, it is easy to understand the sadistic tendency to crank your neck and watch the crash. For a person like Trump – and to be sure, many American presidents fall into the same category; indeed an American president is the only one to have committed those unthinkable atrocities – the only thing left is abstract power, pure, destructive power, loosed from any rational thought or humane impulse. I think this kind of death-drive is a very real and tangible feature of our culture in America today.
Everyone is scared of Trump with the nuclear button, as they well should be, but few among our elite chattering classes care to tell you the whole truth. All of Washington, across both parties, has been thoroughly invested in aestheticizing and fetishizing nuclear weapons for decades. It has been an active and explicit goal of the U.S. government to help prosecute and manage this campaign. Billions of dollars have gone to these efforts, through cultural and museum practices, through curatorial choices and “educational” materials for children on just how darn cool the Manhattan Project was. I understand that you’re not supposed to discuss this in the West. Look, we can enjoy Christopher Nolan movies, and we can assume “our leaders” mean well, but we are all actively fetishizing nuclear weapons, and thus fascinating over the extinction of humanity. I can recall some several years back, a friend of mine among the Pueblo peoples sent me a presser from the Los Alamos Study........