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It is impossible to describe the dawn of the atomic age without immediately identifying its specific targets. The two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed approximately 110,000 or 210,000 people [[link removed]], with tens of thousands more injured. Writing at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Professor Shiho Nakazawa compares [[link removed]] J. Robert Oppenheimer to his peers, Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller. Before the bomb was dropped or even tested, Bohr pushed Oppenheimer to urge international control of atomic energy, an action he did not take. “Nevertheless,” writes Nakazawa, “I can’t stop thinking that the biggest weak point of Oppenheimer’s plan for the international control of the atomic energy may be at this singular time in history. I think that after using the devastating weapons, without revealing the nature of them in advance, it was very difficult to get cooperation from other nations, especially the USSR.” That the atomic bomb was born and used in secrecy confounds attempts to prevent a Cold War arms race. Oppenheimer could have pushed for openness before the bomb’s use by passing along the Szilard-drafted “ Franck Report [[link removed]],” which called for international cooperation, and offered a demonstration against an uninhabited target as an alternative to bombing a city. Oppenheimer shared only the latter. It would be after the war, and in the fight against the much more potent hydrogen bomb, that Oppenheimer would attempt to stop an arms race.

Any fort in a storm

When war displaces people, they still end up somewhere, and for many of the residents of Afrin, the arrival of Turkey and Turkish-backed forces led them to inhabit camps for internally displaced people inside Syria’s Shaba canton, where fertile soil and flowing water are threatened by unexploded bombs and the remnants of chemical weapons.

“Shahba and the wider Aleppo area have been the most damaged by the ongoing war, as it was the worst-hit during the clashes between warring parties [[link removed]]. Subjected to years of bombing that weakened critical infrastructure making the living situation unbearable, the earthquake in February 2023 [[link removed]] made it even worse,” writes Suaad Omar at Unicorn Riot [[link removed]]. Omar spent time in Shahba as a humanitarian worker working for the Kurdish Red Crescent.

She continues, “Residents report that they have no other viable options but to stay in Shabha despite knowing it’s dangerous.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Cluster bluster

Brazil is one of a handful of nations that still produce cluster munitions. While the weapons are widely banned, some notable signatories are missing, like the United States, Russia, and Ukraine. The weapons have seen widespread use in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the United States has agreed to send more cluster munitions to Ukraine, as a way to mitigate an artillery shortfall. The US decision was met with vocal disapproval from otherwise-staunch allies like Canada, as well as several partners in Europe.

“Lula’s voice is notably absent from the global outcry over this move. But denouncing the transfer and use of cluster munitions might have put the spotlight on Brazil’s own role in producing [[link removed]] and transferring these weapons, which kill and injure civilians when they are used and leave unexploded submunitions that pose a danger long after wars end,” write Mart Wareham, Maria Laura Canineu, and Renata Escudero of Human Rights Watch [[link removed]].

Their call was also published in Brazil’s O Globo newspaper [[link removed]]. While there’s a business case to be made for Brazilian arms manufacturers continuing to produce the weapons, should Lula heed the call to condemn the weapons and support a bill banning the production, use, and trade of cluster munitions, it would add material weight to his foreign policy convictions.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Pink and Greenwashing: Part II

Only part of a nation ever goes to war. Even the total wars that typified the first half of the 20th century — conflicts seen as existential for all participants and involving a wholesale mobilization of people and industry — only pulled in a fraction of the population as combatants. For multiethnic countries, especially ones where legal regimes create imbalance and racialized societies, the way that burden falls unevenly can lead to large disparities in how the component populations within the nation feel about war.

In “ Whose War is it Anyway? Explaining the Black-White Gap in Support for the Use of Force Abroad [[link removed]],” authors Naima Green-Riley and Andrew Leber document a “race gap” in enthusiasm for US wars between Black and white Americans. The effect of this gap is persistent and greater than can be explained by other factors, like family in the military or political alienation.

“Whereas long-standing observations of a ‘gender gap’ in support for war have given rise to an extensive research program — and amid a growing acceptance of the role of mass attitudes in shaping foreign policy decision making — examinations of race and ethnicity in IR have been largely confined to the study of ethnic conflict and civil war,” write the authors. “This is striking. The results from decades of social science research on the use of force abroad show significantly different levels of support for war between Black and White respondents in the United States, with Black respondents expressing much less enthusiasm for US military extroversion. Across myriad conflicts, time periods, and geographical regions in the United States, the ‘race gap’ in support for the use of force has surfaced repeatedly. Although Black support for war has fluctuated across conflicts, the gap persists.”

Part of this, the authors find, is the legacy of past military organization in the United States, where the military was officially segregated through World War II and in parts into the Korean War.

But it also, the authors argue, comes from “linked fate,” or “an individual-level concern for the improvement of social and economic conditions for all members of the race.” The authors describe “linked fate” as a key source of Black Americans’ relatively unified political and policy views, which isn’t always concerned with the entire nation.

The attitudes of Black Americans from the Korean War through the Vietnam and Iraq wars are good examples of linked fate because each of these wars was seen as particularly risky for Black Americans, and in turn, less worth that sacrifice.

According to the authors, “Imbalanced casualty numbers at the beginning of the Vietnam War exacerbated linked fate concerns about casualties among Black Americans, but these sociotropic concerns also existed before Vietnam, even in contexts where Black and White casualties were more evenly distributed. For instance, the rates of war deaths between Black and White soldiers were comparable both before and after desegregation of US forces in the Korean War. Nevertheless, because of troop segregation at the beginning of that war, the perception of Black American activists at the time was that Black soldiers faced greater risk of death in Korea due to White officers’ racism.” In other words, the “race gap” has serious implications for how Americans of color view military service and the sacrifice associated with serving in the armed forces, and foreign policy in general.

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Rebecca Rosman reported [[link removed]] on the campaign to try and get the United Kingdom to extend the same welcome to Sudanese refugees that the country has extended to Ukrainians fleeing war. “My son, my flesh and blood, he is there amongst the war,” 63-year-old Naglaa Sadik Ahmed Mustaf told Rosman. Ahmed Mustaf lives in London, but her son is stuck in Sudan’s capital of Khartoum, which has become a battleground in an ongoing civil war between parts of the Sudanese military. While the United Kingdom has a path for safe and legal admission of refugees from Ukraine, it has yet to extend those legal pathways to refugees from Sudan.

Anna Romandash interviewed [[link removed]] Olha Kukharuk, a psychiatrist in Ukraine who has worked with war-affected people since 2015, during the Donbas war. Then, the war hit only a portion of the country, and vast swaths of the land and people could avoid engaging with it directly. Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, and with its ongoing missile and drone attacks against interior targets, the war is inescapable. “If you’re Ukrainian, you have war experience regardless of where you are,” Olha explained to Romandash. “Even if you’re away, you may have someone on the frontline or under occupation, so you worry for them.”

Gisele Regatão and Vera Haller dove [[link removed]] into the discovery of fossil corals off the coast of the Galapagos. The corals, as already dead, contain a record of past climatic conditions of the ocean, and as the waters change with the changing climate, can form a baseline for future study. “You can find what the chemistry of the ocean around Galapagos was like 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 years ago, just by looking at coral fossils,” scientist Michelle Taylor told The World. “Then, we can look at all the live stuff we collected and we can start seeing just how different the environment is for these corals now than it was then.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL-PLAYED

Barbieland is an original signatory [[link removed]] of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

“Eternal vigilance is the price we must pay to secure our freedoms,” said Mickey, after warning of the threat of chemical warfare [[link removed]]. “Gawrsh,” replied Goofy.

Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. If lobbing thermonuclear warheads, close is irrelevant: the weapon will hit the target, thanks to its blast radius [[link removed]].

The Pentagon needs to steppe up [[link removed]] its history.

The strain in grain [[link removed]] will cause pain for those who remain.

Back to the one-state solution [[link removed]].

Lick the bomb [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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