[In the pandemic year 2020, 76 years after two American atomic
bombs left the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in ashes, the
world’s nuclear powers increased spending on nuclear weapons by $1.4
billion more than they had put out the previous year.]
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AN ALL-AMERICAN HORROR STORY: THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY OF NUCLEAR
FOLLIES — AND THAT'S JUST WHERE TO BEGIN  
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Tom Engelhardt
July 1, 2021
Tomdispatch [[link removed]]

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_ In the pandemic year 2020, 76 years after two American atomic bombs
left the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in ashes, the world’s
nuclear powers increased spending on nuclear weapons by $1.4 billion
more than they had put out the previous year. _

, TomDispatch

 

Yes, once upon a time I regularly absorbed science fiction and
imagined futures of wonder, but mainly of horror.  What else could
you think, if you read H.G. Wells’s _War of the Worlds_ under the
covers by flashlight while your parents thought you were asleep?  Of
course, that novel was a futuristic fantasy, involving as it did
Martians arriving in London to take out humanity. Sixty-odd years
after secretly reading that book and wondering about the future that
would someday be mine, I’m living, it seems, in that very future,
however Martian-less it might be.  Still, just in case you hadn’t
noticed, our present moment could easily be imagined as straight out
of a science-fiction novel that, even at my age, I’d prefer not to
read by flashlight in the dark of night. 

I mean, I was barely one when Hiroshima was obliterated by a single
atomic bomb. In the splintering of a moment and the mushroom cloud
that followed, a genuinely apocalyptic power that had once rested only
in the hands of the gods (and perhaps science-fiction authors) became
an everyday part of our all-too-human world.  From that day on, it
was possible to imagine that we — not the Martians or the gods —
could end it all. It became possible to imagine that we ourselves were
the apocalypse. And give us credit. If we haven’t actually done so
yet, neither have we done a bad job when it comes to preparing the way
for just such a conclusion to human history. 

Let’s put this in perspective. In the pandemic year 2020, 76 years
after two American atomic bombs left the cities of Hiroshima
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and Nagasaki
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the world’s nuclear powers actually increased spending
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on nuclear weapons by $1.4 billion more than they had put out the
previous year.  And that increase was only a small percentage of the
ongoing investment of those nine — yes, nine — countries in their
growing nuclear arsenals. Worse yet, if you happen to be an American,
more than half of the total 2020 “investment” in weaponry
appropriate for world-ending scenarios, $37.4 billion to be exact, was
plunked down by our own country. (A staggering $13.3 billion
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was given to weapons maker Northrop Grumman alone to begin the
development of a new intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, the
one thing our thoroughly troubled world obviously needs.) In all,
those nine nuclear powers spent an estimated $137,000
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a minute in 2020 to “improve” their arsenals — the ones that, if
ever used, could end history as we know it. 

IN THE DUST OF THE HISTORY OF DEATH

Imagine for a second if all that money had instead been devoted to
creating and disseminating vaccines for most of the world’s
population, which has yet to
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receive such shots and so be rescued from the ravages of Covid-19,
itself a death-dealing [[link removed]], sci-fi-style
nightmare of the first order. But how could I even think such a thing
when, in the decades since this country dropped that first atomic bomb
on Hiroshima, it’s learned its atomic lessons all too well? 
Otherwise, why would its leaders now be planning to devote at least
$1.7 trillion
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over the next three decades to “modernizing” what’s already the
most modern nuclear arsenal on the planet?

Let me just add that I visited
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Hiroshima once upon a time with a Japanese colleague who had been born
on an island off the coast of atomically destroyed Nagasaki. In 1982,
he took me to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
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which, despite exhibiting a carbonized child’s lunchbox
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and permanently imprinted human shadows
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can obviously offer a visitor only a hint of what it was actually like
to experience the end of the world, thanks to a single bomb. And yet I
found the experience so deeply unsettling that, when I returned home
to New York City, I could barely talk about it.

Admittedly, though nine countries now possess nuclear weapons, most of
them significantly more powerful than the single bomb that turned
Hiroshima into a landscape of rubble, not one has ever been used in
war.  And that should be considered a miracle on a planet where, when
it comes to weapons and war, miracles of any sort tend to be few and
far between.  After all, it’s estimated that, in 2020, this country
alone had more than 5,000
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nuclear weapons, at least 1,300 of them deployed and ready to use —
enough, that is, to destroy several worlds.

Consider it an irony of the first order, then, that U.S. leaders have
spent years focused
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trying to keep the Iranians from making a single nuclear weapon, but
not for a day, not for an hour, not for a second on keeping this
country from producing ever more of them and the delivery systems that
would distribute them anywhere on this planet.  In that light, just
consider, for instance, that, in 2021, the U.S. is preparing to invest
more than $100 billion in producing a totally new ICBM, whose total
cost over its “lifespan” (though perhaps the correct word would be
“deathspan”) is already projected at $264 billion
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— and that’s before the cost overruns even begin. All of this for
a future that… well, your guess is as good as mine.  

Or consider that, only recently, the American and Russian heads of
state, the two countries with by far the biggest nuclear arsenals, met
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in Geneva, Switzerland, and talked for hours, especially about
cyberwar, while spending little appreciable time considering how to
rein in their most devastating weaponry and head the planet toward a
denuclearized future.

And keep in mind that all of this is happening on a planet where
it’s now commonplace scientific knowledge that even a nuclear war
between two regional powers, India and Pakistan, could throw so many
particulates into the atmosphere as to create a nuclear winter
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this planet, one likely to starve to death billions
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of us.  In other words, just one regional nuclear conflict could
leave the chaos and horror of the Covid-19 pandemic in the
unimpressive dust of the history of death.

A SLOW-MOTION HIROSHIMA?

And yet, here’s perhaps the strangest thing of all: we’re still
convinced that, since the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no
matter how much world-ending weaponry has been stockpiled by China,
France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United
Kingdom, and the United States, none has been used.  Unfortunately,
that should increasingly be seen as a Martian-less fantasy of the
first order. 

While it’s seldom thought of that way, climate change should really
be reimagined as the equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear holocaust.
Hiroshima took place in literally seconds, a single blinding flash of
heat. Global warming will prove to be a matter of years, decades, even
centuries of heat.

That all-too-apocalyptic phenomenon was set off in the nineteenth
century via the coal-burning that accompanied the industrial
revolution, first in Great Britain and then elsewhere across the
planet.  It’s only continued over all these years thanks to the
burning, above all, of fossil fuels — oil and natural gas — and
the release of carbon (and methane) into the atmosphere. In the case
of climate change, there are no ICBMs, no nuclear-missile-armed
submarines [[link removed]],
no nuclear bombers. Instead, there are oil and natural gas companies,
whose CEOs, regularly abetted by governments, have proven all too
ready to destroy this planet for record profits. They’ve been
perfectly willing to burn fossil fuels in a criminal fashion
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until, quite literally, the end of time. Worse yet, they generally
knew
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just what kind of harm they were causing long before most of the rest
of us and, in response, actively supported
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climate denialism.

No, there was no mushroom cloud, but rather a “cloud” of
greenhouse gases forming over endless years beyond human vision. 
Still, let’s face it, on this planet of ours, not in 2031 or 2051 or
2101 but right at this very moment, we’re beginning to experience
the equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear war.

In a sense, we’re already living through a modern slo-mo version of
Hiroshima, no matter where we are or where we’ve traveled.  At this
moment, with an increasingly fierce megadrought gripping the West and
Southwest, the likes of which hasn’t been experienced in at least
1,200 years
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among the top candidates for an American Hiroshima would be Phoenix
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(118 degrees), Las Vegas
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(114 degrees), the aptly named Death Valley (128 degrees), Palm
Springs
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(123 degrees), and Salt Lake City
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(107), all record temperatures for this season.  A recent report
suggests
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that temperatures in famed Yellowstone National Park are now as high
or higher than at any time in the past 20,000 years (and possibly in
the last 800,000 years). And temperatures in Oregon and Washington are
already soaring
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in record fashion with more to come, even as the fire season
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across the West arrives earlier and more fiercely each year.  As I
write this, for instance, California’s Big Sur region is ablaze
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in a striking fashion, among growing numbers of western fires.  Under
the circumstances, ironically enough, one of the only reasons some
temperature records might not
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be set is that sun-blocking smoke from those fires might suppress the
heat somewhat.  

You should know that you’re on a different planet when even the most
mainstream of news sources begins to put climate change in the lead in
environmental pieces, as in this recent first sentence of a CNN report
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“The incredible pictures of a depleted Lake Mead, on the
Nevada-Arizona border, illustrate the effects of drought brought on by
climate change.”

You could also imagine our modern Hiroshimas in the Florida Keys
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where inexorably rising sea levels, due in part to the massive melting
of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, are already threatening that
especially low-lying part of that southern state. Or perhaps the Gulf
Coast would qualify, since the heating waters of the Atlantic are now
creating record
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tropical-storm and hurricane seasons that, like the heat and fires in
the West, seem to arrive earlier
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each year.  (One Florida city, Miami, is already contemplating
building
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a massive seawall to protect itself against devastating future storm
surges.)

In this desperately elongated version of nuclear war, everything being
experienced in this country (and in a similar fashion around the
world, from Australia’s brutally historic wildfires
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to a recent heat wave in the Persian Gulf
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where temperatures topped 125 degrees) will only grow ever more
extreme, even if, by some miracle, those nuclear weapons are kept
under wraps.  After all, according to a new NASA study, the planet
has been trapping far more heat
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than imagined in this century so far. In addition, a recently revealed
draft of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report suggests
that our over-heating future will only grow worse in ways that
hadn’t previously been imagined. Tipping points
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may be reached — from the melting of polar ice sheets and Arctic
permafrost (releasing vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere) to
the possible transformation of much of the Amazon rain forest into
savannah — that could affect the lives of our children and
grandchildren disastrously for decades to come. And that would be the
case even if greenhouse-gas releases are brought under control
relatively quickly.  

Once upon a time, who could have imagined that humanity would inherit
the kinds of apocalyptic powers previously left to the gods or that,
when we finally noticed them, we would prove eerily unable to respond?
Even if another nuclear weapon is never used, we stand capable, in
slow-motion fashion, of making significant parts of our world
uninhabitable — or, for that matter, if we were to act soon, keeping
it at least reasonably habitable into the distant future.   

Imagine, just as a modest start, a planet on which every dollar
earmarked for nuclear weapons would be invested in a green set of
solutions to a world growing by the year ever warmer, ever redder,
ever less inhabitable.

Copyright 2021 Tom Engelhardt   Reprinted with permissiom.

_Follow TomDispatch on Twitter
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[[link removed]]. Check out the newest Dispatch
Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands
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final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s
novel Every Body Has a Story
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Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War
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as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
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John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since
World War II
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_Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com
[[link removed]]. He is also a co-founder of the
American Empire Project [[link removed]] and
the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the
Cold War, The End of Victory Culture
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A fellow of the Type Media Center [[link removed]], his
sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War
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