The USA’s unique deadly sin

Our prime minister Bob Menzies became fearful when it appeared that Britain was considering an alternative site to Australia to test its first bomb in 1952. So huge was the status of ownership of the bomb that this pipsqueak nation felt it could share in the glory by being a test site.

Why the USA is responsible for us now sharing our planet with more than 23,000 nuclear weapons

The USSR had its own atomic bomb by 1949 for the following reasons:

• until the USA detonated the first atomic bomb, the world had no idea if such a weapon was a practical possibility. It required an immensely rich nation whose homeland was clear of hostilities to do the experiment;
• if there had been no American project within which the USSR had its own spies, there would have been no Soviet bomb in the foreseeable future as the USSR did not have the resources to run up blind alleys as the USA had;
• if the USSR finally did become the offending nation to introduce a monster to the world in peace time, it would have been pilloried by the UN. That original sin was not possible as the USA had already committed it;
• the paranoid anti-Communist USA’s demonstrated willingness to use the bomb on its enemy’s cities removed any hesitation the equally paranoid Soviets may have felt about building the bomb.

The Cold War seems to have faded away. Now there are new complications

Outside of North Korea, we know that all the members of the nuclear club have checking systems which we hope will work. But, in North Korea it seems that nobody can question the decisions of one man. Then there is nuclear armed Israel which has made it clear that it if it is to go, then it will take the Arab world out with it.

Even so, a first nuclear strike via a missile can be ruled out. All that would be required is that the weapon be detonated in a container within a ship docked in an American or Israeli port; and the Taliban are getting closer to the nuclear arsenal of Pakistan. If they ever get their hands on it, God may call upon them to use it.

Summary

There is a very high probability that without the USA’s image of itself in 1945 as being the world champ, there would not be a single nuclear weapon in the world today.

Footnotes

Kyoto was chosen as a target, but then rejected as one of the politicians had happy memories of honeymooning there. So, the children of Kyoto were not to be cooked, but the children of Hiroshima were because of one man’s happy honeymoon. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen not because they were strategic targets, but because they were two of the few cities left that still had buildings to knock over which would enable before-and-after photos of what the new big gun could do.

Japan wanted to surrender - but not unconditionally. The USA demanded unconditional surrender. After the two nuclear bombs achieved that unconditional surrender, the USA then gave the Japanese basically what they wanted in their conditional surrender. Probably history’s most tragic exercise in point scoring.

The archives reveal that the dominant issue in the mind of the American government prior to using the bomb was not Japan at all. It was Joseph Stalin’s USSR. The American president imagined that rattling the atomic bomb would make the USSR more manageable. All the rattling did was engender in the Soviets the desire to get an atomic bomb of their own.

Horrified scientists such as Niels Bohr and Leo Szilard warned of an unfolding arms race after the world saw pictures of the mushroom cloud. They were dismissed as eccentrics. In 1986 there were about 70,000 nuclear warheads. We are lucky we are still here to talk about it.