Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy by Francis J Gavin

Author:Francis J Gavin [Gavin, Francis J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815737919
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

EIGHT

Deterring while Disarming

It is easy to forget we live in a world in which nine states possess thousands of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons of unimaginable destructive capacity.1 A tour of the Hiroshima Peace museum, however, dramatically reminds visitors of the potential horrors.

Like many Japanese cities, Hiroshima is in a valley surrounded by mountains, the population concentrated in a dense and easily targeted urban setting. On August 6, 1945, the military was busy building defenses in the center of town; despite the protests of teachers and families, many children were drafted into this work and were working outdoors near where the atomic bomb detonated. As many as 20,000 slave laborers from Korea were also killed, as well as more than 90 percent of the city’s medical personnel. All death during war is horrible, but the death unleashed by the bomb that day was especially horrific. The most fortunate were immediately incinerated by the tremendous impact of the blast. Others, still alive but with their skin melting off, lived for excruciating hours or days in inconceivable pain. Shards of glass and metal from shattered buildings penetrated scores of victims. Within minutes of the blast, a yellow rain began to fall, bringing intense radiation sickness over the next weeks that killed thousands who had survived the blast, fire, and collapsing infrastructure. Many lucky enough to survive the horrors of that day and the weeks that followed had their lives cut short by an array of cancers. While the final death toll is disputed, at least 80,000 people and perhaps as many as 140,000 died as a consequence of one bomb detonation. Three days later the city of Nagasaki suffered the same fate, with as many as 80,000 dead within two months of the bombing.

In retrospect, perhaps the most frightening aspect of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings is how small these detonations were compared with the capabilities that were to come. As the United States and the Soviet Union both developed and tested the so-called super or thermonuclear weapon in the 1950s, bomb yields increased to orders of magnitude beyond those used in August 1945. The infamous fifty-megaton Tsar Bomba, tested by the Soviet Union on October 30, 1961, had a destructive capability equal to 3,800 Hiroshima-style atomic bombs and would have killed at least 7 million people had it been dropped over New York City. Both sides developed plans to use these weapons during war, massively and early, that could have killed tens if not hundreds of millions of civilians and caused catastrophic damage to the earth’s environment. In that same year of 1961, American planners estimated that implementing their nuclear war plan, called the SIOP-62, would have in a matter of hours killed approximately 108 million people in the Soviet Union, well over half of the population, as well as 104 million Chinese and 2.6 million Poles.2 In all likelihood, fatalities would have vastly exceeded those figures, considering the number who would perish of radiation poisoning, to say nothing of the

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