I turn 60 this year. My health is generally good, though I
have aches and pains from a form of arthritis.
I’m not optimistic enough to believe that the
best years of my life are ahead of me, nor so
pessimistic as to assume that the best years
are behind me. But I do know this, however sad
it may be to say: the best years of my country
are behind me.
Indeed, there are all too many signs of America’s decline,
ranging from mass shootings to mass
incarceration to mass hysteria about voter
fraud and “stolen” elections to massive
Pentagon and police budgets. But let me focus
on just one sign of all-American madness that
speaks to me in a particularly explosive
fashion: this country’s embrace of the
“modernization” of its nuclear arsenal at a
price tag of at least $2 trillion over the
next 30 years or so — and that staggering sum
pales in comparison to the price the world
would pay if those “modernized” weapons were
ever used.
Just over 30 years ago in 1992, a younger, still somewhat
naïve version of Bill Astore visited Los
Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New
Mexico and the Trinity test site in Alamogordo
where the first atomic device created at that
lab, a plutonium “gadget,” was detonated in
July 1945. At the time I took that trip, I was
a captain in the U.S. Air Force, co-teaching a
course at the Air Force Academy on — yes,
would you believe it? — the making and use of
the atomic bombs that devastated the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World
War II. At the time of that visit, the Soviet
Union had only recently collapsed,
inaugurating what some believed to be a “new
world order.” No longer would this country
have to focus its energy on waging a costly,
risky cold war against a dangerous
nuclear-armed foe. Instead, we were clearly
headed for an era in which the United States
could both dominate the planet andbecome “a
normal country in normal times.”
I was struck, however, by the anything-but-celebratory
mood at Los Alamos then, though I really
shouldn’t have been surprised. After all,
budget cuts loomed. With the end of the Cold
War, who needed LANL to design new nuclear
weapons for an enemy that no longer existed?
In addition, there was already an effective
START treaty in place with Russia aimed at
reducing strategic nuclear weapons instead of
just limiting their growth.
At the time, it even seemed possible to imagine a gradual
withering away of such great-power arsenals
and the coming of a world liberated from
apocalyptic nightmares. Bipartisan support for
nuclear disarmament would, in fact, persist
into the early 2000s, when then-presidential
candidate Barack Obama joined old Cold War
hawks like former Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn in
calling for nothing less than a
nuclear-weapons-free world.
An Even More Infernal Holocaust
It was, of course, not to be and today we once again find
ourselves on an increasingly apocalyptic
planet. To quote Pink Floyd, the child is
grown and the dream is gone. All too sadly,
Americans have become comfortably numb to the
looming threat of a nuclear Armageddon. And
yet the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist’s
Doomsday Clockcontinues to tick ever closer to
midnight precisely because we persist in
building and deploying ever more nuclear
weapons with no significant thought to either
the cost or the consequences.
Over the coming decades, in fact, the U.S. military plans
to deploy hundreds — yes, hundreds! — of new
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in
silos in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and
elsewhere; a hundred or so nuclear-capable
B-21 stealth bombers; and a brand new fleet of
nuclear-missile-firing submarines, all, of
course, built in the name of necessity,
deterrence, and keeping up with the Russians
and the Chinese. Never mind that this country
already has thousands of nuclear warheads,
enough to comfortably destroy more than one
Earth. Never mind that just a few dozen of
them could tip this world of ours into a
“nuclear winter,” starving to death most
creatures on it, great and small. Nothing to
worry about, of course, when this country must
— it goes without saying — remain the number
one possessor of the newest and shiniest of
nuclear toys.
And so those grim times at Los Alamos when I was a “child”
of 30 have once again become boom times as I
turn 60. The LANL budget is slated to expand
like a mushroom cloud from $3.9 billion in
2021 to $4.1 billion in 2022, $4.9 billion in
2023, and likely to well over $5 billion in
2024. That jump in funding enables “upgrades”
to the plutonium infrastructure at LANL.
Meanwhile, some of America’s top physicists
and engineers toil away there on new designs
for nuclear warheads and bombs meant for one
thing only: the genocidal slaughter of
millions of their fellow human beings. (And
that doesn’t even include all the other life
forms that would be caught in the blast radii
and radiation fallout patterns of those
“gadgets.”)
The very idea of building more and “better” nuclear
weapons should, of course, be anathema to us
all. Once upon a time, I taught courses on the
Holocaust after attending a teaching seminar
at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Now,
the very idea of modernizing our nuclear
arsenal strikes me as the equivalent of
developing upgraded gas chambers and hotter
furnaces for Auschwitz. After all, that’s the
infernal nature of nuclear weapons: they
transform human beings into matter, into ash,
killing indiscriminately and reducing us all
to nothingness.
I still recall talking to an employee of Los Alamos in
1992 who assured me that, in the wake of the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the lab would
undoubtedly have to repurpose itself and find
an entirely new mission. Perhaps, he said,
LANL scientists could turn their expertise
toward consumer goods and so help make America
more competitive vis-à-vis Japan, which, in
those days, was handing this country its lunch
in the world of electronics. (Remember the
Sony Walkman, the Discman, and all those
Japanese-made VCRs, laser disc players, and
the like?)
I nodded and left Los Alamos hopeful, thinking that the
lab could indeed become a life-affirming
force. I couldn’t help imagining then what
this country might achieve if some of its best
scientists and engineers devoted themselves to
improving our lives instead of destroying
them. Today, it’s hard to believe that I was
ever so naïve.
“Success” at Hiroshima
My next stop on that tour was Alamogordo and the Trinity
test site, then a haunted, still mildly
radioactive desert landscape thanks to the
world’s first atomic explosion in 1945. Yes,
before America nuked Japan that August at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we nuked ourselves.
The Manhattan Project team, led by J. Robert
Oppenheimer, believed a test was needed
because of the complex implosion device used
in the plutonium bomb. (There was no test of
the uranium bomb used at Hiroshima since it
employed a simpler triggering device. Its
first “test” was Hiroshima itself that August
6th and the bomb indeed “worked,” as
predicted.)
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father” of the atomic bomb
So, our scientists nuked the desert near the Jornada del
Muerto, the “dead man’s journey” as the
Spanish conquistadors had once named it in
their own febrile quest for power. While
there, Oppenheimer famously reflected that he
and his fellow scientists had become nothing
short of “Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In
the aftermath of Hiroshima, he would, in fact,
turn against the military’s pursuit of vastly
more powerful hydrogen or thermonuclear,
bombs. For that, in the McCarthy era, he was
accused of being a Soviet agent and stripped
of his security clearance.
Oppenheimer’s punishment should be a reminder of the price
principled people pay when they try to stand
in the way of the military-industrial complex
and its pursuit of power and profit.
But what really haunts me isn’t the “tragedy” of Opie, the
American Prometheus, but the words of Hans
Bethe, who worked alongside him on the
Manhattan Project. Jon Else’s searing
documentary film, The Day After Trinity,
movingly catches Bethe’s responses on hearing
about the bomb’s harrowing “success” at
Hiroshima.
His first reaction was one of fulfillment. The crash
program to develop the bomb that he and his
colleagues had devoted their lives to for
nearly three years was indeed a success. His
second, he said, was one of shock and awe.
What have we done, he asked himself. What have
we done? His final reaction: that it should
never be done again, that such weaponry should
never, ever, be used against our fellow
humans.
And yet here we are, nearly 80 years after Trinity and our
country is still devoting staggering resources
and human effort to developing yet more
“advanced” nuclear weapons and accompanying
war plans undoubtedly aimed at China, North
Korea, Russia, and who knows how many other
alleged evildoers across the globe.
Fire and Fury Like the World Has Never Seen?
Perhaps now you can see why I say that the best years of
my country are behind me. Thirty years ago, I
caught a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of
my eye (Pink Floyd again) of a better future,
a better America, a better world. It was one
where a sophisticated lab like Los Alamos
would no longer be dedicated to developing new
ways of exterminating us all. I could briefly
imagine the promise of the post-Cold-War
moment — that we would all get a “peace
dividend” — having real meaning, but it was
not to be.
And so, I face my sixtieth year on this planet with
trepidation and considerable consternation. I
marvel at the persuasive power of America’s
military-industrial-congressional complex. In
fact, consider it the ultimate Houdini act
that its masters have somehow managed to turn
nuclear missiles and bombs into stealth
weapons — in the sense that they have largely
disappeared from our collective societal radar
screen. We go about our days, living and
struggling as always, even as our overlords
spend trillions of our tax dollars on ever
more effective ways to exterminate us all.
Indeed, at least some of our struggles could
obviously be alleviated with an infusion of an
extra $2 trillion over the coming decades from
the federal government.
Instead, we face endless preparations for a planetary
holocaust that would make even the Holocaust
of World War II a footnote to a history that
would cease to exist. The question is: What
can we do to stop it?
The answer, I think, is simply to stop. Stop buying new
nuclear stealth bombers, new ICBMs, and new
ultra-expensive submarines. Reengage with the
other nuclear powers to halt nuclear
proliferation globally and reduce stockpiles
of warheads. At the very least, commit to a
no-first-use policy for those weapons,
something our government has so far refused to
do.
I’ve often heard the expression “the nuclear genie is out
of the bottle,” implying that it can never be
put back in again. Technology controls us, in
other words.
That’s the reality we’re all supposed to accept, but don’t
believe it. America’s elected leaders and its
self-styled warrior-generals and admirals have
chosen to build such genocidal weaponry. They
seek budgetary authority and power, while the
giant weapons-making corporations pursue
profits galore. Congress and presidents, our
civilian representatives, are corrupted or
coerced by a system that ensnares their minds.
Much like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, the
nuclear button becomes their “precious,” a
totem of power. Consider President Trump’s
boast to Kim Jong-un that “his” nuclear button
was much bigger than theirs and his promise
that, were the North Korean leader not to
become more accommodating, his country would
“face fire and fury like the world has never
seen.” The result: North Korea has vastly
expandedits nuclear arsenal.
It wouldn’t have to be this way. To cite Dorothy Day, the
Catholic peace activist, “Our problems stem
from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten
system.” Don’t accept it, America. Reject it.
Get out in the streets and protest as
Americans did during the nuclear freeze
movement of the early 1980s. Challenge your
local members of Congress. Write to the
president. Raise your voice against the
merchants of death, as Americans proudly did
(joined by Congress!) in the 1930s.
If we were to reject nuclear weapons, to demand a measure
of sanity and decency from our government,
then maybe, just maybe, the best years of my
country would still lie ahead of me, no matter
my growing aches and pains on what’s left of
my life’s journey.
Not to be morbid, but I suppose we all walk our own
Jornada del Muerto. I’d like what’s left of
mine to remain unlit by the incendiary glare
of nuclear explosions. I’d prefer that my last
days weren’t spent in a hardscrabble struggle
for survival in a world cast into darkness and
brutality by a nuclear winter. How about you?
