LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Reviving America’s Nuclear Culture.
At 8:15 a.m., most of downtown Hiroshima disappeared in a searing flash of light and a crushing blast of superheated air. At least 70,000 Japanese (including around 20,000 soldiers) were killed by the firestorm that incinerated the city’s wooden houses and buildings. Three days later, on August 9, the city of Nagasaki was similarly destroyed, this time with the immediate death of around 40,000 civilians. Tens of thousands more would die in coming weeks and years from burns and radiation sickness.
For 70 years since those August mornings, the world has been spared another nuclear bombing. Even as the United States and the Soviet Union built enormous stockpiles of nuclear warheads, reaching a maximum combined total of 64,500 in 1986, neither they nor the other official nuclear powers ever detonated a nuclear weapon during a conflict. Since the end of the Cold War, in particular, the threat of nuclear war has appeared to recede, and the massive nuclear arsenals relegated in importance to the backwaters of national strategy.
Today, though, a quarter-century after the fall of the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons are back, proliferation is increasing, and the world faces a new and unsettling nuclear future. To prepare for the return of a nuclear world, the United States above all must revitalize its once-dominant nuclear culture, relearn the language of deterrence, and reincorporate nuclear strategy into all levels of security policymaking.