Nuclear War: A Scenario

The atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima, Japan in August 1945 killed at least 80,000 people at once, with the total casualties being almost impossible to calculate. When the bomb struck, at an altitude designed to kill as many people as possible, a 13-year-old girl named Setsuko Thurlow was buried under a pile of rubble and miraculously rescued when dozens of other girls in the same building burned to death. Later calculations showed that the bomb, code-named “Little Boy,” was roughly equivalent to 2,100 tons of conventional bombing payloads.

Setsuko saw horror all around her, including people carrying parts of their bodies that had become detached. The US Army and its occupation forces in Japan suppressed such data for decades, keeping the effects atomic weapons used in combat had on people and buildings classified and proprietary information: “The Pentagon wanted to make sure it knew more about nuclear blast effects than any future enemy could possibly know” (10). After that and the bomb three days later, Nagasaki ended a war that killed upwards of 75 million people, the US began planning for another war that would kill vastly more people in a much quicker time.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the US atomic arsenal was relatively small, and the fate of the Los Alamos labs that helped produce them was uncertain. That all changed when the US Navy, “deeply worried about its looming obsolescence in this new age of atomic warfare” (14), decided to show how it could play a central role in a nuclear war. In 1946, the US Navy conducted a series of tests at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The purpose of the test was to support the mass production of more bombs with the promise of utterly obliterating an enemy nation’s entire society. Once the Soviet Union developed its bombs in 1949, the US government deemed it necessary to expand the arsenal further to ensure retaliatory capability against a potential Soviet attack.

In the ensuing years, the US and USSR stockpiles both began to climb. In 1952, the US developed the thermonuclear bomb (also known as the hydrogen bomb), with nearly 1,000 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb. The prospect of the government developing and potentially using such a weapon horrified some of the scientists involved, and their fears seemed confirmed when a 1952 test in the Marshall Islands turned one of the islands, Elugelab, into a literal crater. Instead, the US government began producing bombs on an industrial scale, eventually reaching an astonishing height of 31,255 bombs by 1967.

Deterrence, the main principle of preventing a nuclear war, argues that maintaining a large nuclear stockpile is necessary to prevent a nuclear war, by presenting a potential adversary with the threat of mutual destruction. Yet, it remains unclear how much deterrence has so far contributed to the outbreak of war and where its vulnerabilities might lie.

In early 1960, each branch of the armed services had its plans for waging nuclear war. The meeting discussed in Chapter 1 was an attempt to reconcile those plans into one cohesive whole involving all branches. In addition to the many millions killed in the initial strikes and the certain Soviet retaliation, hundreds of millions would suffer the effects of radiation poisoning, including in many countries not intentionally targeted by the major powers. Calculations of the dead also failed to include “the untold numbers of people who would starve to death from the climate effects of a world set on fire” (24).

The briefing took place, and afterward, top brass came around to offer congratulations to all involved, with no one questioning the dire moral implications of what they were planning to do. Finally, one man, General David Shoup, Commandant of the US Marine Corps, insisted that such mass slaughter was “not the American way” (26), but no one echoed his objections. The man who later recorded this meeting, John Rubel, found that the plans reminded him of the Holocaust in its ability to execute mass murder through the lens of bureaucratic routine. While the nuclear Holocaust Rubel feared has not yet taken place, and nuclear arsenals have shrunk considerably, major powers including the US still can destroy the entire world at a moment’s notice.