July 25, 2005 issue
60 years of nuclear weaons
By J. Daryl BylerPage:
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Aug. 6 and 9 mark the 60th anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, which instantly killed as many as 150,000 people in 1945.
The long-term death toll from dropping “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” — the only nuclear weapons ever used in war — is estimated at more than 300,000.
The month before the United States dropped the bombs, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower advised Secretary of War Henry Stimson that using nuclear weapons was not necessary because the Japanese were already basically defeated.
Leo Szilard, a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb but who opposed a first-strike U.S. use of the weapon, argued that if the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities “we would have defined [this action] as a war crime.”
Sixty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have we learned the lessons of this tragic history?
A 35-year-old nonproliferation treaty requires nuclear states to work toward disarming their weapons in exchange for a promise by non-nuclear states not to build weapons. But no one seems in a hurry to fulfill the treaty’s commitments.
While nearly 190 nations have signed the treaty, today there are eight declared nuclear states — the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Israel is also known to have nuclear weapons.
Other nations are suspected of having plans to develop such weapons.
The United States has about 10,000 nuclear weapons. Russia has almost twice as many. In 2002, President Bush and Russian President Putin signed a treaty requiring each country to reduce its nuclear stockpile to no more than 2,200 warheads by 2012.
In light of U.S. treaty commitments, it is especially troubling that the Bush administration is now seeking funds to study a new generation of nuclear weapons.
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