The United States had the bomb and no one else did but that wouldn’t last for long. The Soviet Union developed the bomb in 1949. That same year the U.S. made the hydrogen bomb and in 1953 the Soviet Union made theirs. The race was on and still is raging. At this point the U.S. and Russia each have around seven thousand nuclear warheads. Suffice it to say it would only take a few hundred to make the Earth uninhabitable for nearly all carbon-based life. This spinning orb would be left with the most likely survivors, namely; roaches and maybe rabbits.
Now, since August 9, 1945 no country has used an atomic weapon on another country anywhere in the world. The nuclear club has grown to include The United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel (Israel will not confirm or deny having the bomb but satellite surveillance makes it clear they have detonated a test). So, what do we do? That is the million dollar question. What do we do to prevent the end of the world? Any and all answers are welcome.
The two men charged with building the bomb and ending the war were General Leslie Groves and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Groves was a career army man who had taken over a floundering project and completed it… The Pentagon. Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist who led seminars at Berkeley on bomb design when he was tapped as the leading scientist on the Manhattan Project. It was a military project, thus General Groves, but it would take the world’s best physicists to design and build it. It took three years but they were successful and on July 16, 1945 the bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico. At five thirty in the morning in a shack five miles from the bomb an anxious Oppenheimer and dozens of others waited. If it didn’t work then, three years of work and two billion dollars would be down the drain. Not to mention the reputations and careers of all the scientists and engineers involved. In addition, General Groves would be demoted and spend months if not years in front of congressional committees explaining the waste of the taxpayers’ money and the failure to end the war early and save American lives. As the countdown came close to zero there were many things on the line. Oppenheimer and Ken Bainbridge, who was in charge of the test, waited nervously. Then three, two, one and detonation. There was the blinding flash and in a few seconds the rumble could be heard and felt. There was a mushroom cloud that went ten thousand feet in the air. A twelve-hundred-foot diameter crater was created in which everything was gone and the steel tower was evaporated. Not melted but evaporated. Windows were broken miles away; cattle were knocked off their feet and a girl who was blind at birth saw the light from the flash. Yes, the bomb worked. Oppenheimer and his band of egg-heads had breached the divide between physics and the impossible. They had captured the power of the Universe then released it at their will.
Okay, so science is unswerving in its drive to explain everything, discover everything, invent everything, etc. There wasn’t a person, scientist or not who wasn’t impressed and in awe of the accomplishments that took place in the desert of New Mexico. But sometimes we do things and then realize that there are consequences for any action no matter how large or small. More importantly, there is responsibility. The machine gun was invented along with poisonous gas, chemical and biological weapons and any number of other things to make killing in war more efficient. And, these things work very well but where is the guilt. Millions of people have or will die in the future from weapons created by scientists and engineers. Do they get a moral pass since they were just doing their jobs? There is no easy answer and on the early morning of July 16, 1945 Oppenheimer and Bainbridge watched as the bomb obliterated the test site. Perhaps Oppenheimer had given thought to what he was doing during the project and what the ramifications might be if and when the bomb worked and other countries had it. Who knows but as he and Bainbridge watched the debris fall back to Earth and as the men who went outside to watch were cheering the success of the last three year’s work something came over Oppenheimer. As he stood staring out the window at the destruction he had created, he quoted from the Bhagavad Gita. “I am become Death, shatterer of worlds.” Ken Bainbridge, was not the learned scholar that Oppenheimer was but he put it in terms that anyone could understand. “Yeah, now, we’re all sons-a-bitches.” They were that to be sure but let’s be fair; their country grabbed them, plopped them down in the desert and said build us the ultimate weapon to end the war. They did and after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to speak to his people. This was the man who was worshipped as a God yet no one had ever heard his voice. Now, they heard him speak and he praised the Japanese people for their great effort during the war but then said it is time to surrender. The bomb did the trick. All those American and Japanese lives were saved as the war ended. And, it was due to the effort of those scientists at Los Alamos so, to turn around and beat them over the head with a moral argument seems disingenuous. The bomb did what it was expected to do and on September 2, 1945 Japan surrendered in Tokyo Bay.
A happy ending? Not exactly, it’s like buying a tiger to rid your house of rats. The rats are eradicated but how do you control the tiger. He has a voracious appetite and he sees everything and everyone as his prey. You can’t take him back because of the no return policy at the tiger store. You keep him at a distance, you don’t want to use him again if you can avoid it. He is ever vigilant and waiting for his chance to attack and you have to keep him at bay, keep him under control. Your house is free of rats but can you ever be safe again, can you ever feel content and most importantly can you ever relax again without fear of annihilation? No, you can’t and thus is the predicament the world is in now.
Oppenheimer said after the war that the U.S. should take all of their bombs, all the paper work, the plans, fuel, materials etc. and dump it in the ocean. A fanciful suggestion meant to symbolize the state of the world because of the bomb. Too late Dr. Oppenheimer, the toothpaste is out of the tube, Pandora’s Box is open, the cat is out of the bag and good luck capturing him and putting him back in a second time.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists keeps a doomsday clock and at this time it is two minutes to midnight. That’s how close they think we are to the end. Rather pessimistic but the number of weapons out there is suggestive of a powder keg waiting for a match. Any time there is a stand-off between the big nations, fears run high of a nuclear exchange. The U.S. and Russia are ever mindful of the stakes that exist in any conflict. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Petrov incident and other misses showed not just the dangers that existed but the restraint used by both sides. It seems unlikely that the two giants would start a nuclear war but the renegade states like North Korea and Iran when they finally get a nuclear weapon are another story. They would wield weapons of mass destruction without regard for the political or nuclear fallout.
At the height of the cold war in the sixties the U.S. built an underground facility to monitor Soviet activities and to be ready to launch all those missiles. It was the Cheyenne Mountain Complex near Colorado Springs, Colorado. It is built under two-thousand feet of granite in the Rocky Mountains and it can withstand a 30-megaton nuclear explosion. It was in full operation during the Cold War but after the Soviet Union fell it was decommissioned in 2006 because it was felt that Russia was no longer a threat (permission to chuckle). Now, guess what? We are moving back into the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. The Russians have never retreated from a position of angst regarding nuclear war and keep an ever vigilante eye on the U.S. So, the Cold War is just as cold or just as hot; whatever you choose. Does that signify a coming nuclear exchange? No, but it pays to be prepared. Because you never know what is going to happen on any day that you get up. Tomorrow could be a crisis that has both sides with their fingers on the button. That’s what this story is about.