Long before an operational nuclear weapon was developed, it was envisioned and imagined and described in western culture, with key ideas arising decades earlier, particularly in speculative literature and science fiction. As H. Bruce Franklin argued in his book "War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination," a strong case can be made for viewing the emergence of nuclear weapons as part of a seductive cultural fascination with the idea of a weapon capable of providing a solution to the problem of war itself, ensuring security and protection through its sheer destructive power. But there are no technological solutions to such problems, and instead the bomb has brought in its wake a host of terrors steamming from its use, its ongoing development, and the continuing madness of political and strategic doctrines organized around the threat of its use as a weapon of war.
Where to begin? The initial folly of U.S. policymakers squandering their years of nuclear monopoly in escalating confrontations with the Soviet Union while subjecting the domestic population to anticommunist repression on a grand scale? The irrational belief that "secrecy" in matters of science and technology could ensure strategic advantages? The crackpot "deterrence" doctrine which became ever more ridiculous with each passing year as both the nuclear arsenals and their destructive force grew unchecked? Consider the growing realization among all strategic thinkers of nuclear weaponry's increasing practical uselessness for achieving any manner of rational military or political aim, such that "deterrence" became little more than the effort to maintain the "credibility" of a willingness to initiate global suicide. Nuclear weapons and their associated policies have proven very effective tools for the subjugation of domestic populations through the promotion of fear and insecurity. They have also enabled heads of state throughout the world to concentrate ever greater degrees of power in their hands - one need only reflect on the complete removal of effective war power from Congress in the U.S. to recognize this shift.
The encouraging steps toward serious arms control and disarmament that began in the 1960s marked the first open acknowledgement that the menace of nuclear weapons demanded political and diplomatic solutions. Yes, it was true the nuclear "genie" was out of the bottle for good and that the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons is here to stay. But this has never constituted a justification for maintaining huge arsenals aimed at targets that can be reached in minutes, thus reducing the time in which human beings must make decisions about their use to unacceptably small fragments. In recent decades the very size and complexity of nuclear arsenals has even raised the horrifying possibility of "accidental" nuclear wars, yet another chapter in the insanity of attempting to build policies around nuclear forces.
The promise of arms control, non-proliferation, and disarmament as serious policy has been subjected to enormous strain in our time, and in the last decade the U.S. government has once again taken a foolish detour from sane policy by attempting to compel non-proliferation through military means, an approach which is utterly doomed to failure while making the world more dangerous in the process. Not unlike the mounting ecological threats posed by climate change, pollution, and nuclear weaponry's deadly junior partner, nuclear power, the bomb is a global menace to all of us, and it demands a response that goes far beyond the petty, puny, and increasingly pathetic nationalism governments and elites promote to breed ever more outer-directed hatred, fear and resentment among the population. I'm not interested in the hysterical conjuring up of "insane dictators" and "fanatical terrorists" as a justification for maintaining nuclear arsenals, and I find it dishonest when those who engage in this fear-mongering make excuses for a U.S. government that today rains bombs on people in other countries with impunity, something which must surely strike victims of our military violence as "insane" and "fanatical."
The peoples of the world have accomplished a great many wonderful things since the end of the Second World War. It is time to add the abolition of nuclear weapons to this list. We can live with knowledge of the bomb, but we can't live with nuclear arsenals. They are enemies of all life on the planet, and they must go before we use them to put an end to that life.
H. Bruce Franklin's War Stars page: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/Books/WarStarsNew.html
Interview with Jonathan Schell on his book "The Seventh Decade": http://youtu.be/7zy29OwnbkI
Bibliography: The Atomic Bomb: http://universityhonors.umd.edu/HONR269J/bibBomb.htm
Some hope - Theodore Sturgeon's story "Thunder and Roses," from 1947. Sturgeon was well ahead of his time in realizing the way out of this darkness: http://www.datapacrat.com/Art/Fiction/Baen/twtud/0743498747__29.htm
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