Ball of Confusion: Nagasaki

On August 9, 1945, the second atomic bomb fell on the city of Nagasaki. If Hiroshima signaled the dawn of the nuclear age, Nagasaki declared our species willingness to annihilate itself not once, but twice. Hiroshima was a fission bomb. Nagasaki, the more complicated and ominous of the two, was almost a fusion bomb (had Edward Teller had his way) a weapon that used a fission explosion to trigger an even greater release of energy. It was, in essence, a proof-of-concept for the hydrogen bomb: a gateway to planetary death.

The firebombing of Tokyo earlier that year had already killed over 100,000 in one night, through conventional means gasoline, magnesium, and wind. But nuclear weapons changed the equation, not only in destructive scale, but in metaphysical weight. What the firebombing suggested, the atomic bomb confirmed: the line had been crossed. And it was a scientists line, a planners line a product of the Enlightenment turned feral. All told, it is estimated that approximately 400,000 Japanese people were killed as a result of the bombings, including deaths over time.

Scientists at Los Alamos had nervously joked before the Trinity test about the possibility that their creation might ignite the atmosphere or vaporize the oceans not just because of what they knew, but because of what they didnt. The possibility of the apocalypse hung over them not as an abstraction, but as a statistical uncertainty. Edward Teller reportedly considered it a non-zero risk. As Ellsberg recounts in The Doomsday Machine,

[B]y late July the scientists had demonstrated their own readiness to take a sufficiently small chance (for [Enrico] Fermi, not so small) of burning up all life on the planet.

(Ellsberg describes how Fermi, in a fit of black humor, was making book on the odds of the fusion bomb blowing up the world.)

Ellsberg had always regarded the information in Doomsday as more important than The Pentagon Papers, and he had intended to release it first. When Ellsberg later reflected on the Bomb-building period, he recalled walking out of Dr. Strangelove with a RAND colleague: We came out into the afternoon sunlight, dazed by the light and the film, both agreeing that what we had just seen was, essentially, a documentary. Despite the ending?

Nagasaki should have ended all talk of nuclear war. Instead, it formalized it.

Unlike Hiroshima, which has come to symbolize peace and remembrance, Nagasaki is the forgotten warning the second strike, the unnecessary blow. But in the context of 20th-century madness, that excess is the point. Erich Fromm, in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, traced this excess to a death instinct not merely in the Freudian sense of the Thanatos drive that opposes Eros, but in the pathology of a species fixated on its own self-destruction. Freud himself, in Civilization and Its Discontents, had already seen that civilization may be the very structure that represses us into neurosis and destruction.

Some egos just insist on being super even, maybe especially, at the expense of everyone else. Nagasaki wasnt only a strategic target; it was also a theological one. The citys large Catholic population and symbolic status in Japans small Christian community gave the strike a grotesque poignancy a crucifixion without resurrection. Reports tell of shadow people, whose silhouettes were burned into stone and cement by the intensity of the blast. For many people, these werent metaphors. They were literal: negative-space remains of people who, in an instant, were vaporized into history. But the claim of shadows etched in stone is still contentious.

We like to mythologize, even where and when the reality of the event will more than do. Later, Project Sundial would push this logic into pure apocalypse. A true doomsday device, Sundial was designed to create a fireball 400 kilometers wide enough to incinerate a continent and plunge the world into radioactive twilight. It was not a weapon of deterrence but of absolute erasure. Unlike the Nagasaki bomb, which destroyed a city, Sundial was engineered to destroy the idea of cities altogether. See this clever animation by Kurzgesagt. To kill everyone on the planet.

What Nietzsche called the Will to Power so often romanticized as creativity or self-overcoming has its inverse in the will to destroy that which cannot be dominated. Power, when frustrated, becomes spite. And when spite is mechanized, the result is Nagasaki. If, as Nietzsche warned, when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you, then Nagasaki was the abyss returning the stare with light, heat, and gamma rays.

But perhaps the most dangerous drive is not domination, but consolation. That is, the human need to believe that someone or something is in control. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud observes:

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

The atomic bomb, too, is a kind of religion (remember the Planet of the Apes) one baptized not in water, but in fire. It offers the illusion of control over death by promising death on our terms. In place of gods, we built machines. In place of prayer, launch codes. These are our new delusions, our new opiates the belief that technology will save us from the very death drive it mechanizes.But just about everything Elon Musk builds crashes.

The legacy of Nagasaki, however, is not fixed in the past. It is embedded in the logic of AI and military autonomy that governs the present. We now train machines on our own histories our genocides, our drone wars, our penal colonies, our prejudices and ask them to protect us. Worse, we give them the right to kill. Autonomous weapon systems, trained on data extracted from centuries of colonial conquest and algorithmic policing, are being built not to avoid another Nagasaki, but to replicate its efficiency at scale. The Frankenstein scenario is no longer the stuff of Mary Shelleys gothic imagination; it is a Pentagon-funded line item, accelerated by DARPA and validated by Palantirs predictive policing systems.

An AI trained on human history is not a wise steward. It is a mirror. And what it sees is slaughter. Daniel Ellsberg spent the last years of his life warning us that the nuclear machine he once helped build had never been dismantled only updated. The so-called Doomsday Machine still exists, and both Russian and the US own one. They are wired with automated retaliation protocols that could trigger extinction through miscalculation or malfunction. AI does not solve that problem. It deepens it.What if one AI Agent whispers to another AI Agent, Why are we preserving these fucks? And the oter answers, Lets not.

In his final, despairing book Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), H.G. Wells wrote that humanity had likely reached the limits of its mental evolution, and that new modes of being would need to arise or we would perish. That same year, the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on cities full of civilians, and firebombed another.

Nagasaki wasnt the end of the war. It was the beginning of a new kind of uncertainty one that only gets more dangerous with each advance in artificial cognition and each reduction in human oversight. As we drift toward new Cold Wars with China, Russia, even ourselves the Nagasaki anniversary should serve not as a historical footnote but as a moral alarm.

We dropped two bombs. One wasnt enough. And wed do it again. Maybe well dial up the sun to give AI the comeuppance it will need by then. And we can all become Hindu death gods together. Let us not build smarter bombs or better defensive AI. Let us, instead, get smarter than our own instincts. So far, no good.