Yes, once in the previous century, I actually visited the city of Hiroshima. I was an editor at Pantheon Books and had published a translation of a Japanese volume, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. In it, years later, a few survivors of that city, devastated by the first nuclear weapon used in war on August 6, 1945, none of them artists, had drawn vividly memorable pictures of their experiences accompanied by short, grimly touching descriptions. Mikio Inoue, then 72 years old, for instance, drew an image of a professor he knew and had come upon that horrendous day, the sky still red with flames (a sea of fire), almost naked, holding a rice ball in his fist, who had failed to save his wife, trapped under a roof beam. But I wonder, Inoue later wrote, how he came to hold that rice ball in his hand? His naked figure, standing there before the flames with that rice ball looked to me as a symbol of the modest hope of human beings.
The Japanese editor of that book, amazed that an American would ever have published it, invited me to his country in 1982 and took me to that rebuilt city to visit the all-too-grim museum there dedicated to preserving memories of that nightmarish experience. It was to reuse a word from the books title a genuinely unforgettable experience for me. And I'm still reminded of the destruction of Hiroshima regularly when, in my neighborhood in New York City, between 105th and 106th street on Riverside Drive, I regularly walk by an impressive bronze statue of Shinran Shonin, the founder of the Jodo Shinshu sect of Buddhism, in front of a local Buddhist temple with this sign: The statue originally stood in Hiroshima, at a site 2.5 kilometers northwest from the center of the first atomic bomb attack. Having survived the full force of the bomb, the statue was brought to New York in September of 1955 to be a testimonial to the atomic bomb devastation and a symbol of lasting hope for world peace.
Perhaps, under the circumstances, we should consider it something of a miracle, 80 years later, that the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended World War II in the Pacific, was horrifying enough so that, of all the weaponry that's been used ever since in humanity's never-ending war-making, atomic weapons have not been. And yet, unnervingly enough, nine countries have now gone nuclear, and my own country simply cant seem to stop building (or rather modernizing) its already vast nuclear arsenal to the tune of $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years.
It seems genuinely beyond belief, as TomDispatch regular retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore reminds us so vividly today in his yes! 115th piece for this site, that our country is still investing an unbelievable fortune in that modernization process for an arsenal already big enough to destroy not just this planet but several others as well. So, take a moment to accompany him briefly into the past and to Cheyenne Mountain as he offers his own countdown on this strange, strange planet of ours. Tom
Apocalypse Soon?
Returning a Final Time to Cheyenne Mountain
Its been 20 years since I retired from the Air Force and 40 years since I first entered Cheyenne Mountain, Americas nuclear redoubt at the southern end of the Front Range that includes Pikes Peak in Colorado. So it was with some nostalgia that I read a recent memo from General Kenneth Wilsbach, the new Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF). Along with the usual warrior talk, the CSAF vowed to relentlessly advocate for the new Sentinel ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber. While the Air Force often speaks of investing in new nukes, this time the CSAF opted for recapitalization, a remarkably bloodless term for the creation of a whole new generation of genocidal thermonuclear weapons and their delivery systems.
(Take a moment to think about that word, creation, applied to weapons of mass destruction. Raised Catholic, I learned that God created the universe out of nothing. By comparison, nuclear creators aren't gods, they're devils, for their creation may end with the destruction of everything. Small wonder J. Robert Oppenheimer mused that he'd become death, the destroyer of worlds, after the first successful atomic blast in 1945.)
In my Cheyenne Mountain days, circa 1985, the new must have bomber was the B-1 Lancer and the new must have ICBM was the MX Peacekeeper. If you go back 20 to 30 years earlier than that, it was the B-52 and the Minuteman. And mind you, my old service owns two legs of Americas nuclear triad. (The Navy has the third with its nuclear submarines armed with Trident II missiles.)And count on one thing: it will never willingly give them up. It will always relentlessly advocate for the latest ICBM and nuclear-capable bomber, irrespective of need, price, strategy, or above all else their murderous, indeed apocalyptic, capabilities.
At this moment, Donald Trumps America has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various sorts, while Vladimir Putin's Russia has roughly 5,500 of the same. Together, they represent overkill of an enormity that should be considered essentially unfathomable. Any sane person would minimally argue for serious reductions in nuclear weaponry on this planet. The literal salvation of humanity may depend on it. But don't tell that to the generals and admirals, or to the weapons-producing corporations that get rich building such weaponry, or to members of Congress who have factories producing such weaponry and bases housing them in their districts.
So, here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another $1.7 trillion (and no, that is not a typo!) recapitalizing its nuclear triad, and so in a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a possible future doomsday, the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds, and a true end-times catastrophe.
I Join AF Space Command Only to Find Myself Under 2,000 Feet of Granite
My first military assignment in 1985 was at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado with Air Force Space Command . That put me in Americas nuclear command post during the last few years of the Cold War. I also worked in the Space Surveillance Center and on a battle staff that brought me into the Missile Warning Center. So, I was exposed, in a relatively modest way (if anything having to do with nuclear weapons can ever be considered modest), to what nuclear war would actually be like and forced to think about it in a way most Americans dont.
Each time I journeyed into Cheyenne Mountain, I walked or rode through a long tunnel carved out of granite. The buildings inside were mounted on gigantic springs (yes, springs!) that were supposed to absorb the shock of any nearby hydrogen bomb blast in a future war with the Soviet Union. Massive blast doors that looked like they belonged on the largest bank vault in the universe were supposed to keep us safe, though in a nuclear war they might only have ensured our entombment. They were mostly kept open, but every now and then they were closed for a military exercise.
I was a space systems test analyst. The Space Surveillance Center ran on a certain software program that needed periodic testing and evaluation and I helped test the computer software that kept track of all objects orbiting the Earth. Back then, there were just over 5,000 of them. (Now, that numbers more like 45,000 and space is a lot more crowded perhaps too crowded.)
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