Hiroshima attack marks its 78th anniversary – its lessons of unnecessary mass destruction could help guide future nuclear arms talks

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An American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan – an important military center with a civilian population close to 300,000 people.

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The Conversation

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https://theconversation.com/hiroshima-attack-marks-its-78th-anniversary-its-lessons-of-unnecessary-mass-destruction-could-help-guide-future-nuclear-arms-talks-210115

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Monday, July 31, 2023

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PAKISTAN, TAIWAN, INDIA, NEW MEXICO, CHINA, IRAN, RUSSIA, EUROPE, ISRAEL, JAPAN, UKRAINE, HIROSHIMA, FRANCE

Summary

Key Points:

An American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan – an important military center with a civilian population close to 300,000 people.
The bomber plane was called the Enola Gay, named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot.
This was part of the Manhattan Project, a secret, federally funded science effort that produced the first nuclear weapons.
What might have been a single year of nuclear weapons development ushered in decades and decades of nuclear proliferation – a challenge across countries and professions.

The man who started it all

Einstein urged the U.S. to stockpile uranium and begin developing an atomic bomb – a warning he would later regret.
Einstein wrote a letter to Newsweek, published in 1947, headlined “The Man Who Started It All.” In it, he made a confession.
“Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger,” Einstein wrote.
The result was a hydrogen bomb explosion with approximately 700 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Arms control

But today there are nine countries that have nuclear weapons – the U.S., Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea.
There has been progress over the past few decades in reducing the global stockpile of nuclear weapons while preventing the development of new ones.
That treaty is considered by experts one of the most successful arms control agreements.
Russia and the U.S. signed on to a new START treaty in 2011, restricting the countries to each keep 1,550 nuclear weapons.
There are no current plans for the countries to renew the deal, and it is not clear what comes next.

Complicating factors

Although Putin has not formally ended Russian adherence to the START II agreement, Russia has stopped participating in the nuclear inspection checks that the deal requires.
This lack of transparency makes diplomacy over the deal more difficult.
Another complicating factor is that China has made it clear that it is not interested in an arms control agreement until it has the same number of nuclear weapons that the U.S. and Russia have.
In 2015, China had an estimated 260 nuclear warheads, and by 2023 that number rose to more than 400.

Diplomacy is the way forward

Diplomacy matters, as was clear in the early years of U.S.-Soviet agreements.
In my view, a formal agreement between the U.S. and Iran to slow down its nuclear development would be valuable.
The U.S. can also use public diplomacy tools – everything from official speeches to international educational exchanges – to warn the world of the escalating dangers of unchecked nuclear weapons use.
But the best way to honor history is not to repeat it.