Manhattan

• Mr. Belt was inspired to be an artist directly by Andrew Wyeth himself.
• Now Andrew Wyeth is considered one of the most influential American painters, along with Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Winslow Homer, and a few others.
• In addition to the original works of Andrew Wyeth, American Fine Art specializes in the 19th-21st century masters including Picasso, Chagall, Miro, Warhol, Dali, Leger, Banksy, and more.
• American Fine Art is an international leader in fine art and Scottsdale's premier fine art gallery.

• HOLLYWOOD, Calif. , Oct. 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Kevin Schewe's Bad Love Tigers has captivated the world as it tops 400 international screenplay awards, recently adding the awards for Best Sci-Fi Script and Best Original Feature Script at the IMDb-qualified 8 and HalFilm Awards International Film Festival in Rome, Italy.
• "Bad Love Tigers continues to crisscross the globe and is ready to be that next global tentpole franchise!"
• Schewe says, as his screenplay also recently won awards in California, Liverpool, Paris, Lithuania, London, and Tokyo.
• The Bad Love Tigers screenplay is an international success, finding acclaim at film festivals in dozens of countries, including Cannes World Film Festival, Madrid Arthouse Film Festival, Rome International Movie Awards, New York International Film Awards, The Los Angeles Movie Awards, Vegas Movie Awards, The London Classic Film Festival, The Barcelona International Film Festival, Bridge Fest, Anatolia International Film Awards, Toronto Awards Film Festival, Annual American Filmatic Arts Awards, and many more.

• Oppenheimer had many achievements in theoretical physics but is remembered as the so-called father of the atomic bomb.
• But he conveyed a sense of anguish – scripting his own tragic role, as I argue in my book about him.
• “The physicists have known sin,” he remarked two years after the attacks, “and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

‘Batter my heart’

• As physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi later said, the bomb “treated humans as matter,” nothing more.
• But Oppenheimer pointedly used religious language when talking about the project, as if to underscore the weight of its significance.
• The atomic bomb was first tested in the early morning of July 16, 1945, in the arid basin of southern New Mexico.
• Mathematician John von Neumann acerbically observed, “Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin.”

Describing the indescribable

• On Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, these cities suddenly ceased to be.
• Robert J. Lifton, an expert on the psychology of war, violence and trauma, called the Hiroshima survivors’ experience “death in life,” an encounter with the indescribable.
• When it comes to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, he chooses to represent the attack without portraying it.

The bomb to end all wars?

• After the end of the war, many of the scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project sought to emphasize that the atomic bomb was not just another weapon.
• Among them, Oppenheimer carried the most authority as a result of his leadership of Los Alamos and his oratorical gifts.
• The form it ultimately took, known as the Baruch Plan, was rejected by the Soviet Union.
• Rather than seeing the bomb as the weapon to end all wars, the U.S. military seemed to treat it as its trump card.
• The era of mutual assured destruction, when a nuclear attack would be certain to annihilate both superpowers, had begun.

• 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.