Close to Home: Seven decades living under a bomb threat

Every August for 77 years since the United States dropped two atomic bombs and obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, experts have issued the same warning: Until the world’s nuclear arsenals are abolished, a single launch misstep can put all of humanity — and much of life itself — “at risk of total annihilation,” as U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterras recently said.

Vladimir Putin has threatened to use low-yield nuclear weapons if the U.S. or NATO interfere in his war against Ukraine. No informed nuclear analyst has expressed any confidence that crossing this threshold wouldn’t devolve into further nuclear use and possibly full-scale nuclear war.

A series of war game simulations at Princeton University involving an initial use of tactical weapons demonstrated repeatedly that retaliatory escalation to higher-yield thermonuclear bombs is virtually inescapable. The likely end game of a “small” nuclear exchange would be at least 90 million casualties.

Still, with every new generation of policymakers promoting the deterrent value of nuclear weapons, and with every round of expansion and “modernization,” calls for elimination of nuclear weapons fall on deaf ears. If the risk of extinguishing the ecosystems that support life on earth is not enough to roused policymakers, then what is?

In my graduate years in the anthropology department at UC Berkeley during the height of the Cold War, I raised this question in interviews with many among the top brass at the Pentagon. The answers were not overtly unreasonable, given the military’s nation-protecting mandate. The risk to the human species would be worth it, many said, because “we would be standing up for our American values,” “for freedom,” “for the principles of the Judeo-Christian ethic,” for “our democratic political system.”

In the words of one high-ranking officer: “If it came down to a choice between ourselves as a nation versus the survival of the species, I would have to say, we as a nation would have to look out for ourselves first and the species, second.”

One does not have to be a neuroscientist or an anthropologist to grasp that the human species is vulnerable to a host of characteristics that can impair rational judgment during a military crisis: cognitive limitations on perception, calculation, memory and alertness; cultural, political and religious beliefs that can undermine caution; reflexively resorting to out-of-date tradition; emotions (rivalry, revenge, rage, greed, pride, misplaced honor) — not to mention the near impossibility of mastering the intricacies of modern military command and control operations.

In short, in the 77 years since the first use of atomic weapons, maybe some of our best policy analysts have been addressing the wrong questions. What if — looking squarely at our cognitive limitations as a species — we were to swallow our pride and admit that those advocating for the incremental elimination of nuclear arsenals are the visionaries among us.

Donna Brasset-Shearer, a cultural anthropologist, lives in Petaluma.

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