Annamaria on Monday
Nukes are back in the news because newly installed President Biden is moving toward a five-year extension of the START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) with Russia. UN officials are calling nuclear weapons "obsolete," a word that drew my attention. I was a baby when my country became the only nation on earth to use them. I have lived with their threat all my life.
By the time I first learned of their existence, US bombs had been dropped on Japan. Those attacks were being credited as the reason the US won that war. The destruction, it was postulated, had convinced the Japanese to surrender, negating any need for an invasion of Japan and thereby saving the lives of a million Allied fighting men.
There was also talk, of course of the dreadful loss of life in Japan, which was countered at the time with reminders of the enormous cruelty of the Japanese toward the populations of countries they conquered, most notably in China. I had desperately missed my daddy while he was away fighting in the Pacific and was so happy that I got him back. My father, I eventually understood, was one of those million who might have died invading Japan. I harbored ever afterwards a guilty relief that the bomb that destroyed so many had preserved him.
By then the threat of nukes was part of the air one breathed. All public buildings had designated fall-out shelters. People were digging them in their own backyards. School children were put through drills.
A relic of that age still displayed on the stairwell of the building where I live.
I grew up, of course, completely opposed to the very existence of hideous nukes. Come the 60s and 70s, when I became a peacenik, I joined many efforts to do away with them. The most successful of those, took place on 12 June 1982. Then President Reagan, an avowed military hawk, was in the White House. Many, many people wanted to send him a strong message. They came from all over the US to join with New Yorkers and staged the, until then, largest peaceful protest ever to gather anywhere.
A million people showed up! A million in Central Park! Here is what it looked like where I was:
Ronald Reagan, who professed to be against nukes, then chose a strange way to eliminate their danger. He shocked the world by what he called a Strategic Defence - the creation of an anti-missile system to shield the USA. Nobody ever thought that would do the trick. What it did do was calm down the fears in enough people and, by doing so, took a lot of the steam out of the anti-nuke movement.
The current ready bottle
My husband David and I once discussed what we would do if we got word that an ICBM carrying a nuclear warhead was on its way to us. We knew that New York would be a prime target. We also understood that, though there would be a considerable warning period, we would never be able to escape our densely populated island home in time. We decided we would just sit on our stoop and drink champagne. We, and now I, have kept a chilled bottle on hand ever since. If it is drunk for some pleasant other reason, I quickly replace it.
When the Cold War ended, an opportunity arose for world powers to deal with the nuke threat. But there was no political will anywhere to do that deed. The moment was wasted. Johnathan Schell writing in The Nation said it was, "as if people believed that a mortal illness could be dealt with by forgetting about it."
Then, during Bush 1, the first START was negotiated and signed. It does not banish nukes. But it does control them.