Remembering the bomb that changed the world

The use of nuclear bombs on Japan should be a time of national reflection.

By David P. Barash & Judith Eve Lipton

Special to the [Seattle] Times, Originally published August 5, 2015

WE Americans like celebrations. We prefer happy holidays, not downers. Even Veterans Day and Memorial Day are opportunities for patriotic reflection and gratitude, not regrets or remorse.

Since many Americans consider the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to have been legitimate, it isn’t surprising that Hiroshima Day (Aug. 6) and Nagasaki Day (Aug. 9) haven’t made it onto the national calendar. But they should. We propose Aug. 6 and Aug. 9 should be “Nuclear Awareness Days.”

There is much to be said for reflecting on these events, and not simply for their historical significance. Aug. 6, 1945, was the first time a nuclear weapon was used to kill people deliberately, and Aug. 9, 1945, was the last — so far. On this, everyone agrees. In addition, use of nuclear weapons would constitute a tragedy of immense proportions. Nearly everyone agrees with this, too.

An Allied correspondent stands in front of the shell of a building that once
was a movie theater in Hiroshima, Japan, a month after an atomic bomb
was dropped by the United States. (Stanley Troutman/The Associated Press)

Although there is debate about whether nuclear weapons “keep the peace” via their avowed role as deterrents, informed opinion — including increasing numbers of military and strategic authorities — has been moving toward the position that these weapons are a liability (to everyone, including their possessors) rather than an asset.

Seventy years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is still not a peaceful place. There is no evidence that possessing more than 16,000 bombs and warheads have made the nuclear states any more secure than their non-nuclear counterparts.

Nuclear arsenals have not provided any discernible leverage. Imagine a policeman armed with a backpack nuclear weapon, confronting a bank robber. His “deterrent” would simply be too blunt, destructive and lacking in credibility to provide any benefit. Thus, nuclear weapons have not helped Russia in Ukraine, the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan, the United Kingdom in the Falkland Islands, France in Algeria, nor China in Tibet or Taiwan.

Nuclear North Korea is a nightmare, but what good has armament done? India and Pakistan are less safe in their struggles over Kashmir, with nuclear weapons aimed at each other. Israel has a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East, but this hasn’t prevented decades of war — and when other states or terrorists get the bomb, only one or two warheads could effectively destroy Israel. Only nuclear abolition and careful verification could ultimately protect anyone.


A massive column of billowing smoke
mushrooms over Nagasaki, Japan,
after the United States dropped
an atomic bomb on Aug. 9, 1945. (AP)

Taking the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seriously by establishing Nuclear Awareness Days would give us an opportunity to meditate on the terrible reality of what transpired in 1945 and condemn the world’s worst weapons before they are used again. Chemical and biological weapons, land mines and cluster munitions are illegal, so why aren’t nuclear weapons? Some 112 countries have signed a petition calling for nuclear weapons to be banned.

The U.S. nuclear arsenal is especially relevant to Puget Sound — Trident submarines are based at Naval Base Kitsap Bangor. A single vessel can carry 24 nuclear missiles (restricted to 20 by treaty), each capable of delivering eight to 12 independently targetable warheads, each roughly 40 times the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. To repeat: This is the potential output of just one Trident submarine — eight are currently deployed west of Seattle, and an additional five at Kings Bay, Ga., and one in Portsmouth, Va.

Even if the theory of deterrence has any validity at all, how much extinction is enough? Bangor and other sites in Washington that house nuclear weapons are not just sources of planetary destruction, but also targets.

Maybe the United States will eventually wake up, abandon nuclear arms and embrace fundamental decency and basic planetary hygiene. Toward that end, we fervently recommend Nuclear Awareness Days as an opportunity to reflect not only on what has happened but also what might yet be achieved — and preserved.
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Original Source URL: http://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/remembering-the-bomb-that-changed-the-world/

David P. Barash, professor of psychology at University of Washington, is the author of “Buddhist Biology: Ancient Eastern Wisdom Meets Modern Western Science.” Judith Eve Lipton, a retired psychiatrist, is the founder of the Washington state chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.


Stubborn like a musk ox -- why Homo sapiens can't think straight about nuclear weapons

Editor's Note: David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington. Since the early 1980s he has actively researched, promoted and practiced the field of peace studies. His op-ed in the Los Angeles times presents a unique, thought-provoking perspective on our thinking about nuclear weapons (and how we might change it "in our own self-interest). David gave permission to reprint his op-ed here, and encourages others to share it as well. I hope it will be shared widely.

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Stubborn like a musk ox -- why Homo sapiens can't think straight about nuclear weapons

By David P. Barash

Note: Originally published in the Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2015, Reprinted here with the author's permission

Most people can be forgiven for ignoring the threat posed by nuclear weapons. It might seem surprising, but we have been preprogrammed by our own evolutionary history to engage in such ignorance. The nuclear age is just a tiny blip tacked on to our very recent phylogenetic past, so when it comes to the greatest of all risks to human survival, we are more threatened by the instincts we lack than by those we possess..

And yet, we are genuinely threatened by those weapons we possess, which the United States government is planning to upgrade at an estimated cost of $1 trillion over the next three decades. Partly in response, on Thursday the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset its iconic Doomsday Clock from five minutes to midnight to three minutes and counting.

How does evolution create our ignorance, thereby adding to our danger? Because its two forms — biological and cultural — are disconnected, and so are we, from our own self-interest.

Homo sapiens is the product of biological evolution — a painfully slow Darwinian process — yet we are simultaneously enmeshed in its cultural counterpart, a Lamarckian phenomenon which, by contrast, is blindingly fast and proceeds under its own rules. We have one foot thrust into the cultural present and the other stuck in our biological past.

Individuals, after all, do not evolve in the Darwinian sense; only populations and lineages do. And they are shackled to the realities of genetics and reproduction, since organic evolution is a process whereby gene frequencies change over time. Accordingly, generations are required for even the smallest evolutionary step.

By contrast, cultural evolution is astoundingly rapid. Acquired characteristics can be “inherited,” a la Lamarck, in hours or days, then passed along to other individuals, modified yet again before being picked up or dropped altogether. For example, in just a few decades (less than an instant in biological time), personal computers were developed, proliferated and modified. If they had “evolved” by Darwinian, biological means, as a favorable mutation to be promoted in one or even a handful of individuals, there would currently be only a dozen or so computer users instead of billions.

Just a superficial glance at human history shows today's world is vastly different from that of a century ago, which is almost unimaginably different from 50,000 years ago. And yet a Cro-Magnon baby, magically plunked down at birth in 21st century America, could very well find herself comfortably reading on her iPad, and offspring of today's technophiles could adapt to the world of saber-toothed cats and stone axes.

Consider that stone ax. The history of civilization is, in large part, one of ever-greater efficiency in killing, as in the progression from club, knife and spear, to bow and arrow, musket, rifle, cannon, battleship, bomber and nuclear-tipped ICBM. At the same time, the human being who creates and manipulates these devices has not changed much at all.

As a biological creature, in fact, Homo sapiens is poorly adapted for killing, given his puny nails, minimal jaws and laughable little teeth. But cultural evolution has made it not only possible but easy.

This biology-culture disconnect is especially acute in the realm of nuclear weapons. At the one-year anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Albert Einstein famously noted that “the splitting of the atom has changed everything but our way of thinking; hence we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

He might have been talking about musk oxen. These shaggy Arctic beasts have long employed a very effective strategy when confronted by their enemies: wolves. They herd the juveniles into the center while the adults face outward, arrayed like the spokes of a wheel. Even the hungriest wolf finds it intimidating to confront a wall of sharp horns and bony foreheads, backed by a thousand pounds of angry pot roast. For countless generations, their behavior served musk oxen well.

But in more modern times, their primary threat hasn't been wolves, but human hunters carrying high-powered rifles. Today, musk oxen would do better if they spread out and high-tailed it toward the horizon, but instead they respond as previous generations always have — forming their trusted defensive circle — and are easily slaughtered.

Human actions changed everything but the musk ox way of thinking; as they clung to their biology they drifted toward unparalleled catastrophe, until another human action (conservation) intervened.

Humans also cling to (or remain unconsciously influenced by) our biology. That stubbornness is especially evident when it comes to thinking, or not thinking, about nuclear weapons.

Take, for example, this widespread difficulty: When told something is “hot,” most of us readily think in terms of boiling water or burning wood. The biological creature within cannot effectively grasp the meaning of millions of degrees. Before the artificial splitting of uranium and plutonium atoms, nuclear explosions had never occurred on Earth. Even in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are unprepared to wrap our minds around them, including the vast scale of destruction, deaths by the millions, and in minutes.

And so the conflict between our biological natures and our cultural products cloaks nuclear weapons in a kind of psychological untouchability.

But does this mean that things are hopeless, that we are the helpless victims of this aspect of our human natures? As Carl Sagan emphasized, eliminating nuclear weapons — certainly not building more or upgrading what we have — is a basic requirement of species-wide sanity and good planetary hygiene.

The missiles, bombers, bombs and warheads in our nuclear arsenal are our own creation, our own responsibility, not something imposed upon us by a malignant God. And we are the most adaptable of all creatures, probably the only ones capable of acting, consciously, in our own self-interest. Once we stop acting like musk oxen.

Original source URL: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-barash-nuclear-weapons-evolution-20150125-story.html