War : Survivors, Memory, and Moral Responsibility (18)

During the Manhattan Project, physicist Enrico Fermi was asked about the chance that the first nuclear test might ignite the atmosphere. With dry humour, he replied: “Well, I would say two or three per cent.” The audience laughed nervously, revealing the surreal mix of humour and dread that surrounded the birth of nuclear weapons. This scientific uncertainty set the tone for how nuclear power was perceived—not merely as a technical achievement, but as a force that could threaten existence itself. 

Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, was briefed about the atomic bomb after the war. He reportedly remarked: “This is the Second Coming in Wrath.” His words reflected both awe and fear at the destructive power unleashed. From the laboratory to the corridors of power, nuclear weapons were quickly recognised as instruments that transcended ordinary warfare, shaping political imagination and global strategy.

After Hiroshima, many ordinary citizens in the United States expressed mixed feelings. One woman in New York said: “Thank God the war is over, but I can’t help wondering what kind of world we’ve entered.” Her words captured the paradox of victory shadowed by dread. Such public voices remind us that nuclear weapons were not only a matter of politics and science, but also a source of anxiety for everyday people who sensed the dawn of a new and uncertain era.

In post-war Japan, survivors recalled children asking why the “pikadon” (flash-bang) had happened. The innocent phrasing became a poignant anecdote of how ordinary people tried to make sense of devastation. This final perspective brings us to the human core of the nuclear story—where innocence, trauma, and memory converge—preparing us to examine the broader possibilities of nuclear use in war, diplomacy, and deterrence.

The anecdotes surrounding the atomic bomb—whether Fermi’s dry humour, Churchill’s solemn awe, or the innocent questions of Japanese children—reveal more than mere reactions. They highlight the profound uncertainty and moral unease that accompanied the dawn of nuclear weapons. Such stories serve as a bridge, reminding us that behind every technical achievement lies a human dimension of fear, wonder, and responsibility.

From these moments of public and political reflection, it becomes clear that the bomb was never simply a military tool. Instead, it was perceived as a force capable of reshaping the very fabric of international relations and human existence. This perception naturally leads us to consider the possible uses of nuclear weapons—not only in war, but also in diplomacy, deterrence, and the shaping of global order.

Thus, the anecdotes act as entry points into a broader discussion. They show how humour, dread, and curiosity converged in the face of unprecedented power, and they prepare us to examine the practical, strategic, and ethical possibilities of nuclear deployment in the decades that followed.

THE NUCLEAR THRESHOLD

History, Proliferation, and the Prospect of Use in the Twenty-First Century

I. Introduction: The Shadow That Has Never Lifted

On 6 August 1945, at 8:15 in the morning, a single American aircraft released a device above the Japanese city of Hiroshima that killed between 70,000 and 80,000 people in an instant and would claim, through radiation and injury, perhaps 140,000 lives by the end of that year. Three days later, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. In those two moments, humanity crossed a threshold from which it has never returned. Nuclear weapons—devices capable of obliterating entire cities with the destructive energy of tens of thousands of tonnes of conventional explosive—became a permanent feature of the international order.

More than eight decades have elapsed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that span, the world has been fortunate: no nuclear weapon has been fired in anger. Yet this fortunate record conceals a history of extraordinary danger—of crises that came perilously close to catastrophe, of miscalculations narrowly averted, of command-and-control failures that could have ended civilisation. And as the twenty-first century deepens, the conditions that sustained the long nuclear peace are eroding. Geopolitical rivalries are sharpening, arms control architecture is collapsing, and the circle of nuclear-armed states has widened.

This essay proceeds in two parts. The first surveys the history of nuclear weapons: from the Manhattan Project and the bombings of Japan, through the Cold War arms race, to the present configuration of nuclear-armed states and their arsenals. The second part undertakes an analytical assessment of the scenarios under which nuclear weapons might be used—by which actors, under which circumstances, and with what likely consequences. The purpose is not alarmism but clarity: to understand the nuclear question with the seriousness it demands.

PART ONE: THE HISTORY OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS

II. Origins: Physics, Politics, and the Manhattan Project

The intellectual foundations of nuclear weapons were laid not by soldiers or statesmen but by physicists—men and women working at the frontier of the understanding of matter itself. In 1905, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which contained the famous equation E = mc², establishing that mass and energy are interconvertible at an exchange rate governed by the square of the speed of light. The energy locked within even a small quantity of matter was, by this reckoning, almost incomprehensibly vast.

The practical path to exploiting that energy began to open in the 1930s. In 1932, James Chadwick at Cambridge discovered the neutron. In 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, working in Berlin, demonstrated nuclear fission: the splitting of a uranium nucleus by a slow neutron, releasing energy and producing further neutrons capable of splitting additional nuclei. The physicist Lise Meitner—who had collaborated with Hahn but been forced to flee Nazi Germany as a Jewish woman—provided the theoretical interpretation. The chain reaction, the conceptual heart of the atomic bomb, was now imaginable.

What turned this scientific possibility into a military programme was the political catastrophe of the Second World War and, above all, the fear that Nazi Germany might develop the weapon first. In August 1939, Einstein and the Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning that Germany might be developing nuclear weapons and urging the United States to pursue its own programme. Roosevelt authorised preliminary research.

The Manhattan Project—the vast, secret American industrial and scientific effort to build the bomb—formally came into being in 1942 under the direction of General Leslie Groves, with the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as scientific director. At its peak, it employed more than 130,000 people across sites including Los Alamos in New Mexico, Oak Ridge in Tennessee, and Hanford in Washington State. It consumed some $2 billion (equivalent to roughly $30 billion today) and drew upon the greatest concentration of scientific talent in history, including refugees from fascist Europe: Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and many others.

On 16 July 1945, at a test site in the New Mexico desert known as Trinity, the first nuclear device — nicknamed 'the Gadget'—was detonated. The yield was approximately 21 kilotons of TNT equivalent. Watching the explosion, Oppenheimer reportedly recalled a line from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' By then, Germany had already surrendered. The weapon had been built to fight one enemy; it would be used against another.

 

III. Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The First and Only Use in War

The decision to deploy atomic bombs against Japan remains one of the most debated in modern history. President Harry S. Truman, who had assumed the presidency upon Roosevelt's death in April 1945, was told of the Manhattan Project only after taking office. He and his advisers faced a stark military situation: Japan showed no signs of surrender despite the devastation visited upon its cities by conventional bombing, and American military planners projected that an invasion of the Japanese home islands could cost hundreds of thousands of American and millions of Japanese lives.

On 6 August 1945, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay, piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets, dropped a uranium-based bomb—'Little Boy'—on Hiroshima, the headquarters of Japan's Second Army. The explosion, at a height of roughly 600 metres, released energy equivalent to approximately 15 kilotons of TNT. The temperature at the hypocentre reached an estimated 4,000 degrees Celsius. Buildings within a kilometre were obliterated. Fires raged across the city. Between 70,000 and 80,000 people died immediately; radiation sickness, burns, and injuries would bring the total to perhaps 140,000 by December 1945.

On 9 August, a plutonium bomb—' Fat Man'—was dropped on Nagasaki, the second-choice target after the primary target of Kokura was obscured by cloud. The Nagasaki bomb was more powerful—approximately 21 kilotons—but the city's hilly topography confined the blast somewhat, and immediate deaths are estimated at between 40,000 and 50,000, rising to approximately 80,000 by year's end. On 15 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender.

The moral and strategic debates provoked by these bombings have never been fully resolved. Defenders argue that the bombs ended the war quickly, prevented a catastrophic invasion, and ultimately saved more lives than they destroyed. Critics contend that Japan was already on the verge of surrender, that the bombings were directed at civilian populations in contravention of the laws of war, and that they were in part an act of geopolitical signalling directed at the Soviet Union. What is certain is that Hiroshima and Nagasaki established the parameters of nuclear horror—parameters that have shadowed international politics ever since.

 

IV. The Cold War Arms Race: Deterrence, Proliferation, and Near-Misses

The American monopoly on nuclear weapons lasted barely four years. The Soviet Union, drawing upon its own programme and upon intelligence obtained partly through espionage, detonated its first atomic bomb in August 1949. The United Kingdom followed in 1952, France in 1960, and China in 1964. The nuclear club was expanding even as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was shaping every dimension of international politics.

The development of thermonuclear weapons—hydrogen bombs, which use a fission device to trigger a vastly more powerful fusion reaction—raised the destructive potential to a qualitatively different level. The United States detonated its first thermonuclear device in 1952; the Soviet Union followed in 1953. By the mid-1950s, both superpowers possessed weapons thousands of times more destructive than those dropped on Japan. A single large thermonuclear warhead could, in principle, destroy an entire metropolitan area.

The doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD) emerged as the operative logic of nuclear deterrence. The reasoning was grim but coherent: if each superpower maintained a secure second-strike capability—the ability to absorb a nuclear first strike and still retaliate with devastating effect—neither would rationally initiate a nuclear exchange. The weapons, paradoxically, became useful precisely because they were intended never to be used. Stability rested upon the credibility of mutual annihilation.

Yet the Cold War nuclear peace was not placid. Its most dangerous moment came in October 1962, when American reconnaissance aircraft photographed Soviet missile installations under construction in Cuba. The thirteen-day Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any other moment in the nuclear age. President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev negotiated a resolution—Soviet missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba in exchange for an American pledge not to invade the island and a secret agreement to remove American missiles from Turkey—but the outcome was far from foreordained. Subsequent research has revealed that Soviet submarines in the area were carrying nuclear-armed torpedoes, and that at least one Soviet submarine commander came close to authorising their use against American vessels.

Less well known but comparably dangerous was the Able Archer 83 exercise of November 1983, in which NATO simulated the transition to nuclear warfare with a realism that convinced Soviet intelligence that an actual Western nuclear first strike might be imminent. Soviet nuclear forces were placed on heightened alert. Only later did Western leaders learn how close the world had come to a catastrophic misunderstanding.

Arms control emerged as the principal institutional mechanism for managing nuclear danger. The Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963) prohibited nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT, 1968) sought to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the five recognised nuclear states while committing those states to eventual disarmament. The SALT I and II agreements, and later START I and II, placed limits on strategic nuclear arsenals. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987, signed by Reagan and Gorbachev, eliminated an entire category of nuclear weapons from Europe.

 

V. After the Cold War: New Proliferators and Eroding Architecture

The end of the Cold War did not end the nuclear danger; it transformed it. The Soviet arsenal was divided among four successor states — Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan—and the latter three ultimately relinquished their weapons to Russia under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Ukraine received security assurances (though not formal guarantees) from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. That undertaking's subsequent breach, when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and invaded Ukraine fully in 2022, has cast a long shadow over non-proliferation diplomacy.

Three states acquired nuclear weapons outside the NPT framework. India and Pakistan, which had fought three conventional wars, both conducted nuclear tests in 1998. Both now possess arsenals estimated at 160 to 170 warheads each. Their mutual deterrence operates in a peculiarly dangerous environment: the two countries share a contested border, have fought multiple limited wars, experience periodic crises precipitated by cross-border terrorism, and have shorter warning times for ballistic missiles than the Cold War superpowers ever did.

Israel has maintained a policy of nuclear ambiguity—neither confirming nor denying possession of nuclear weapons—since at least the 1960s, when it is generally believed to have acquired the capability. Estimates of Israel's arsenal vary from approximately 80 to 400 warheads. North Korea, after years of developing its programme under international sanctions, conducted its first nuclear test in 2006 and has since refined its weapons to include thermonuclear devices and delivery systems capable, in principle, of reaching the continental United States.

Meanwhile, the arms control architecture constructed during the Cold War has been significantly dismantled. The United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, enabling the development of missile defence systems that Russia regards as threatening to its deterrent. The INF Treaty, which had eliminated ground-launched intermediate-range missiles, was abandoned in 2019 following mutual accusations of non-compliance. The New START Treaty—the last remaining bilateral strategic arms control agreement between the United States and Russia—was suspended by Russia in 2023 in the context of the war in Ukraine. Negotiations for its successor have not been initiated.

The global nuclear stockpile at its peak, in the mid-1980s, exceeded 70,000 warheads. It has since been reduced dramatically, to approximately 12,100 warheads as of early 2026, of which roughly 9,600 are in the military stockpiles of the nine nuclear-armed states and approximately 3,900 are deployed—that is, placed on missiles or at bomber bases. The reductions are real, but the remaining arsenal is still more than sufficient to end industrial civilisation.

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PART TWO: THE PROSPECT OF USE — AN ANALYTICAL ASSESSMENT

VI. The Nine Nuclear-Armed States: A Survey

Any analysis of nuclear use must begin with a survey of the nine states that possess nuclear weapons and the strategic doctrines that govern them.

The United States

The United States possesses approximately 5,550 warheads, of which roughly 1,700 are deployed on a triad of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and nuclear-capable aircraft. American nuclear doctrine is governed by the Nuclear Posture Review, most recently updated in 2022, which contemplates nuclear use in extreme circumstances, including not only nuclear attack but also non-nuclear attacks of strategic magnitude against the United States, its allies, or partners. The United States has historically maintained a 'no first use' ambiguity—declining to rule out first use—and remains committed to extended deterrence for NATO allies, Japan, and South Korea. 

Russia

Russia possesses approximately 6,200 warheads—the world's largest arsenal—including a significant number of non-strategic (tactical) nuclear weapons for which no binding international limits exist. Russian nuclear doctrine, updated in 2020, explicitly contemplates nuclear use in response to conventional attacks that threaten the 'existence of the state,' a formulation that has taken on acute significance in the context of the war in Ukraine. Since 2022, Russian officials—including President Vladimir Putin—have made repeated public references to nuclear weapons, raising Western concerns about Russian willingness to use them coercively. 

China

China has historically maintained a relatively small arsenal under a declared 'no first use' policy, but is engaged in a rapid and substantial build-up. Estimates suggest China now possesses approximately 500 warheads and is projected to reach 1,000 by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035. China is also constructing hundreds of new ICBM silos. This expansion is altering the strategic calculus in the Indo-Pacific and complicating any future US-Russia bilateral arms control framework, since China would need to be included in any comprehensive regime. 

The United Kingdom and France

Both Britain and France maintain relatively small arsenals—approximately 225 and 290 warheads respectively—consisting primarily of submarine-launched missiles. Both are committed to NATO's nuclear sharing arrangements. Their doctrines emphasise deterrence of existential threats and are calibrated to the minimum credible deterrent rather than to war-fighting. 

India and Pakistan

India and Pakistan each possess approximately 160 to 170 warheads. India's doctrine is guided by 'no first use' and 'credible minimum deterrence,' though analysts have debated whether India's actual posture is consistent with those commitments. Pakistan explicitly rejects no first use, maintaining nuclear weapons as an equaliser against India's conventional superiority. The possibility of Pakistani use in response to a losing conventional battle is a particular concern among strategists. 

Israel

Israel's nuclear arsenal remains officially unacknowledged but is widely estimated at between 80 and 400 warheads. Israeli doctrine—to the extent it can be inferred—appears to contemplate nuclear weapons as a last resort against existential threats, an approach sometimes called the 'Samson Option.' The volatile state of the Middle East, including Iran's nuclear ambitions and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Iranian conflicts, makes Israel's situation one of the most strategically fraught in the world. 

North Korea

North Korea is estimated to have between 40 and 50 nuclear warheads, with fissile material for perhaps 80 to 90. Its delivery systems include ICBMs potentially capable of reaching the United States. Kim Jong-un's regime appears to view nuclear weapons not only as a deterrent but as a tool of coercion and regime survival. Doctrine is opaque, but North Korea has codified into law the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons in certain circumstances, including threats to the leadership.

 

VII. Scenarios for Nuclear Use: A Typology

The question of where and how nuclear weapons might actually be used is best approached through a systematic consideration of the scenarios most frequently analysed by strategic thinkers. These scenarios differ along several dimensions: the scale of use (tactical vs. strategic), the actors involved, the degree of deliberateness, and the role of escalation dynamics.

 

Scenario A: Russia and the War in Ukraine

The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, which began with Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, has introduced the most concrete nuclear risk the world has faced since the Cold War. Russia's nuclear signalling has been unprecedented in its frequency and explicitness. The scenario most commonly discussed is the use of a tactical nuclear weapon—a lower-yield battlefield device—either against Ukrainian forces, as a demonstration strike on Ukrainian territory, or against the supply lines or territory of a NATO state providing military assistance.

The rationale for such use would likely be military reversal combined with the calculation that NATO would not respond in kind, fearing escalation. The risks of this path are, however, enormous. A nuclear strike on Ukraine would likely trigger severe conventional and economic retaliation by the Western alliance, could prompt other nuclear states to reconsider their own doctrines, and would demolish the nuclear taboo that has governed international relations since 1945. Precisely this uncertainty—about how the West would respond—has thus far appeared to restrain Russian decision-making, even in moments of acute military stress.

 

Scenario B: South Asia—India and Pakistan

The India-Pakistan nuclear dyad represents what many strategists regard as the most dangerous nuclear situation in the world. Both countries have relatively small arsenals on high alert, short missile flight times of approximately five minutes between capitals, and a history of crises that have come close to conventional conflict. Scenarios for nuclear use typically involve a major terrorist attack on India attributed to Pakistani-based groups—as occurred in 2001 and 2008—followed by an Indian conventional military response that crosses Pakistani red lines, at which point Pakistan faces the choice of conventional defeat or nuclear use.

A regional nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan could kill millions directly. Studies have suggested that even a limited exchange—100 Hiroshima-scale bombs—could inject sufficient soot and smoke into the stratosphere to reduce global temperatures by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius for a decade, disrupting agriculture globally and potentially causing a billion additional deaths from famine. This 'nuclear winter' effect makes a South Asian nuclear exchange a global catastrophe even for states far removed from the conflict.

Scenario C: North Korea and the Korean Peninsula

North Korea's nuclear weapons serve multiple purposes for Pyongyang: regime survival through deterrence, coercive leverage over South Korea and the United States, and potentially a tool of last resort in any conflict that threatens the regime's existence. The most plausible scenarios for use involve either a pre-emptive North Korean strike in anticipation of a regime-change military operation, or use in the final stages of a losing conventional conflict. A North Korean nuclear strike against South Korean cities or American military bases in the region could kill hundreds of thousands immediately and would inevitably trigger an overwhelming American conventional and potentially nuclear response. 

Scenario D: Middle East—Israel and Iran

Iran's nuclear programme has been a central preoccupation of Israeli strategic planning for two decades. Israel has repeatedly signalled that it would take military action to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Were Iran to approach the nuclear threshold—or cross it—Israel might conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. The risk of nuclear use in this context involves not Israel initiating nuclear warfare but rather the escalatory dynamics that could follow Israeli conventional strikes on Iran, Iranian retaliation against Israel, and Israel's potential use of nuclear weapons if it faced an existential military threat.

The situation is further complicated by the regional dimension: Iran's nuclear capability, if achieved, could trigger a cascade of proliferation among neighbouring states—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and others—that might seek their own nuclear deterrents. A multi-polar nuclear Middle East would be extraordinarily difficult to manage.

 

Scenario E: Accident, Miscalculation, or Unauthorised Use

History provides numerous examples of near-misses stemming not from deliberate decision but from technical malfunction, intelligence failure, or command failure. In 1983, the Soviet early-warning satellite system gave a false indication of an American missile launch; Stanislav Petrov, the duty officer, correctly judged it to be a malfunction and did not report it as an attack. In 1995, Russia briefly prepared to launch missiles after detecting what turned out to be a Norwegian scientific rocket that had been mistaken for a US submarine-launched ballistic missile.

As nuclear arsenals age, as cyber capabilities increasingly threaten command-and-control systems, and as warning times shorten with the proliferation of hypersonic missiles, the risk of accident or miscalculation increases. The states most vulnerable to these failures are those with the least sophisticated command-and-control arrangements—Pakistan, North Korea, and, in a crisis, any state operating under extreme stress.

 

Scenario F: Non-State Actors and Radiological Terrorism

The acquisition of nuclear weapons by terrorist organisations remains one of the most feared scenarios in counter-proliferation policy, though arguably the least likely given the technical and logistical barriers involved. More plausible is radiological terrorism—the construction of a 'dirty bomb,' combining conventional explosives with radioactive material that could contaminate an urban area and cause mass panic, enormous economic disruption, and political crisis, even if casualties from radiation were relatively limited. The international community has worked to secure radioactive materials globally, but vulnerabilities remain, particularly in states with weak governance.

 

VIII. The Erosion of the Nuclear Taboo

One of the most consequential features of the post-1945 nuclear order has been the nuclear taboo: the powerful political and moral norm against the use of nuclear weapons, reinforced by the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the development of international humanitarian law, and by the repeated choices of nuclear-armed states not to use their weapons even when they might have had military incentives to do so. The United States did not use nuclear weapons in Korea, in Vietnam, or in its other post-1945 conflicts. The Soviet Union did not use them in Afghanistan. China has never used its weapons offensively.

That taboo, however, has shown signs of weakening. Russian political and military discourse has normalised nuclear signalling to a degree without precedent since the Cold War. North Korea has codified pre-emptive use in law. Some voices in strategic debates—particularly in South Asia and the Middle East—have questioned whether the taboo is truly universal or merely a reflection of a particular balance of power. As the generation that lived through Hiroshima and Nagasaki passes from the scene, the visceral memory that has sustained the taboo will fade.

The collapse of arms control further erodes the institutional framework that has sustained restraint. When the NPT was concluded in 1968, it rested on a bargain: non-nuclear states would forgo weapons in exchange for the nuclear states' commitment to disarm. That commitment has never been fulfilled. The frustration of non-nuclear states with the double standard—in which the nuclear powers insist on their own deterrents while prohibiting others from acquiring them—has fuelled support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW, 2021), which none of the nuclear-armed states has signed.

 

IX. Consequences: The Scale of Catastrophe

Any honest analysis of nuclear use must confront the scale of its potential consequences. A single modern thermonuclear warhead detonated over a major city would release energy of approximately one megaton—equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. The immediate blast, heat, and radiation would kill hundreds of thousands. The ensuing firestorm, if the weapon were detonated over a dense urban area, would kill hundreds of thousands more.

A large-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia—involving even a fraction of their arsenals—would have global consequences. The most comprehensive scientific modelling suggests that such an exchange could inject five to 150 million tonnes of soot into the stratosphere, blocking sunlight, reducing global temperatures by up to 10 degrees Celsius for several years, and devastating global agriculture. Estimates of global famine deaths in such a scenario range from hundreds of millions to five billion. The extinction of industrial civilisation—and possibly of the human species—cannot be excluded.

Even a 'limited' regional exchange, as noted above, would have global agricultural and humanitarian consequences far beyond the region affected. There is, in the nuclear domain, no clean or localised catastrophe. Every nuclear war is, potentially, a world war by other means.

 

X. Conclusion: Living Under the Nuclear Shadow

The history of nuclear weapons is a history of astonishing scientific achievement, of catastrophic violence, and of a decades-long, imperfect, but partially successful effort to manage an unprecedented danger. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated what these weapons do to human beings. The Cold War demonstrated that great powers can, under certain conditions, be restrained by mutual deterrence. The period since has demonstrated that those conditions are not permanent.

The twenty-first century presents a more complex nuclear landscape than the Cold War: more actors, more contested regions, weakening arms control, and a global political culture in which the memory of Hiroshima is fading. The scenarios assessed here—Russia and Ukraine, South Asia, the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East, accident and miscalculation, radiological terrorism—are not remote or theoretical. Each represents a real combination of actors, interests, capabilities, and dynamics that could, under conditions of stress, produce nuclear use.

What sustains the hope that nuclear use can continue to be avoided? Several things: the continued functioning of deterrence, however imperfect; the residual strength of the nuclear taboo; the interests of nuclear states in avoiding wars that would destroy what they seek to protect; the work of arms control diplomats and non-proliferation institutions; and, not least, the informed engagement of citizens and policymakers with the reality of nuclear danger.

That engagement begins with knowledge—of what these weapons are, of how they came to exist, of who possesses them and why, and of how they might be used. It is in that spirit that this essay has been written. The nuclear shadow has never lifted. The question is whether humanity will have the wisdom to ensure it never falls.

[Part 19]

[Part 17]

Bahasa

War : Survivors, Memory, and Moral Responsibility (17)

The attack on Andrie Yunus, deputy coordinator of KontraS, unfolded on the evening of 12 March 2026 in Central Jakarta. Having just left a meeting at the YLBHI office, he was ambushed by two assailants on a motorbike who hurled acid at him. The assault left him with burns across nearly a quarter of his body and severe damage to his eyes, requiring corneal implant surgery. The police quickly escalated the case to a formal investigation, combing through dozens of CCTV recordings, while civil society groups staged demonstrations in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, demanding accountability.

To understand the gravity of this incident, one must consider Yunus’s background. As a prominent figure in KontraS, he has been deeply involved in exposing human rights abuses and challenging state impunity. His work often placed him at odds with powerful interests, and he became a visible symbol of resistance against authoritarian tendencies. In that sense, the attack was not random violence but a calculated strike against a voice that consistently questioned the erosion of democratic safeguards.

The impact of the assault reverberates beyond the personal tragedy of Yunus’s injuries. It signals a chilling climate for activists in Indonesia, where the use of acid as a weapon is both symbolic and practical: it disfigures, silences, and instils fear. The brazenness of the attack in a central urban area underscores the vulnerability of those who dare to speak out. Public reaction has been swift, with solidarity actions and international coverage framing the incident as an attempt to muzzle dissent. Yet the deeper consequence lies in the psychological terrain—activists now operate under heightened anxiety, while ordinary citizens witness the fragility of democratic space.

From a broader perspective, the assault illustrates the precarious balance between Indonesia’s democratic aspirations and the persistence of coercive tactics. If the perpetrators and masterminds remain unidentified or unpunished, the episode risks normalising violence as a tool of political control. Conversely, a transparent investigation and genuine accountability could reaffirm the state’s commitment to human rights. The case of Andrie Yunus is not merely about one man’s suffering; it is a litmus test for the resilience of Indonesia’s democratic institutions and the courage of its civil society.

There have been similar cases before. The assault on Andrie Yunus in March 2026 echoes one of the most notorious acid attacks in Indonesia: the case of Novel Baswedan in April 2017. Novel, a senior investigator at the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), was attacked with acid while returning home from morning prayers, leaving him with severe eye injuries. The incident became emblematic of the dangers faced by those who challenge entrenched power and corruption, and the sluggish handling of the case fuelled public distrust in law enforcement. The parallels between the two cases are striking. Both victims were high-profile figures engaged in exposing abuses of authority—Novel in the realm of corruption, Yunus in human rights advocacy. Both were attacked in public spaces, and both assaults employed acid, a weapon chosen not only for its physical destructiveness but also for its symbolic power: it disfigures, silences, and instils fear. In each case, the violence was not random but targeted, designed to intimidate and to send a message to others who might dare to speak out. The broader impact of these incidents lies in the erosion of democratic confidence. Novel’s case demonstrated how justice could be delayed and diluted, with masterminds shielded from accountability. Yunus’s case now raises the spectre of repetition, suggesting that such attacks may become a recurring tactic against dissent. For activists and civil society, the consequence is a heightened sense of vulnerability, while for the wider public, it underscores the fragility of democratic protections. If the state fails to deliver justice, violence risks becoming normalised as a political instrument. In short, the attack on Andrie Yunus is not an isolated tragedy but part of a troubling continuum. It forces Indonesia to confront whether it will break the cycle of impunity or allow intimidation to become the accepted language of power.

When we place Indonesia’s acid attack cases alongside those in South Asia and Europe, a comparative narrative emerges that highlights both shared patterns and distinctive contexts. In Indonesia, the assaults on Novel Baswedan in 2017 and Andrie Yunus in 2026 were deeply political, targeting individuals who embodied resistance to corruption and human rights abuses. These attacks were not merely personal vendettas but calculated acts designed to silence voices that threatened entrenched power. The symbolism of acid—its capacity to permanently disfigure and instil fear—was harnessed as a weapon of intimidation against reformist figures in a democratic setting still grappling with authoritarian residues.

In South Asia, particularly Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, acid attacks have historically been more widespread, often directed at women and activists challenging patriarchal norms, forced marriage, or caste hierarchies. While the Indonesian cases were tied to political dissent, South Asian assaults frequently carried a social dimension, punishing those who sought autonomy or equality. Yet the underlying logic was similar: acid was used to enforce conformity, to mark the body as a site of control, and to deter others from following the same path of resistance. The Bangladeshi government eventually enacted strict laws to curb acid violence, but the scars—both physical and societal—remain a reminder of how reformist voices were targeted.

Europe presents another layer of comparison. In the United Kingdom during the 19th century, “vitriol throwing” became notorious in labour disputes and personal conflicts. Though not always politically motivated, these attacks carried the same symbolic weight: permanent disfigurement as punishment and deterrence. More recently, acid assaults in London and other European cities have been linked to gang violence and personal vendettas, showing how the weapon’s appeal lies in its accessibility and its capacity to terrorise. Unlike Indonesia and South Asia, where acid attacks often intersect with activism and social reform, European cases tend to emerge from urban crime and interpersonal disputes, yet the psychological impact remains consistent.

Juxtaposing these histories reveals both parallels and divergences. The common thread is the use of acid as a weapon of fear, chosen for its ability to leave indelible marks and silence voices. The differences lie in the contexts: Indonesia’s cases are tied to political activism, South Asia’s to gender and social reform, and Europe’s to labour conflict or urban crime. Together, they illustrate how acid attacks transcend geography, becoming a universal instrument of intimidation whenever power feels threatened. In this way, the assault on Andrie Yunus situates Indonesia within a global continuum of violence, reminding us that the struggle for democracy and human rights is always shadowed by attempts to suppress it through terror and destruction.

The Indonesian Government and the House of Representatives of Indonesia have expressed serious concern over the acid attack against Andrie Yunus. The Chief of Police ordered a thorough investigation, while Commission III of the DPR urged the disclosure of the mastermind and described the incident as a form of resistance against authority. Several members of the DPR also emphasised that the perpetrators did not come from the security forces or the government. However, Statements from certain members of the DPR asserting that the perpetrators were not from the security forces or the government cannot simply be taken at face value. Such claims, while politically significant, remain speculative unless supported by transparent investigation and credible evidence. In contexts where attacks on activists have historically raised suspicions of institutional involvement or complicity, these assertions must be tested against a thorough, independent inquiry. Blind acceptance risks reinforcing impunity and undermining public trust. What matters most is not the immediate political narrative but the integrity of the investigative process, which alone can establish accountability and restore confidence in democratic institutions.

International institutions have indeed responded firmly to the acid attack on Andrie Yunus. Amnesty International, for instance, condemned the incident as a brutal assault intended to silence a human rights defender. They stressed that this should not be dismissed as an ordinary street crime but recognised as a grave threat to freedom of expression and the protection of human rights in Indonesia. Amnesty also highlighted that the Indonesian government has a duty to safeguard those who stand at the forefront of defending civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, and that its failure to do so reflects a troubling weakness in its democratic commitments.

In addition, international media such as The Independent drew attention to the case, portraying it as part of a wider pattern of intimidation against activists in Indonesia. Their reporting described the attack as an attempt to suppress critical voices, noting the severe burns Yunus sustained and the outrage it provoked internationally. This coverage underscored the perception that Indonesia is struggling to protect its human rights defenders, thereby raising concerns about its democratic credibility.

Taken together, these international reactions show that the assault on Yunus is not seen merely as a domestic issue but as a test of Indonesia’s reputation on the global stage. The condemnation from Amnesty International and the scrutiny of international media amount to both moral denunciation and political pressure, urging the Indonesian government to conduct a transparent investigation and ensure that both perpetrators and masterminds are held accountable.

The acid attacks on both Novel Baswedan and Andrie Yunus are acts that deserve unequivocal condemnation. They are not simply assaults on individuals but direct strikes against democratic values, moral courage, and fundamental human rights. Novel was targeted while pursuing major corruption cases, and Yunus became a victim because of his steadfast defence of human rights. In both instances, acid was deliberately chosen as a weapon of terror: it not only wounds the body but seeks to erase courage and silence critical voices in the public sphere.

The most fitting response is not merely to “condemn” but to reject any attempt to normalise violence against activists. These attacks are dangerous messages of intimidation, and if left without accountability, they risk fostering a culture of impunity. What is required is strong moral denunciation, solidarity with the victims, and a demand that the state demonstrate its commitment to protecting those who dare to speak out.

In other words, the cases of Novel Baswedan and Andrie Yunus must be seen as major tests for Indonesia’s democracy. Condemnation alone is insufficient; civil society and the state must ensure that justice is delivered, so that violence does not become an accepted language of politics.

The discussion of acid attacks on activists such as Andrie Yunus naturally leads us to reflect on broader patterns of violence and intimidation in modern history. When societies witness attempts to silence dissent through physical harm, it raises questions about the extremes to which power can go in order to maintain control. This trajectory of thought opens a path towards examining one of the most devastating uses of violence in the twentieth century: the atomic bomb. Just as acid attacks are designed to instil fear and suppress voices, the deployment of nuclear weapons was intended not only to end a war but also to demonstrate overwhelming dominance. Moving from the microcosm of individual assaults to the macrocosm of global conflict allows us to see how different scales of violence share a common thread—an effort to reshape political realities through terror and destruction.

THE ATOMIC BOMB

Origins, Motives, and Consequences

Doctor Manhattan is a character in the graphic novel Watchmen (1986–1987) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The name "Manhattan" was chosen as a deliberate and explicit reference to the Manhattan Project—and the connection runs considerably deeper than the name alone.

The character's origin is itself an allegory of the Manhattan Project

Doctor Manhattan—born Jon Osterman—was a nuclear physicist employed at a United States government laboratory during the Cold War. He suffered a catastrophic accident inside a physics test chamber, his body disintegrating entirely, before he gradually reconstructed himself into a superhuman entity capable of manipulating matter, space, and time. Moore consciously designed this transformation as a metaphor: a scientist consumed by the very forces he had helped to create—precisely as the Manhattan Project's scientists, in the aftermath of Trinity and Hiroshima, felt they had unleashed something that had long since passed beyond their control.

The thematic parallels Moore deliberately constructed

Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen embodies the same moral question that haunted Oppenheimer and his colleagues: when science produces a power that transcends human understanding, does the scientist bear any responsibility for its consequences?

Oppenheimer said, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." The sentence originates from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu sacred scripture, Chapter XI, verse 32—spoken by the god Vishnu in his cosmic form to the warrior-prince Arjuna. In the original Sanskrit, the verse reads: "Kālo'smi lokakṣayakṛt pravṛddho lokān samāhartum iha pravṛttaḥ"—rendered into English, most faithfully, as: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Oppenheimer was a fluent reader of Sanskrit and an admirer of Hindu philosophy. He didn't quote the Bhagavad Gita spontaneously in the field—he revealed that in a 1965 television interview, twenty years after Trinity, when he had lived with the consequences of his actions for some time. Trinity was the code name given to the first ever detonation of a nuclear device, conducted by the United States on 16th July 1945, at a remote desert site in New Mexico. It was the culmination of the Manhattan Project—the moment the bomb was tested and proved to work, three weeks before it was used against Hiroshima.  

The grammatical strangeness of the English phrasing—"I am become" rather than the modern "I have become"—is not an error but a deliberate archaism, characteristic of the Elizabethan English employed by classical Sanskrit translators of the nineteenth century. Oppenheimer quoted it in precisely this form intentionally; the antiquated construction only deepens the impression of something ancient, cosmic, and utterly beyond human restraint.

The philosophical meaning of the line is not one of pride or triumph. In the context of the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu is revealing to Arjuna that Death is not a force that can be avoided or forestalled—it is a cosmic power already in motion long before any human hand reaches for a weapon. Arjuna, Vishnu tells him, is merely an instrument, not a cause. It is precisely this dimension that made the verse rise unbidden in Oppenheimer's mind on the morning of Trinity. He was not saying, "I have created something magnificent." He was saying something far darker: that the force he had just released no longer belonged to him, that it was vastly greater than himself, and that the world could never be restored to what it had been.

What gives the quotation its fullest and most haunting weight, however, is the context in which Oppenheimer first shared it publicly. He did not utter those words in the desert on the morning of the test—he revealed them in a television interview in 1965, two full decades after Trinity, by which point he had lived with the consequences of his work for twenty years, had watched his security clearance stripped from him by a government he had served, and had grown into a man visibly marked by what he had helped to bring into the world. The quotation is therefore not a spontaneous reaction but a reflection of two decades of moral reckoning—the words of a man who understood precisely what he had done to human history, and who had never made his peace with it.

Doctor Manhattan, quite literally, becomes an entity that transcends death and destruction—he no longer experiences human empathy, no longer bound by conventional morality. Moore transformed Oppenheimer's inner crisis into a permanent physical and metaphysical condition.

The symbolic details

The atomic symbol on Doctor Manhattan's forehead is no mere decoration—it signals that this character is quite literally defined by nuclear energy. His luminous blue skin is a visual allusion to Cherenkov radiation, the distinctive blue glow emitted by nuclear reactors. Moore and Gibbons designed every such detail with deliberate intent.

Doctor Manhattan is therefore not simply inspired by the Manhattan Project—he is its philosophical personification: the embodiment of every question the Project left unanswered, about the scientist who surrenders his humanity to the power he creates, and about a world condemned to live beneath the shadow of a force it can never fully comprehend.

Yet Doctor Manhattan is, in the end, a fiction—a brilliant one, but a fiction nonetheless. The scientists who gathered in the desert of New Mexico in the summer of 1945 were not comic-book characters; they were flesh-and-blood men carrying the full weight of moral consequence. Their story did not unfold in the panels of a graphic novel but in the classified corridors of the most ambitious scientific enterprise in human history. To understand what Alan Moore was truly writing about, one must first understand what actually happened—and why.

I. Introduction

The development of the atomic bomb stands as one of the most consequential scientific and political events of the twentieth century. Born from a convergence of scientific curiosity, geopolitical fear, and the inexorable pressure of wartime urgency, the bomb reshaped international relations, transformed military strategy, and ignited moral debates about the limits of technological power that continue to reverberate to this day. Its creation reached its terrible culmination in the closing stages of the Second World War, when the United States deployed nuclear weapons against Japan in August 1945. To understand why the bomb was created is to examine the scientific discoveries that made it possible, the global conflict that made it urgent, and the individuals whose brilliance and ambition brought it into existence.

This essay traces that history in full: from the laboratories of pre-war Europe, through the vast industrial enterprise known as the Manhattan Project, to the obliteration of two Japanese cities and the long shadow cast by those events upon the modern world.

II. Scientific Origins of Nuclear Weapons

The story of the atomic bomb begins not in any military committee room, but in the quiet corridors of European physics. In 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann demonstrated nuclear fission — the process by which the nucleus of a heavy atom, such as uranium, could be made to split into smaller nuclei, releasing an extraordinary amount of energy. This discovery was rapidly interpreted by the Austrian-Swedish physicist Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, who provided the theoretical framework for understanding what Hahn and Strassmann had observed.

The implications were immediately apparent to those who understood nuclear physics. If fission could be sustained in a controlled chain reaction, it might be harnessed as a source of virtually unlimited energy. But if that reaction could be triggered suddenly and in an uncontrolled fashion, the energy release would be catastrophic—far exceeding anything achievable through conventional chemical explosives. The idea of a bomb of unprecedented destructive power was no longer the province of science fiction.

The theoretical groundwork had been laid over decades: Einstein's famous equation E = mc² had established the principle that mass could be converted into energy, and a series of discoveries in radioactivity and atomic structure throughout the 1920s and 1930s had deepened understanding of the forces binding atomic nuclei. By the late 1930s, the pieces were in place. What remained was the will — and the political necessity—to assemble them.

III. Fear of Nazi Germany

The discovery of fission in Germany cast an immediate and chilling shadow over the scientific community. Many of Europe's most distinguished physicists were Jewish refugees who had fled the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy for Britain and the United States. They understood, with particular urgency, what it would mean if Adolf Hitler's government succeeded in transforming the energy of fission into a weapon of war.

It was this fear that galvanised one of the most famous acts of scientific advocacy in history. In the summer of 1939, the Hungarian-American physicist Leó Szilárd, who had himself conceived the principle of a nuclear chain reaction as early as 1933, persuaded Albert Einstein to lend his name to a letter addressed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Einstein–Szilárd letter, dated 2nd August 1939, warned the President that uranium might be used to construct a new type of bomb of exceptional power and urged the United States to accelerate its own research into nuclear chain reactions. It also noted that Germany had already stopped the sale of uranium from Czechoslovakian mines under its control — a worrying sign that the Nazi state was aware of the weapon's potential.

Roosevelt received the letter in October 1939, weeks after Germany had invaded Poland and the Second World War had begun. The letter did not immediately produce a large-scale programme, but it initiated a process of government consultation and small-scale funding that would eventually culminate in the most ambitious scientific and industrial enterprise ever undertaken.

IV. The Beginning of the Manhattan Project

The American effort to build an atomic bomb grew slowly at first and then with gathering speed as the war expanded. Initial research was coordinated under the auspices of the National Defence Research Committee, established in 1940. A series of reports, including the influential British MAUD Report of 1941—which concluded that an atomic bomb could be built within two years and would have decisive military value—helped convince the United States government to commit fully to the project.

The formal programme, eventually codenamed the Manhattan Project, was established in 1942 under the authority of President Roosevelt. Its administration was placed in the hands of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, with Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves appointed to oversee the enterprise. Groves was an experienced military engineer, energetic, demanding, and possessed of an almost fanatical drive for efficiency. He had recently overseen the construction of the Pentagon and understood how to manage projects of immense logistical complexity.

To lead the scientific work, Groves chose J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was, in many respects, an unlikely choice: he had no prior experience of large-scale administration and had, in his youth, maintained associations with left-wing political circles that made the security services nervous. Yet Groves recognised in him a rare combination of scientific depth and personal authority. Oppenheimer had the capacity to command the respect of the brilliant and temperamental scientists who would need to collaborate under the same roof, and to synthesise their work into a coherent programme. His appointment would prove inspired.

V. Funding and Scale of the Project

The Manhattan Project was funded entirely by the United States federal government from its wartime military budget. Between 1942 and 1945, approximately two billion U.S. dollars were expended — a figure equivalent to tens of billions in contemporary terms. The expenditure was authorised by Congress, but the specifics were classified to such a degree that most legislators were unaware of the project's true nature. Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War, managed the appropriations with studied vagueness, describing the funds as being directed toward 'a project of the utmost importance to the national security.'

The scale of the enterprise was extraordinary by any measure. At its peak, the project employed more than 130,000 people—scientists, engineers, technicians, construction workers, military personnel, and factory labourers—spread across dozens of facilities. The vast majority of those involved knew only the portion of the work immediately relevant to their own role. Security was so strict and compartmentalisation so complete that many workers spent years contributing to the bomb without understanding what they were helping to build.

VI. Key Research Sites

The Manhattan Project was deliberately dispersed across multiple sites, both to maximise production capacity and to reduce the catastrophic risk of a single enemy strike destroying the entire programme.

The most intellectually significant of these sites was the Los Alamos Laboratory in the desert highlands of New Mexico, where Oppenheimer assembled the scientific talent responsible for designing the bomb itself. Established in 1943 on a remote mesa that had previously housed a boys' school, Los Alamos was a strange, isolated community of Nobel laureates, graduate students, and military officers. The scientists who gathered there included Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, and many others of comparable distinction. It was at Los Alamos that the theoretical and engineering problems of bomb design were solved.

Production, however, required facilities on an entirely different scale. Uranium enrichment — the laborious process of concentrating the fissile isotope uranium-235 to weapons-grade purity — was undertaken at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in a vast complex of industrial plants employing tens of thousands of workers. Plutonium production, which offered an alternative fissile material, was carried out at the Hanford Site in the state of Washington, where enormous reactors were built along the banks of the Columbia River.

Together, these sites represented an unprecedented mobilisation of scientific, industrial, and human resources in pursuit of a single objective.

VII. The First Nuclear Test

By the summer of 1945, the scientific and engineering problems had been resolved, and two distinct bomb designs had been developed. The first, a gun-type device using highly enriched uranium, was judged sufficiently reliable not to require a prior test. The second, an implosion-type device using plutonium, was more technically complex and its performance less certain.

The test of the plutonium bomb was designated Trinity, and it took place in the early hours of 16th July 1945 at a remote desert site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. At 5:29 in the morning, the device— mounted on a steel tower—was detonated. The explosion was equivalent to approximately twenty-one kilotons of TNT. Those who witnessed it described an experience of overwhelming sensory intensity: a flash that lit the desert for hundreds of miles, a pressure wave that knocked observers from their feet, and a vast fireball that rose into a towering mushroom cloud.

Oppenheimer, watching from a bunker several miles away, later recalled that the sight brought to his mind a verse from the ancient Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' Other observers were more immediate in their reactions. Kenneth Bainbridge, the test director, turned to Oppenheimer and said simply: 'Now we are all sons of bitches.'

The test confirmed that the weapon worked. Within weeks, it would be used.

VIII. Why the Bomb Was Used

Germany surrendered on 8th May 1945, but the war in the Pacific continued with undiminished ferocity. Japan had suffered devastating conventional bombing raids—the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 alone had killed more than 80,000 people—yet the Japanese government showed no sign of capitulation. American military planners were preparing for Operation Downfall, the codename for the projected invasion of the Japanese home islands, which was estimated to cost potentially hundreds of thousands of Allied lives and millions of Japanese casualties.

President Harry S. Truman, who had assumed office following Roosevelt's death in April, authorised the use of atomic bombs against Japan in the hope of forcing a swift surrender and avoiding those losses. The decision was not universally supported within the administration. Some officials and scientists urged that a demonstration bombing in an uninhabited area might achieve the same effect without the mass killing of civilians. Others argued for a modification of the surrender terms to allow Japan to retain its Emperor—a step that might have made acceptance politically possible. These arguments did not prevail.

Historians continue to debate the decision. Some argue that the bomb was genuinely necessary to end the war quickly and on terms acceptable to the United States. Others contend that Japan was already near collapse and that the bombings were intended, at least in part, as a signal to the Soviet Union — which had entered the Pacific war on 8th August — of American strategic supremacy in the emerging post-war world.

IX. Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The selection of both cities was not a matter of chance—it was the product of a carefully considered sequence of military and strategic criteria.

The Target Committee

The United States convened a dedicated Target Committee, comprising scientists and senior military officers, which met in April and May of 1945 to establish the criteria by which potential targets would be assessed. The committee determined several principal requirements: the target city had to be large and of significant military-industrial value; it must not have been subjected to conventional bombing beforehand, so that the effects of the atomic bomb could be measured in isolation; it had to possess a topography conducive to maximising the blast; and the weather above it had to be reliably predictable to ensure accuracy of delivery.

Why Hiroshima

Hiroshima satisfied nearly every criterion with remarkable precision. It was a major port city serving as the headquarters of the Japanese Second Army and a vital centre of military logistics. Its position on a river delta, enclosed by surrounding hills, was expected to concentrate and amplify the blast wave dramatically. Crucially, Hiroshima had been left almost entirely untouched by prior conventional bombing—making it, in the coldest possible terms, a clean canvas against which the destructive capacity of the new weapon could be assessed without ambiguity.

Why Nagasaki

Nagasaki was not, in fact, the primary target for the second bomb. The city of Kokura held that distinction on the 9th of August 1945, but heavy cloud cover on the day prevented the crew from acquiring a visual fix on their objective. The aircraft diverted to its secondary target: Nagasaki. The city's fate was therefore determined, in no small part, by the weather that morning — one of history's more bitter ironies. Nagasaki itself was, nonetheless, a substantial industrial city, home to major shipyards and armaments factories of considerable strategic significance.

The Cities Deliberately Preserved

What is often overlooked is that the United States deliberately withheld conventional bombing raids from several cities in the months preceding the atomic strikes—among them Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki—precisely so that the impact of the atomic bomb would be unambiguous and unmixed with prior destruction. Secretary of War Henry Stimson personally struck Kyoto from the target list, because its exceptional cultural and religious significance to Japanese civilisation made it an unsuitable choice.

The Darker Dimension

Some historians have observed that the selection of large civilian centres—rather than purely military installations—reflects the logic of strategic terror: that destruction sufficiently catastrophic and sufficiently sudden could shatter the will of an entire nation to continue fighting. In this sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen not solely for their military value but because they represented something broader—a demonstration that no corner of Japan could any longer be considered beyond reach. On the morning of 6th August 1945, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay, piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets, released a uranium bomb known as 'Little Boy' over the city of Hiroshima. The bomb exploded at approximately 580 metres above the city centre, generating a fireball with temperatures at its core reaching several million degrees. The blast and thermal pulse instantly killed an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people and destroyed roughly five square miles of urban area. By the end of 1945, the death toll—accounting for radiation sickness, burns, and collapsed buildings—is estimated to have reached between 90,000 and 166,000.

Three days later, on 9th August, a plutonium bomb known as 'Fat Man' was dropped on Nagasaki. The city's hilly topography partially contained the blast, but the devastation was nonetheless catastrophic: between 40,000 and 80,000 people perished, according to some sources that say up to 200,000 people. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, relying on decades of research, has long cited a figure of around 140,000 for Hiroshima alone as of the end of December 1945, while acknowledging that the actual figure is likely higher. Combined with Nagasaki's casualties, the cumulative figure approaches 200,000. This is well within the range of scientific estimates.

Japan's Emperor Hirohito announced his country's surrender on 15th August 1945, citing the appearance of a 'cruel bomb' as a determining factor. The formal instruments of surrender were signed on 2nd September 1945 aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, bringing the Second World War to an end. The atomic bomb had been decisive—though whether it was the sole or even primary cause of Japan's surrender remains a question that historians have debated ever since.

X. Science, War, and Ethics

The atomic bomb raised profound moral questions that its creators could not evade. In the months and years following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many of the Manhattan Project's scientists confronted what they had done with a mixture of pride and revulsion. Oppenheimer himself became increasingly ambivalent about nuclear weapons. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb—a weapon of still greater destructive power — on ethical grounds, a position that would later contribute to the revocation of his security clearance during the paranoid atmosphere of McCarthyism.

The deeper ethical problem was not simply whether the bombs should have been used against Japan, but whether science itself could remain morally neutral when its discoveries were inherently susceptible to weaponisation. The Manhattan Project scientists had created a weapon capable of destroying entire cities at a stroke. As Oppenheimer acknowledged, the physicists had 'known sin'—not in the medieval theological sense, but in the more modern sense of having acquired a knowledge whose consequences could not be undone.

This dilemma—that scientific knowledge, once gained, cannot be unlearned, and that powerful states will always seek to exploit the most destructive applications of that knowledge—remains one of the defining challenges of the modern era. The atomic bomb did not resolve the question of how science should relate to power; it made the question inescapable.

XI. Legacy of the Atomic Bomb

The detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki transformed the world in ways that are still unfolding. In the immediate aftermath, the United States enjoyed a brief nuclear monopoly, but the Soviet Union tested its first atomic device in 1949, and by the mid-1950s, both superpowers were developing thermonuclear weapons of far greater yield. The nuclear arms race that followed shaped the entire course of the Cold War, producing a strategic environment governed by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction—the grimly rational proposition that neither side would launch a first strike if the result would be its own annihilation.

The bomb also altered the calculus of international relations more broadly. It created a new category of military power—the nuclear-armed state—and established a distinction between those who possessed such weapons and those who did not. Treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 attempted to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, with mixed success. As of the twenty-first century, nine states are known or believed to possess nuclear weapons, and the threat of proliferation to additional states or non-state actors remains a serious concern.

Yet the most profound legacy of the atomic bomb may be conceptual rather than material. It demonstrated, for the first time, that human civilisation had acquired the capacity to destroy itself—not through accumulated social breakdown or ecological collapse, but through a single deliberate decision taken in the space of minutes. The awareness of that capacity has never entirely left the consciousness of the modern world. The bomb thus represents both the most dramatic triumph of applied science and the most sobering warning about the relationship between knowledge, power, and human responsibility.

XII. Conclusion

The atomic bomb was not an accident of history. It emerged from specific scientific discoveries, specific geopolitical fears, and specific decisions taken by identifiable individuals under the pressures of the most destructive conflict in human experience. It was built with extraordinary speed and ingenuity, deployed with lethal efficiency, and justified on grounds that reasonable people have disputed ever since.

What cannot be disputed is its significance. The weapon that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not merely end the Second World War; it inaugurated a new era in which the potential for mass destruction became a permanent condition of international life. Understanding that transition—how it happened, why it happened, and what it has meant for the world—remains one of the essential tasks of historical inquiry.

Further Reading

Bird, Kai, and Martin J. Sherwin. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

Hersey, John. Hiroshima. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946.

Hughes, Jeff. The Manhattan Project: Big Science and the Atomic Bomb. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2003.

Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.

Southard, Susan. Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War. New York: Viking, 2015.

Walker, J. Samuel. Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

[Part 18]

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