Eighty Years on the Edge
Within the August difficulty, Atlantic contributors examined the previous eight a long time of life within the Atomic Age.
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Thanks in your collection of articles on nuclear warfare. I used to be particularly moved by the essays on Japanese internment and Kurt Vonnegut, however all of them led me to marvel why we people appear so incapable of studying from the previous.
Noah Hawley was right to notice that our present age is rife with improvements which can be technically candy however have not often been subjected to the query Simply because we are able to, ought to we? I ponder what Vonnegut would say if he had been alive as we speak.
Ellen Vliet Cohen
Arlington, Mass.
One query shouldn’t be answered in The Atlantic’s August difficulty: What can actually be carried out to rid the world of nuclear weapons? Maybe it’s time that this matter reentered public dialogue.
My proposal is that the 186 international locations that don’t have nuclear weapons assemble and draft an ultimatum to the international locations that do, stating that until the nuclear-armed states do away with their weapons, they, the non-nuclear-armed states, will band collectively to conduct the analysis and growth obligatory for every of them to have their very own weapons. That’s it. Dangerous? Sure. However is it riskier than the current scenario? Maybe not. Ross Andersen, in “The New Arms Race,” predicts that the nuclear membership could double underneath present situations. Staying on the current course assures us of just one factor: that we are going to ultimately, by intention, misjudgment, human or technological error, or simply plain dangerous luck accomplish our mutual assured destruction. The ultimatum dangers nothing greater than that.
Crimson Slider
Sacramento, Calif.
How can I describe the sensation I had after I turned to “The Mild of a Man-Made Star” and noticed the pictures from Michael Mild’s 100 Suns? First amongst them is {a photograph} of the Hood check, to which I, as a small youngster, was uncovered. My father, a mineral exploration geologist keen on uranium, had introduced my brother, mom, and me to Nevada that summer time.
I used to be younger, and my recollections of that point are few: lifting my pillow off the ground within the bunkhouse to show a rattlesnake, the ghostly rise and fall of a participant piano’s keys. Years later, many residents of the world contracted most cancers from the fallout. Hazard, secrecy, and the unnatural—these had been the hallmarks of my very own personal nuclear age.
The next 12 months, in 1958, my father went to work on a feasibility examine for Venture Chariot, to find out whether or not the federal government ought to use nuclear gadgets to bomb a harbor into the coast of northwestern Alaska. The undertaking was categorised, and he didn’t converse of it till the 12 months I turned 12, after I by accident found a book-length doc titled “The Results of Nuclear Weapons” in our bookcase. The chapter that I most keep in mind was titled “Results on Personnel.” It contained images of hibakusha—Japanese atomic-bomb survivors—with their our bodies uncovered to show the kimono patterns that had been burned into their backs. I’ve by no means shaken these photos from my thoughts, or forgotten that these photographed had been handled within the textual content not as victims however as topics of an experiment.
My father continued to prospect in Alaska for radioactive minerals. The summer time earlier than the Cuban missile disaster, he discovered a big deposit of beryllium, a component essential to the workings of nuclear weapons; it earned him a write-up in Newsweek and a quotation from the Alaska legislature. I grew as much as grow to be an English professor, and I taught Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle in a course on nuclear points that I developed within the early 2000s. Vonnegut’s portrayal of Felix Hoenikker struck near residence.
Alison Sainsbury
Bloomington, Ailing.
I learn “Rattling You All to Hell!,” Tom Nichols’s article discussing movies about nuclear warfare, with curiosity. He overlooked an obscure contribution to the style: In 1964, Rod Serling wrote a TV film starring Peter Sellers, Carol for One other Christmas, which portrayed a nightmarish way forward for nuclear destruction. My father was energetic in teams that urged a nuclear-test-ban treaty. He was so impressed with the film that he purchased a duplicate, acquired a projector and a display, and went round Chicago exhibiting it to anyone who would watch. I used to be an adolescent and it frightened me—it appeared that we had been all doomed to die in nuclear warfare. The film stays value a watch as we speak.
Judith Jacobson
Baltimore, Md.
I appreciated “Rattling You All to Hell!” and will relate to Tom Nichols’s anecdote about instructing as we speak’s college students about nuclear warfare. After 23 years on energetic responsibility within the Military, I additionally went into academia, instructing programs in political science and intelligence research. Once I first taught a category on homeland safety, I shared movies of “duck and canopy” drills and obtained equally incredulous reactions from my college students, who after 9/11 had been residing with the specter of terrorism—not nuclear warfare. At one of many faculties the place I taught, I had a colleague who owned a house with a fallout shelter constructed within the Sixties. I took college students to see it so they may think about what it could have been like to really reside there. It wasn’t till I confirmed them the 1999 film Blast From the Previous, nevertheless, that they absolutely grasped what a fallout shelter must appear to be for a household to outlive a nuclear warfare.
Richard Kilroy
Charlottesville, Va.
Eleven years in the past, I visited Manzanar with my spouse, by no means having recognized that such a spot existed. We had been informed that the phrase manzanar means “apple orchard” in Spanish, as a result of the land the place the internment website stood had initially been an apple orchard. Now, we found, it was a nationwide historic website. Attempting to think about life within the jail camp was unattainable. We couldn’t visualize how households had been ripped from their properties and crammed into barracks surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire. Our go to resulted in Manzanar’s cemetery, which individuals nonetheless go to to see the graves of their ancestors. What we didn’t hear or see had been the firsthand tales of the individuals who lived there. Andrew Aoyama’s “The Expatriate,” about Joseph Kurihara, was an article we wanted to learn, even 11 years later.
Richard Grove
Philadelphia, Pa.
I appreciated Jeffrey Goldberg’s article, “Nuclear Roulette,” which quotes me in its final sentence: “Most of all, we neglect the rule articulated by the mathematician and cryptologist Martin Hellman: that the one option to survive Russian roulette is to cease enjoying.”
Society neglects the nuclear risk at its peril. If we might truthfully face that risk—and others, reminiscent of local weather change—they may remodel into alternatives to lastly construct the extra peaceable, cooperative world we now have dreamed of for ages, however thought ourselves incapable of reaching. To cite a paper I wrote some years in the past, “Know-how has given a brand new, international that means to the Biblical injunction: ‘I’ve set earlier than you life and demise, blessing and curse; due to this fact select life that you just and your descendants could reside.’ ”
Martin E. Hellman
Stanford, Calif.
Behind the Cowl
On this month’s cowl story, “How Originalism Killed the Structure,” Jill Lepore considers why the method of constitutional modification has all however vanished from American politics. The Framers designed the Structure to be adaptable, Lepore argues, however a conservative authorized philosophy has undermined makes an attempt to vary it. For our cowl design, the calligraphers Sean Freeman and Eve Steben of There Is Studio wrote out the headline and subheadline utilizing fountain pens and conventional brushes, their tapered strokes evoking the lettering of the Structure’s preamble.
— Liz Hart, Artwork Director
Corrections
“The New Arms Race” (August) acknowledged that Japan’s centrifuge program reprocesses nuclear waste into plutonium. In reality, this course of happens in separate waste-reprocessing vegetation. “The Judgments of Muriel Spark” (September) acknowledged that T. S. Eliot transformed to Catholicism. In reality, he transformed to Anglo-Catholicism.
This text seems within the October 2025 print version with the headline “The Commons.” When you purchase a e-book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.
