Postscript: Politics in the Nuclear Age

Abstract

The dawn of atomic warfare at the end of World War II transformed not only the military but social, scientific, and above all political landscape for all time. Bringing a legacy of nearly total destruction and unimaginable death, Hiroshima and Nagasaki—first salvos of the epic Manhattan Project—continue to shadow the global scene in ways unimaginable in 1945. The Bomb ignited a new era of unlimited warfare, checkmating standard defensive responses and countermeasures while eviscerating boundaries separating civilian and military targets, rendering thinkable the mass extermination of human populations as a “rational” calculus of military action. Invention of the Superbomb in 1951, result of the nascent arms race between the United States and Soviet Union, altered this horrifying specter ever more dramatically. Over time the new doomsday weapons spread around the world and became normalized within the military culture of several nations, none more so than the United States. The mass-psychological numbing and general cultural denial that accompanied these weapons has, over the decades, become far too obvious to require further commentary. For American politics, the Bomb signified a great historical watershed, feeding powerfully into the Cold War and postwar national security state and permanent war economy that were so integral to rising superpower ambitions.