Articles 
PEOPLE FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT
HUMAN SURVIVAL PROJECT
80 YEARS TODAY SINCE THE TRINITY NUCLEAR TEST, AND THE RISK IS GREATER THAN EVER
Eighty years ago on 16 July 1945, the worlds first nuclear explosion took place. The result of work by the Manhattan Project, then the worlds largest (secret) industrial and scientific undertaking, headed by theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and military liaison General Leslie Groves, the Trinity test, conducted next to the creek known as the Journada Del Muerte (journey of death), and allegedly equipped with the most malefic horoscope ever written, was rich in dark symbolism. Oppenheimer as he watched, recalled the Hindu Bhagavad Gita's lines about the brightness of a thousand suns and later on, 'now I am become death, destroyer of worlds'.
Local inhabitants of the semi-desert area of New Mexico in which the test took place were essentially ignored, and have only recently been recognised as eligible for compensation for the cancers and other radiation – related illnesses they have suffered for the last 80 years.
Oppenheimer metaphysical test was of course, a curtain raiser to the actual use of a uranium-based, gun type weapon on Hiroshima on 4 August 1945, and the subsequent use of an implosion type plutonium bomb on Nagasaki.
The devices tested at Trinity and used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while orders of magnitude larger than any of the conventional explosives used in WW-2, were relatively tiny in comparison to typical nuclear warheads of today – 18-25 kilotons, (A kiloton is 1000 tons of TNT), compared to 200Kt-one megaton now. The largest nuclear device ever tested was a Russian one, Tsar Bomba (King of bombs) of 50megatons in 1963.
During the cold war a number of hair-raising 'near misses' took place in which only action from thinking 'outside the box' by military personnel and others saved civilisation from destruction. Of these the most significant may have been the September 26 1983 Serpukhov-15 incident in which a Russian colonel decided not to press a flashing red button 'because I had a gut feeling there was a mistake somewhere'.
While global nuclear stockpiles have declined since reaching an insane high of around 70,000 warheads in the early '80s, to around 12,000 warheads now, the risk of use of nuclear warheads, and the risk of global thermonuclear war, is now considered to be the greatest it has ever been including during the dark days of the cold war, and has stayed there longer than it ever did during the cold war, while awareness and the political will to do anything about it is as LOW as it has ever been.
This is due in part to repeated threats to use nuclear weapons – threats that were never made with the degree of explicitness with which they are now being made – as the weapons are used for a kind of nuclear blackmail. It is also due to the entry of new participants to the nuclear game – North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel - who are also not averse to using their arsenals for blackmail.
The 80th anniversary of humans ability to destroy both themselves and much of the ecosphere is hardly something to celebrate, as the doomsday arsenals still exist and are still primed for operation, while some leaders insist on threatening others with being vaporised.
Yet use of nuclear weapons in any significant number, against large cities would not merely kill up to half of all humans (depending on targeting) in approximately 90 minutes, but would cause massive firestorms that would loft such quantities of dark black smoke into the upper stratosphere that the sun would be dimmed and (paradoxically) the earth would become colder than the last ice-age.
Being able to do this, most likely by madness, malice, malware, miscalculation or malfunction – is hardly a matter for joy, but for deep existential reflection.
And a call for decisive action that will reduce the risk that these instruments of madness ever get to be used, and will eliminate them altogether.
The governments of the world must
--Take measures that make nuclear use, and the initiation of nuclear war less likely
--Sign, ratify, and urge others to sign and ratify, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
Australia has indicated it might be interested in doing both those things. It should do so now.
John Hallam
Nuclear Disarmament Campaigner
People for Nuclear Disarmament
Human Survival Project
Co-Convenor, Abolition 2000 Nuclear Risk Reduction Working Group
Convenor, PNND Australia
Member, No First Use Global Steering Committee
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
61-411-854-612
