More Sunday Perspective

• Wish List: Nonprofit organizations requests for help
• Perspective: Drawing the Line
• Phil Lewis: Press-ing issues, Naples forum

Tell us about it

• What would you add to this story? Tell us what we missed.
• Do you have photos from this event? Documents we need to see? Share with us.
• Upload photos & videos
• More ways to get your stuff online and in the paper.

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

Share and Enjoy [?]

The 63rd anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima passed earlier this month with remarkably little stir in the news media. Which is strange, because we may be nearing the brink of a nuclear war.

Aug. 6, 1945, was a clear and relatively cool day in Hiroshima. Japan had been at war with the United States since the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, nearly four years earlier.

Japanese radio stations had gone off the air when radar showed American planes approaching Honshu, Japan’s largest island. But the radar indicated there were only a few American planes, not one of the massive formations that had bombed Tokyo and other cities so devastatingly.

Japanese fighter planes were not sent up to intercept the Americans. Japan was too short of aviation fuel to send planes against such a small number of American bombers. In Hiroshima, civilians were warned that there might be an air raid and they should consider going to shelters.

One of the three B-29 bombers approaching Hiroshima was the Enola Gay. It carried the “Little Boy” atomic bomb. The other two B-29s were there to record the first nuclear bombing.

The mission went flawlessly. The bomb exploded over Hiroshima with the force of between 10,000 and 15,000 tons of TNT. Some 80,000 men, women and children were killed almost instantly. Tens of thousands more died of wounds, burns and radiation poisoning.

Horrible as it was, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki, three days later) was not as destructive as the firebomb raids on Tokyo, Osaka and other Japanese cities that produced firestorms and killed hundreds of thousands in each city.

Still, the shock of seeing cities destroyed with single bombs stirred the Japanese government into surrender. The planned invasion of Japan’s home islands was not necessary. That invasion would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of American casualties and probably a million or more Japanese deaths.

Nuclear weapons changed world politics. At first the U.S. had sole possession of nukes, and most of the world expected us to enforce a Pax Americana and set ourselves as rulers of a global empire. But we didn’t. Americans don’t want to rule the world. We are not imperialists, except perhaps in the commercial sense.

Soviet Russia, under the dictatorship of Josef Stalin, built its own atomic bombs and, not much later, graduated to the far more powerful hydrogen bomb. In the U.S. there was some opposition to building hydrogen bombs, particularly by some of the scientists who had built the atomic bomb.

But in short order the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, France and the People’s Republic of China built nuclear arsenals. The world became a nuclear armed camp.

When Soviet Russia developed long-range ballistic missiles the U.S. launched a top-secret crash program to do the same. In the 1960 presidential race, John F. Kennedy warned about a “missile gap.”

By now Nikita Khrushchev was in charge in Moscow, and he used the missiles the Soviets had developed to produce very public achievements in space: the first artificial satellite, the first spacecraft to photograph the moon’s far side, the first man to orbit the Earth. The “space race” of the 1960s was a public-affairs reflection of the deadly missile race of the late 1950s.

The United States and Soviet Russia came close to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Both sides backed away from confrontation and eventually hammered out agreements that started the first steps toward nuclear arms limitations.

Those agreements included measures aimed at preventing other nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. Nuclear proliferation was feared by both Washington and Moscow.

In time, the Soviet Union collapsed into the dustbin of history. But their missiles still exist, with their hydrogen bomb warheads atop them.

And other nations are acquiring nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan have them. So does Israel. North Korea tested a nuclear weapon, which fizzled, and then gave in to international pressures (plus economic inducements) and is now apparently dismantling its nuclear program.

Iran is moving ahead with its own nuclear program, however. The Iranian government insists its program is only for peaceful nuclear power generation, but the rest of the world fears (or hopes) that the Iranians will produce their own nuclear weaponry.

Faced with statements from Tehran that threaten the destruction of Israel, the Jewish state has ominously signaled that it cannot and will not allow Iran to produce nuclear weapons. Israel has struck at nuclear facilities in Iraq and Syria, and will no doubt attack Iran if it feels its own survival is at stake.

Since the time of Cyrus the Great, Persia (modern-day Iran) has been the leading power in the Middle East. Not even the Roman Empire could defeat the Parthians, as they were called in those days. It is logical that Iran should be a major force in the region.

More than that, the basic idea of trying to prevent nuclear proliferation is being called into doubt by Iran. Why, the Iranians ask, is it all right for America, Russia, China and several other nation to have nuclear arms, but it is not all right for Iran to acquire the same? Besides, they say, our program is for peaceful purposes only.

The United Nations is half-heartedly trying to induce the Iranians to halt their nuclear program with economic sanctions. Israel undoubtedly is preparing a pre-emptive strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities.

Will nuclear-armed Pakistan stand by and watch Israel attack a Muslim nation? Which way will Russia lean? Would the U.S. support an Israeli strike? How will the various Muslim terrorist groups react to an Israeli strike?

And with Russia aggressively asserting itself in its neighboring Georgia, are we heading back to a cold war that could end in nuclear holocaust?

Where will we be next August, at the 64th anniversary of Hiroshima?

Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of nearly 120 books, including “Mars Life,” his latest futuristic novel. Bova’s Web site address is www.benbova.com.