At age 8, in 3rd grade about 75 years ago we would be ushered into the school hallway, told to crouch and cover our heads with our arms. This, they said, would protect us from and in case of a nuclear attack.
It worked.
75 years later there has not been a nuclear attack.
That was then, when we had the bomb and they, the Soviets (the Russians) had the bomb but no one else did – yet.
Things have changed. So have the bombs, only two of which have ever been used – by us at Hiroshima and at Nagasaki. Those two weapons are each estimated to have had the force of 20,000 tons of TNT. Hydrogen Bombs are more powerful.
How much more powerful? A typical run of the mill H-bomb has a force one million times that of the bombs at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The Russians once tested an H-bomb said to be 50 million times the power of the 1945 bombs.
Ever seen photos of Hiroshima after the bomb? Now try to imagine what would happen over how wide an area and to how many millions of people if an H-bomb dropped on their villages, towns, suburbs and cities.
A layman’s guess of the claims of an H-bomb or two dropped on New York City: All of the city, all of Long Island, New York’s Westchester and Rockland Counties, all of New Jersey from the state border with New York to south of New Brunswick, eastern Pannsyulvania. Everything destroyed. Everyone – at least 25 million people – dead, dying or wishing they were.
That’s conjecture. This is what we know.
There are nine nations with nuclear weapons. The U.S. led the way in 1945 with the completion of its famous Manhattan Project which, in cinema and books took place in Los Alamos, New Mexico. But it owes as much to equally significant efforts in Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as well as at the University of Chicago.
In 1949 the then Soviet Union joined the club and in 1952 England, which had been a junior partner in the Manhattan Project, became a nuclear armed nation. France joined the club in 1960, China in 1964.
India had nuclear weapons starting in 1974. Its forever foe, Pakistan, achieved parity in 1998. There the two are, each with over 200 nuclear weapons, always poised against one another as at the point of a sword and for 27 years now at the tips of their nuclear bombs.
We know Israel has the bomb, though alone among the nine nations that do it does not acknowledge this or cooperate with international controls such as they are. Likely it has had nuclear weapons since the mid-1970s, perhaps earlier.
Most of the most prominent physicists on the Manhattan Project were Jews, refugees from Nazi Europe and Nazi Jew-hatred. They all knew the man whose theory made nuclear weapons conceivable, though he took no active role in the project.
Albert Einstein took no part except to agree to sign the letter to President Roosevelt that set it all in motion. He did not write the letter. He read it. He signed it and very much came to regret lending his name to it. He was asked to sign by others to give it the full weight of his reputation and international standing.It impressed President Roosevelt, who set the Manhattan Project in motion and watched it closely.
FDR died April 12,1945. “Trinity”, the A-bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico came July 16that year. It was President Truman who was told of that success and ordered the bomb dropped, not on Nazi Germany as originally intended, which had surrended May 8, but on Japan – a mordant payback for Pearl Harbor.
Back to today and lately last to become a nuclear nation we come to North Korea, the bizarre hermit kingdom that entered the nuclear lists in the past 10 years as that psychotic state and its current Kim acquired the power to devastate.
There then the nine: the U.S., Russia (inheritor of some but not all of the Soviet arsenal),the United Kingdom, France, China ,Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Nine nations that threaten the very existence of life on the planet. Human life. All life.
In all it is estimated the nine nations control just over 12,000 nuclear warheads with more than 10,700 belonging to the U.S. and Russia – about 5,200 American, about 5,500 Russian. The Chinese have 600 while the others have lesser numbers; about 200 to 225 each for England, France, India, and Pakistan, 90 in Israel and 50 owned by North Korea.
But it only takes one and it would only take one being used to set off a worldwide chain reaction – with the possible exception of an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange.
Such an event on the subcontinent might be contained and confined within and by an understanding of their historic mutual hatred as demonstrated recently in and over Kashmir, and depending on how other nuclear nations would respond and react. They have nuclear weapons to threaten each other, not the whole world except that every nuclear weapon is a real threat to the entire world.
Thus, when the debased lunatic in the White House announced at the beginning of August 2025 that he sent two American submarines to sit off the Pacific Coast of Russia because he did not like something said by a man who was president of Russia 20 years ago it caused, oh, some concern.
That man, Dmitri Medvedev, from time to time serves as a place holder for Vladimir Putin. He is a message in a bottle. You do not send two nuclear subs against a bottle.
But there, as if we needed it, came a reminder. Ah yes, the malevolent, mentally sick, profoundly ignorant, resentment-filled U.S. president controls an arsenal of 5,250 nuclear warheads – including Hydrogen bombs. No one knows how many H-bombs we have or Russia has. But it is said to be many.
The Cold War had its uses. You were on our side. You were on their side. There were no other choices, not really. You didn’t get to have a side or sit it out or like India then pretended.
They had their nukes. We had ours. In fact more than either side has now. There was nothing to be done about that except to pick a side.
The world of Mutually Assured Destruction was a mad world.
So, over time rather than blow up each other and the world, we and they negotiated control agreements on various kinds of nuclear weapons – short range, i.e. tactical, long range, i.e. strategic, with agreements extending to delivery systems, kinds of bombs, missiles, verification and development of coordination with and through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a component of the United Nations.
Only one of those agreements remains, the current New Stratetic Arms Limitation (SALT) Treaty between the U.S. and Russia. It expires in February, but that hardly matteres since Trump had the U.S. withdraw from it in 2019 and Vladimir Putin washed his hands of it as well. Neither nation, neither president has the least interest in replacing it.
So we are in a wholly unregulated world of 10,500 nuclear warheads controlled by us and by Russia, weapons that make the bombs dropped in 1945 seem like mere firecrackers.
At Hiroshima 140,000 died by the end of 1945. At least 70,000 more lives were claimed at Nagasaki and probably twice that number by the end of that year.
This is not to belabor the debate whether yes we had to use the bomb to avoid an invasion that would have bled American forces, or no we should have found another way. Fact is we dropped the bomb dubbed Little Boy on Hiroshima and days later the one called Fat Man on Nagasaki. No one has used one in war since. They have been tested in peacetime though not by us or the Russians in a long while, but not used in war. So far.
No, this is to observe that while the Cold War and its peculiar ability to focus control of nuclear war is long over the binary tension though sublimated yet controls.
Not even China has the kind of say you get with over 5,000 nuclear weapons. Today there are tensions. Not one, but many all over the world. But there are only two participants in global nuclear arms. Us and them, us and Russia.
On this earth, two deceitful men control the two largest nuclear arsenals, world-destroying arsenals if they choose.
If you have long believed that it is certain no one, no leader anywhere of any nation would be so absolutely mad, insane, purely nuts and mentally screwed up as to order the use of nuclear weapons, think again.
Are you so sure? Given the world we are seeing with these men in it, are you so sure, so certain?
For the first time in decades is there reason to wonder about any such certainty?
Are we are closer to nuclear war than at any time in the past 40 years? Does that mean it will happen? No. But does that mean it could given the state of the world and its dominant leaders? Is it imaginable?
Stare that in the face.
What to do?
Go out in the halway, duck and cover.
See if it still works.
Peeling the Onion 