Nagasaki poems

Thoughts from the epicenter eight decades out

“If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past." – Baruch Spinoza

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Nagasaki Peace Statue, photo courtesy of Tayawee Supan on Unsplash

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National surveys by the American Psychological Association in late February and March 2022, revealed that “69% of adults are worried the invasion of Ukraine is going to lead to nuclear war” and believe that Russia and the US are “at the beginning stages of World War III.” I count myself among them, and I think these fears are well founded.

US General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee on April 5 that the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine will last years.

“I do think this is a very protracted conflict, and I think it's measured in years. I don't know about decade, but at least years for sure." 

Russia has about 6,000 nuclear warheads. The US has just over 5,400 warheads, and as the New Yorker recently declared, the war against Russia in Ukraine is “now America’s war too.”

Given their repeated failures of judgment and the reckless and ill-defined US goal of regime change in Russia, it would require staggering naïveté to believe that the people in charge of the thermonuclear arsenals on either side are capable of avoiding their use over a period of years in the heat of an extended military conflict.

In less than three months, the Biden administration and a bipartisan super majority in Congress have allocated $54 billion in war aid to Ukraine, nearly equivalent to Russia’s annual military budget of $65 billion. The US is not involved in, nor does it support, Turkish led diplomatic negotiations to end the war.

After more than two years of pandemic authoritarianism and fearmongering in service to a crackpot vision of a new $100 trillion green utopia, led largely by the same claque of corrupt and witless political shills cheerleading for “total victory” in Ukraine, humanity now finds itself in the midst of historic social, economic, political, and psychological wreckage with a potential suicidal terminus in nuclear war.

This lunatic nuclear brinksmanship started nearly 80 years ago in Japan. At minimum, turning back the current madness requires a clear understanding of the destructive forces that were set in motion in 1945, as well as the deranged story of how they were unleashed.