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Nuclear weapons were in a class by themselves, contrasted with the all-purpose category of “conventional weapons.” As a result, these latter seemed less awful, despite the fact that the body counts from conventional destruction in World War II were far higher than those caused by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is nothing more dangerous, many people argued, nothing more psychically corrupting, nothing more to be abhorred, and the like. This tended to draw a sharp line between nuclear weapons and all other kinds. That I took to be Smith’s most salient point: take nuclear weapons off their quasi-metaphysical pedestal. Oddly enough, what might be called “nuclear exceptionalism” spurred a good bit of anti-nuclear politics. Dissatisfied with economic and psychological analyses of “the bomb,” Smith decided the discussion of nuclear weapons needed to be placed in a much longer historical perspective than the past fifty years. Beginning with the startling and nigh obscene fact that the first atomic test was code-named Trinity and was thought of by at least some of its participants in quasi-religious terms (the release of “forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty”), Smith notes that such language “expresses the feeling that atomic weapons are a radically new thing, so different from all other weapons and devices in the magnitude of their power as to be indescribable in everyday terms.” This tends to place nuclear weapons outside the bounds of rational discourse-we murmur about the ineffable, about horrors no words can describe.īut describe them we must and, in the process, engage in acts of demystification that put nuclear weapons back into history, back into the sphere of political contestation and debate. In 1989 a young scholar named Jeff Smith published a book entitled Unthinking the Unthinkable: Nuclear Weapons and Western Culture, a book that received too little attention at the time or subsequently, for that matter. The Enola Gay on display in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, January 2013 (Wikimedia Commons)
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50 Years After Hiroshima Jean Bethke Elshtain ▪ Summer 1995