There is no sane use for the Bomb

Today, August 6, 2025, is the 80th anniversary of the detonation of a United States nuclear bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Thousands of people died immediately from its blast. Arguments continue among military thinkers and historians about whether the 1945 atomic bombings were strategically and morally justified in order to end the war against Japan.

Many Japanese remember there is no future in a world where nuclear weapons proliferate.

Joe Cirincione seems to be the last of the United States' serious national security experts who is haunted by the reality that there is NO use of our current nuclear arsenal that leads anywhere good or perhaps even toward civilization and even human survival. There is no sane use of the Bomb.

In July at a talk at one of those strategic conferences that "experts" in destruction frequent, he took the opportunity to point out the fallacies in US nuclear thinking.

In order to solve the nuclear policy mystery, we need to consider what we don’t talk about.  Here are seven topics largely off limits, in rising order of importance:

Cost. Next fiscal year the U.S. government will spend $87 billion on nuclear weapons, up from $70 billion this year. The Congressional Budget Office predicts these numbers will skyrocket. We will spend almost one trillion dollars over the next ten years, averaging $95 billion per year. Add in $25 billion for the foolish “Golden Dome” and perhaps $20 billion for other “missile defense and defeat” programs and we will spend $130 billion on nuclear weapons and related programs next year. The costs will grow. Every one of the new nuclear systems is over-budget and behind schedule. ...

Targeting. What will we hit with all these weapons? The targets are kept secret, but why? We should want other nations to know what they risk if they attack the United States. ... Perhaps because the absurdity of targeting hundreds of military, economic and political sites with multiple warheads on multiple delivery systems would be exposed as absurd. In one example I was given at a briefing at the Strategic Air Command when I was on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee in the 1980’s, we would have hit Odessa in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) with 60 thermonuclear warheads. Obviously overkill. In the tortured logic of nuclear targeting, however, we were not targeting cities, merely the sites that happened to be located in cities.

Casualties. We gloss over the millions of innocent civilians that would be killed even by limited use of nuclear weapons. Most experts agree with the finding by the International Campaign against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) that “Nuclear weapons are the most destructive, inhumane and indiscriminate weapons ever created. Both in the scale of the devastation they cause, and in their uniquely persistent, spreading, genetically damaging radioactive fallout, they are unlike any other weapons.” ....

Consequences of Use. The immediate death toll would be just the beginning of the damage. With new climate tools we can predict that even a limited nuclear war in South Asia or the one-sided use of nuclear weapons where the attacked country did not respond could result in massive climate change. Scientists estimate that a war involving as few as one hundred weapons would pour enough particulates and soot into the stratosphere to surround the Earth in clouds, drop global temperatures and kill 40 percent of the world’s food crops. Billions would starve; human civilization would collapse. ...

Morality. Pope Francis repeatedly asserted during his papacy, “The use of nuclear weapons, as well as their mere possession, is immoral.” He is not alone. Most major religions denounce nuclear weapons as immoral, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Ayatollah of Iran to the Dalai Lama.... Despite the frequent invocation of religion in our national discourse, I cannot think of any recent conference where there has been a panel on the morality of our nuclear policy.

Politics. We cannot understand U.S. nuclear policy without factoring in the deep politics involved. This begins with the general antipathy of Democratic Party leaders towards fundamental change in national security policy. Afraid of looking weak, ever since Bill Clinton the party has largely sought to “triangulate” on national security, supporting massive spending and modest adjustments. ...  “People wonder why we don’t learn from failures like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The reason is simple: People who point out alternatives to current national security policies are systematically driven out of positions of authority,” Jeffrey Lewis told The Washington Post. ...

Corruption. We cannot evaluate nuclear strategy as if our decisions are made in careful deliberations among wise, mostly white, mostly men. Nuclear weapons are a big business. People get rich making nuclear weapons. ...

Cirincione concludes: "If this assessment sounds bleak it is because our strategic situation is bleak. Nuclear dangers are rising around the world." Read it all; it's fully accessible.