Plowshare’s occasional Hiroshima/Nagasaki Commemoration serves as an important reminder. As years go by, less and less is remembered about the instant holocaust that two nuclear warheads resulted in. We must never forget how everything is laid waste in seconds. And now the world has 10,000 times more nuclear weapons, most of which are exponentially more powerful. All it takes is one madman to unleash the horror, and thereby end life as we know it on earth.

Do you trust what Hitler would have done with them (instead of his suicide in his bunker)? It’s a very serious matter, and in today’s world, even more so. (Have you ever heard about Israel’s Sampson Option?)

Almost 80 Years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we still produce these weapons of mass destruction.  Nuclear warfare strategy is a set of policies based on fear and mistrust that hope to prevent or fight a nuclear war. The policy of trying to prevent an attack by threatening nuclear retaliation is known as the strategy of nuclear deterrence. The goal in deterrence is to always maintain a second-strike capability (the ability of a country to respond to a nuclear attack with one of its own) and potentially to strive for first strike status (the ability to completely destroy an enemy’s nuclear forces before they could retaliate). During the Cold War, policy and military theorists in nuclear-enabled countries worked out models of what sorts of policies could prevent one from ever being attacked by a nuclear weapon, and developed weapon game theory models that create the greatest and most stable deterrence conditions.

There are critics of the very idea of nuclear strategy for waging nuclear war who have suggested that a nuclear war between two nuclear powers would result in mutual annihilation. From this point of view, the significance of nuclear weapons is purely to deter war because any nuclear war would immediately escalate out of mutual distrust and fear, resulting in mutually assured destruction. This threat of national, if not global, destruction has been a strong motivation for anti-nuclear weapons activism.