Eighty years after the atomic age began with the Trinity bomb test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, American media and politics are “routinely oblivious to the threat of oblivion,” says an article published today by The Nation.
The piece, “80 Years After Trinity, the Dangers of Nuclear War Have Never Been Higher,” written by Norman Solomon, warns that “despite the efforts of individuals and groups striving for arms control, the national discourse ignores the likely results of nuclear buildups — which continue to boost the actual risks of annihilation.”
The article adds: “While hawkish legislators make no pretense of interest in any step toward détente, it’s important that at least a minority of Democrats at the Capitol are urging diplomatic talks aimed at preventing nuclear war. Yet it’s hard to imagine those Democrats sounding anything like President Lyndon B. Johnson at the close of his summit with Russian Premier Alexei Kosygin in mid-1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey, when LBJ said: ‘We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions.’
“Today, the Democrats who talk about the need to avoid nuclear war do not seem especially interested in ‘an effort to improve our understanding’ of the Russian leadership’s thinking. The rote storyline — that Vladimir Putin is evil, end of story — blends in smoothly with U.S. news media and the punditocracy. What it also does is give more fuel to the momentum toward nuclear holocaust.
“Many who justifiably derided President George W. Bush after 9/11 for his Manichean view of the world are now largely replicating it. Implicit in the current worldview is that — after decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, causing deaths into the millions, and now while continuing to serve as the crucial accomplice for ongoing genocide in Gaza — the U.S. government is clearly virtuous, in complete contrast with the Russian government because of its own unconscionable aggression in Ukraine.
“The prevailing reflex, to act as though U.S.-Russia relations could roll along on two tracks – escalating geopolitical conflicts while restoring and concluding major nuclear-arms treaties – is the political equivalent of magical thinking, if not simply craven expediency.”
Available for interviews:
NORMAN SOLOMON, [email protected]
Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and national director of RootsAction. His latest book is War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.