Eighty Year Ago: “The flying start of an unlimited armaments race.”
by Joe Cirincione
Eighty Year Ago: “The flying start of an unlimited armaments race.”
Board Vice Chair Joseph Cirincione writes on Substack about the warning scientists gave before the atomic bombings of Japan, and the dangerous future they saw coming.
What if the nuclear arms race was not an accident, but a consequence foreseen from the very beginning? What did scientists understand in 1945 about proliferation, insecurity, and the limits of military advantage that remains urgent today? In this essay, our board member reflects on the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, tracing how ignored warnings helped produce the nuclear world we are still living in.
“A numerically superior arsenal would offer only false security.”
Eighty years later, the logic those scientists feared is still with us: more weapons, more states seeking them, and fewer constraints holding the system together. This piece is not only about what happened after Hiroshima, it is about why that history still matters now.
