Oddly, this image of Slim Pickens as B-52 Bomber pilot Air Force Maj. T. J. "King" Kong, from the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is on Trump’s corrupt “Dept. of War” website. The Trump regime is so clueless that they don’t get that the joke is on them.

Eighty one years ago on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by two nuclear bombs. About 250,000 civilians were killed and many more died in the years to come from the radiation exposure.

Our government justified these war crimes as necessary to save American lives and end the war. But now we know it was not necessary. Japan was collapsing and ready to surrender.

Today our government still claims nukes are necessary for national defense despite the many people over the last eight decades who have spoken out against the insanity of playing geopolitical “chicken” with the lives of everyone on the planet.

Our country created these awful weapons of mass destruction and are the only nation to ever use them. We should have taken responsibility for them and actively worked for their abolition. We could have done that in 1945 when we were the only nation to have them. Instead we fueled a Cold War arms race and almost destroyed the world in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Army General Omar Bradley said in an Armistice Day speech in 1948,“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. And the way to make sure it never starts is to abolish the dangerous costly nuclear stockpiles which imprison mankind.”

In 1999 in a speech titled “Death by Deterrence,” USAF General George Lee Butler (the former commander of the U.S. nuclear forces from 1991 to 1994) said, “...these hideous devices unnecessarily prolonged and intensified the Cold War...Deterrence was a formula for disaster. We escaped disaster by the grace of God.”

In 2022, Daniel Ellsberg said, “We’re continuing year-by-year deliberately with a posture and a policy and threats that make a...significant risk of near extinction possible.”

Most Americans think nuclear weapons, and the threat of a nuclear war, went away with the end of the Cold War. But because humanity dodged the nuclear bullet in the past doesn’t mean we are safe or that a nuclear catastrophe can’t happen in the future.

According to former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry (speaking in 2015),“The likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe is greater today than during the cold war, and the public is completely unaware of the danger.”

In 2023 Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said, “In this period of high geopolitical tension and mistrust, with communication channels between nuclear-armed rivals closed or barely functioning, the risks of miscalculation, misunderstanding, or accident are unacceptably high.”

Daniel Ellsberg is best known for leaking the “Pentagon Papers” in 1971 (a top-secret Department of Defense history of the U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967). But he also worked as a nuclear war planner for the Rand Corporation and the Department of Defense from 1958 to 1971.

In 2017 Ellsberg published The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner based on nuclear secrets he had access to prior to 1971.

In 2022 Ellsberg discussed his views on the dangers of nuclear weapons in a documentary film by Judith Ehrlich. An Ordinary Insanity is a 27-minute documentary available free online at anordinaryinsanity.com/screenings. The film was released online in 2026. Here are several quotes by Daniel Ellsberg from the film.

“You can’t have a large nuclear war – the ones we have prepared for and spent trillions of dollars preparing for – where the victims in that war would be limited to the adversaries or any particular group of adversaries...There is no possibility to limit damage any more than there is a possibility to win nuclear war.”

“The truth is that our nuclear policies from the beginning – first use – is a threat of an insane action...”

Clearly any use of nuclear weapons, for any reason, by any nation, would be simply insane. Obviously there is no political, military, economic or foreign policy goals that would be worth the horrendous costs in human life, the collapse all social order, the massive physical destruction or the long lasting environmental damage of a nuclear war.

Dr. Ira Helfand, a medical doctor and advocate for abolishing nuclear weapons, says, “Even a very ‘limited’ nuclear war, involving less than 0.5% of the world’s nuclear weapons, would be enough to cause catastrophic global climate disruption and a worldwide famine, putting up to 2 billion people at risk” (to see the 9 minute video TED talk search for “Can we prevent nuclear war? Dr. Ira Helfand”).

We now know that nuclear explosions put massive amounts of dust, ash and smoke into the upper atmosphere (in addition to nuclear radiation and fall out). This would block out much of the sun’s light causing severe drops in temperatures and the collapse of agriculture worldwide. This “nuclear winter” could last for a few years or a decade or more.

Either way it is expected that billions of people would die of starvation rather than the nuclear explosions directly.

Nuclear weapons are not just bigger bombs. They are far more destructive than conventional weapons with long lasting consequences. A full scale nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia would end all major animal life on earth.

Nuclear weapons threaten the extinction of humanity. They are immoral because they deliberately and unavoidably target innocent civilians.

As weapons of mass destruction, they cannot be confined to military targets. They are an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars. They have no actual military value because they can not be rationally used. They are an environmental disaster. Mining the uranium and manufacturing them produces the worst pollution in the world. They don’t make our country more secure. They are, in fact, the only weapons that can destroy us – within minutes with virtually no options to defend against them.

It is crazy, irrational and immoral that our government is opposed to the successful implementation of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Dr. Bob Dodge, Co-President of the Board of Physicians for Social Responsibility in Los Angeles believes, “Now more than ever, we must change our national priorities and invest in critical needs for our survival, not deadly weapons that must never be used.”