The Wizards of Armageddon

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CONCEIVED BY SCIENTISTS, delivered by the military, and adopted by policymakers, nuclear weapons emerged from the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to dominate our time. The politics, diplomacy, economy, and culture of the cold war nurtured the nuclear arms race and, in turn, have been altered by it. “We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945,” E. L. Doctorow observes. “It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.”

The pervasive, transformative potential of nuclear weapons was foreseen by their creators. When Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson assembled a committee in May 1945 to discuss postwar atomic energy planning, he spoke of the atomic bomb as a “revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe.” Believing that it could mean “the doom of civilization,” he warned President Truman that this weapon “has placed a certain moral responsibility upon us which we cannot shirk without very serious responsibility for any disaster to civilization.”

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