It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, but over the past fifty years, the bomb has become an accepted part of our lives, our most significant Significant Other of sorts, the one we’ve come to depend on as our last resort in foreign affairs and military policy. With it, the buck stops. General Dwight Eisenhower said of Hiroshima: “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” But by the time he left the White House he observed: “It would be impossible for the United States to maintain the military commitments which it now sustains around the world…did we not possess atomic weapons and the will to use them when necessary.” Today, a single Trident submarine has the capacity of 4,000 Hiroshimas. We try not to think about it. 

• Thomas Merton wrote in Commonweal (“Nuclear War and Christian Responsibility,” February 9,1962), that it is pure madness for Christians to think we can defend ourselves with nuclear weapons: “The mere fact that we now seem to accept nuclear war as reasonable is a universal scandal,” he said. Nor can we justify our moral passivity, “playing with nuclear fire and shrugging off the results as ‘history,’” because “we are the ones responsible.” As for using just-war criteria to justify preparations for nuclear war, he noted: “Moralists tend to discuss the problems of atomic war as if men still fought with bows and arrows.” Yet it is clear—if not to moralists, then to military planners—that “atomic war is purely and simply massive and indiscriminate destruction of targets chosen not for their military significance alone, but for their importance in a calculated project of terror and annihilation.” 

   

• But are we really that attached to the bomb? With the demise of the Soviet Union, hasn’t there been a stepping back from the nuclear brink? It’s true that the United States has cut its arsenal, unilaterally refrained from nuclear testing, and renewed the nonproliferation treaty. Yet we maintain a “first-use” policy, have yet to sign a comprehensive test ban treaty, and are only now beginning to admit that our nuclear build-up exposed thousands of our citizens to radiation (sometimes on purpose) without their knowledge or consent. 

   

• Fifty years ago, J. Robert Oppenheimer designated the first atomic bomb test “Trinity.” He had been reading John Donne’s sonnet, “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” but misappropriated Donne’s image. Donne was not invoking God’s wrath but God’s love: “.. .bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new,” he wrote. Our hearts and wills need to be overwhelmed by such love. 

   

• A place to start might be to hear the voices of the victims of the original bomb. Rachelle Linner has collected some in City of Silence: Listening to Hiroshima (Orbis). They can be searing, yet they are not without hope, a hope best summed up in the inscription on the memorial Cenotaph in Hiroshima: “We Shall Not Repeat the Evil.” That is a promise worth contemplating.