There are many miracles of the last 70 years, incredible technological advancements in communications, transportation, medicine, science, computers and engineering.
Yet the greatest miracle is something that hasn't happened, despite the means and the temptation to do it.
Humanity has yet to fight a war with atomic weapons.
This accomplishment flies in the face of mankind's history with weapons development that predates the written word. When your kin or your country developed a weapon that provided a clear advantage over your enemies, that weapon was immediately used, with little regard for its morality. Just a month after a test in the New Mexico desert showed it could work, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima 70 years ago today and a second one was dropped three days later on Nagasaki. Since then, somehow, no attack with atomic weapons has ever occurred.
Somehow those safeguards held during the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly 50 years ago. Somehow the weapons didn't disappear into the black market and pop up in places like Iran after the Soviet Union dissolved 25 years ago.
Besides breaking a historical trend, the lack of further use of atomic weapons is miraculous because of their proliferation. There are tens of thousands of nuclear bombs in the world, enough to destroy every life form on Earth multiple times over. Those bombs are held by several countries in various forms. Submarines, planes, and boats carry them, while the rest live in underground silos, able to be delivered to their targets with sophisticated intercontinental missiles. No safeguard is perfect yet the protections in place have been adequate enough to date to keep these devastating weapons under lock and key.
Possessing nuclear weapons certainly hasn't made the countries that possess them safer places. Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban weren't afraid of nuclear bombs falling on their heads in the wake of 9/11. Great Britain has nuclear weapons but that didn't stop the July 7, 2005 attacks. India has nuclear weapons but that didn't prevent the Mumbai attack in 2008. Israel may or may not have nuclear weapons but that doesn't stop the regular attacks from Gaza, from Lebanon and elsewhere. If ISIS captured Barack Obama, they would behead him immediately, post the video on YouTube and dare the United States to nuke them, knowing full well they wouldn't.
The world isn't a safer place, either. Violent conflict or the imminent threat of it remains continuous in numerous countries. Although academics like Steven Pinker like to point out that humans on a per capita level aren't killing themselves in wars as much as they used to, there is little to stop an abrupt reversal of that trend.
The nuclear threat has never subsided, despite the widespread mistaken belief that it has. Russia has once again fallen under the control of an autocratic dictator who has little respect, fear or concern towards their immediate neighbours or the United States. In Pakistan, the military and the security agencies, not the politicians, hold the real power and its police forces allow the murder of volunteers immunizing children with the polio vaccine and attacks on young girls for the crime of going to school. Both of these countries have atomic arsenals.
There is no putting the uranium and the plutonium back in the ground and forgetting the whole thing. A sharp group of high school students with Internet access lack only a handful of ingredients needed to finish a crude but functional weapon that could immediately kill everyone in the Bowl and leave most residents of College Heights, Blackburn and the Hart dying in fires and buildings collapses or much later from radiation poisoning.
And that's just from a small weapon, measured in kilotons of TNT, the kinds used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Modern nuclear bombs are thousands of times more powerful than that.
Seventy years without atomic war provides no guarantee that the next 70 years will be the same. So many bombs in so many places, desired by so many for such evil purposes, makes it almost inevitable that the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be ignored and/or forgotten. Instead of celebrating seven decades without nuclear warfare, humanity should grimly accept that each new day brings us one day closer to the next time atomic weapons are used.
We can only hope that day is an isolated attack and not part of a broader conflict that leads to humanity's fiery demise.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
