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Video: ‘A House of Dynamite’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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The director Kathryn Bigelow narrates a tense sequence from her film, in which a ballistic missile is headed for the United States.

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2/3 The Day After | 1983 Nuclear War Movie

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n an August morning in 1945, 600 metres over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, a small sun came briefly into existence. Few remember a sound, but the flash printed shadows on the pavements and sent buildings thrashing. The explosion - 2,000 times greater than that of any bomb yet used - announced not only a new weapon but a new era.

It was a stunning military victory for the United States. Yet jubilation there was undercut by "uncertainty and fear", the newsman Edward R Murrow observed. It took only a moment's reflection on the bomb's existence to see the harrowing implication: what had happened in Hiroshima, and three days later in Nagasaki, could happen anywhere.

The thought proved impossible to shake, especially as, within the year, on-the-ground accounts emerged. Reports came of flesh bubbling, of melted eyes, of a terrifying sickness afflicting even those who'd avoided the blast. "All the scientists are frightened - frightened for their lives," a Nobel-winning chemist confessed in 1946. Despite scientists' hopes that the weapons would be retired, in the coming decades they proliferated, with nuclear states testing ever-more-powerful devices on Pacific atolls, the Algerian desert and the Kazakh steppe.

The fear - the pervasive, enduring fear - that characterised the cold war is hard to appreciate today. It wasn't only powerless city-dwellers who were terrified ("select and fortify a room in which to shelter", the UK government grimly advised). Leaders themselves were shaken. It was "insane", US president John F Kennedy felt, that "two men, sitting on the opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilisation". Yet everyone knowingly lived with that insanity for decades. It was as if, wrote the historian Paul Boyer, "the Bomb" were "one of those categories of Being, like Space and Time, that, according to Kant, are built into of the very structure of our minds, giving shape and meaning to all our perceptions".

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Boyer remembered the unsettling news of the Hiroshima bombing, which occurred the week of his 10th birthday and shaped the rest of his childhood. Today, someone remembering the bomb that well would have to be 86 at least. The memory of nuclear war, once vivid, is quietly vanishing. The signs on the fallout shelters - those that remain - are rusted, and most of the world's population can't even recall an above-ground nuclear test (the last was in 1980). The bomb no longer gives "shape and meaning to all our perceptions"; until recently, many thought of it only rarely. It has been tempting to see nuclear war as a bygone terror that no longer terrifies, like polio.

Except that the threat of nuclear war, as Vladimir Putin is reminding the world, has not gone away. Russia has amassed the world's largest collection of nuclear weapons, and Putin has threatened to "use them, if we have to". The odds that he may are steadily increasing as Nato countries inch toward direct conflict with Russia. They are now sending Ukraine tanks and missiles, amassing troops in eastern Europe and providing intelligence that has allowed Ukrainians to target and kill Russian generals and sink a Russian warship. If this continues, the risk of nuclear war will be "considerable", Russia's foreign minister has warned. "The danger is serious, real, and we must not underestimate it."

Yet many of Putin's adversaries seem either unconvinced or, worse, unbothered by his threats. Boris Johnson has flatly dismissed the idea that Russia may use a nuclear weapon. Three former Nato supreme allied commanders have proposed a no-fly zone over Ukraine. This would almost certainly entail direct military conflict between Nato and Russia, and possibly trigger the world's first all-out war between nuclear states. Still, social media boils over with calls to action, and a poll found that more than a third of US respondents wanted their military to intervene "even if it risks a nuclear conflict".

Nuclear norms are fraying elsewhere, too. Nine countries collectively hold some 10,000 warheads, and six of those countries are increasing their inventories. Current and recent leaders such as Kim Jong-un, Narendra Modi and Donald Trump have, like Putin, spoken brazenly of firing their weapons. After North Korea promised "thousands-fold" revenge in 2017 for sanctions on its accelerating nuclear weapons programme, Trump threatened a pre-emptive strike, pledging to unleash "fire and fury like the world has never seen". "This is analogous to the Cuban missile crisis," one of Trump's former aides, Sebastian Gorka, insisted.

Leaders have talked tough before. But now their talk seems less tethered to reality. This the first decade when not a single head of a nuclear state can remember Hiroshima.

Does that matter? We've seen in other contexts what happens when our experience of a risk attenuates. In rich countries, the waning memory of preventable diseases has fed the anti-vaccination movement. "People have become complacent," notes epidemiologist Peter Salk, whose father, Jonas Salk, invented the polio vaccine. Not having lived through a polio epidemic, parents are rejecting vaccines to the point where measles and whooping cough are coming back and many have needlessly died of Covid-19.

That is the danger with nuclear war. Using declassified documents, historians now understand how close we came, multiple times, to seeing the missiles fired. In those heartstopping moments, a visceral understanding of what nuclear war entailed helped keep the launch keys from turning. It's precisely that visceral understanding that's missing today. We're entering an age with nuclear weapons but no nuclear memory. Without fanfare, without even noticing, we may have lost a guardrail keeping us from catastrophe.

he nuclear age started at 8.15am, 6 August 1945, with the release of a 4,400kg bomb from a B-29 over Hiroshima. Forty-three seconds later, an enormous explosion shattered the city. That so much destruction could be wrought so quickly was shocking news, which until then only a small coterie of scientists and military officials had known. "One senses the foundations of one's own universe trembling," a New York paper wrote in reaction to the terrifying new weapon.

What did the bomb mean? Atomic scientists, who'd had time to contemplate the question, rushed in to explain. The important thing wasn't that atomic bombs could incinerate cities - conventional weapons were already accomplishing that. What distinguished atomic weapons was how easy they made it, noted J Robert Oppenheimer, who had helped oversee the bomb's development. Atomic weapons "profoundly upset the precarious balance" between offence and defence that had governed war hitherto, Oppenheimer explained. A single plane, a single payload - no city was safe.

The implications were, the scientists admitted, horrifying. Albert Einstein had proposed in 1939 that the US government develop nuclear weapons, in order to ensure that Adolf Hitler wouldn't acquire them first. But immediately after the war, he worried about any country possessing such power. Along with many of his colleagues, he concluded that the only solution was a global government, sovereign above existing countries, that would hold the world's nuclear arsenal, enforce laws and prevent wars (other details were vague). One World Or None was the title of a bestselling book that Einstein, Oppenheimer and other scientists produced in March 1946. Even the head of the US air force contributed a chapter pleading for "a world organisation that will eliminate conflict by air power".

Five months later, the world heard from another set of voices. The US occupation authorities in Japan had censored details of the bomb's aftermath. But, without consulting the censors, the American writer John Hersey published in the New Yorker one of the most important long-form works of journalism ever written, a graphic account of the bombing. Born to missionaries in China, Hersey was unusually sympathetic to Asian perspectives. His Hiroshima article rejected the bomber's-eye view and instead told the stories of six survivors.

For many readers, this was the first time they registered that Hiroshima wasn't a "Japanese army base", as US president Harry Truman had described it when announcing the bombing, but a city of civilians - doctors, seamstresses, factory workers - who had watched loved ones die. Nor did they die cleanly, vaporised in the puff of a mushroom cloud. Hersey profiled a Methodist pastor, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who raced to the aid of his ailing but very much still-living neighbours. As Tanimoto grasped one woman, "her skin slipped off in huge, glove-pieces". Tanimoto "was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a minute", wrote Hersey. "He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, 'These are human beings.'"

Hersey's contemporaries understood the significance of these accounts. The New Yorkerdedicated its full issue to Hersey's article, and within an hour sold out its entire newsstand print run of 300,000 (plus another 200,000 copies to subscribers). Knopf published it as a book, which eventually sold millions. The text was reprinted in newspapers from France to China, the Netherlands to Bolivia. The massive ABC radio network broadcast Hersey's text - with no commercials, music or sound effects - over four consecutive evenings. "No other publication in the American 20th century," the journalism historian Kathy Roberts Forde has written, "was so widely circulated, republished, discussed, and venerated."

Tanimoto, boosted to celebrity by Hersey's reporting, made speaking tours of the US. By the end of 1949, he had visited 256 cities. Like Einstein, he pleaded for world government.

World government: it seems now like a wild utopia. Yet an astonishing number of people - responsible, sober people - felt it to be the only way of preventing more Hiroshimas. Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee both supported the idea. In France, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus championed it. France's postwar constitution provided for the "limitations of sovereignty" a future world state might require. So did Italy's.

Even in the US, which stood to lose its nuclear monopoly and global supremacy, support for a world state hovered between a third and a half in opinion polls. "World Government shall come - this is practically the consensus in this generation," wrote the University of Chicago's chancellor; he even convened a committee to draft its constitution. When candidates in the 1948 elections were asked if they favoured a global government with direct jurisdiction over individuals and peacekeeping powers, 57% said yes, including John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon. In 1946, the movie star Ronald Reagan donated $200 to the cause.

Such enthusiasm, however, counted for little in the face of geopolitics. Rising tensions between Washington and Moscow erased the possibility of global government. Still, they didn't change the fact: across the west, leading thinkers felt nuclear weapons to be so dangerous that they required, in Churchill's words, remoulding "the relationships of all men of all nations" so that "international bodies by supreme authority may give peace on earth and justice among men".

or Albert Einstein, a world state was "the only one way out": it was either that or annihilation. Yet the world state never came, and neither did another nuclear war. One of the most surprising and important facts of modern history is a quiet one: in the 76 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not a single nuclear weapon has been detonated in anger.

Most weapons don't work like that. Poison gas is one of the few other military technologies that, despite its effectiveness, has been shunned - the first world war was a gas war, but the second world war mostly wasn't. Yet even chemical weapons have seen intermittent use, as by Iraq in the 1980s or Syria in 2013. By contrast, the number of nuclear weapons used since 1945 is zero.

Why? The conventional explanation is deterrence. The very thing that terrified Oppenheimer about nuclear weapons - that they made attacking easy and defending nearly impossible - meant that any country nuking a similarly armed foe would have to expect a counterstrike. "Because catastrophic outcomes of nuclear exchanges are easy to imagine, leaders of states will shrink in horror from initiating them," the political scientist Kenneth Waltz argued. This logic led Waltz to a counterintuitive position: nuclear proliferation might be good. It's not just that nuclear weapons deter nuclear weapons, it's that they deter major wars in general by making the risks too high. The greater the number of states with nuclear arms, the argument goes, the less likely we are to see violence on the scale of the two world wars.

Conflicts have indeed become smaller since 1945. And although there have been border skirmishes between nuclear states - China and the USSR in 1969, India and Pakistan more recently - there haven't been full wars. The bomb "gave peace to Europe", the nuclear physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan argued. Khan led Pakistan's nuclear programme starting in the 1970s and then transferred nuclear technologies to Iran, North Korea and Libya in the 1980s and 1990s. His active role in proliferation horrified many, but Khan felt that Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapons (it tested its first in 1998) had saved it "from many wars". By this grim reasoning, we might celebrate the fact that nearly half of humanity now lives in countries with nuclear weapons (and mourn Ukraine's decision in the 1990s to destroy its warheads).

Yet central to Waltz's deterrence theory was that the "catastrophic outcomes" of nuclear war were "easy to imagine". For Waltz, who served in Japan in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, no imagination was necessary. Others needed help. This is why John Hersey's Hiroshima article and Kiyoshi Tanimoto's speaking tours were so important: they turned nuclear war from an abstraction into a reality.

It was a reality many lived with daily. Today, telling schoolchildren to hide under their desks if a hydrogen bomb strikes seems quaintly unhinged (though, actually, it's good advice). But besides whatever trauma they wrought, preparedness drills like that created a widely shared nuclear consciousness. People regularly envisioned themselves in the position of the Hiroshima survivors. And if they needed help, such films as On the Beach (1959, US), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961, UK), The Last War (1961, Japan) and The Day After (1983, US but broadcast globally) vividly dramatised what a nuclear war would be like.

"Is it possible never to think about nuclear weapons?" asked the novelist Martin Amis in the 1980s. "The man with the cocked gun in his mouth may boast that he never thinks about the cocked gun. But he tastes it, all the time.". In the same decade, the psychiatrist Robert Lifton assessed the "psychic toll" such nuclear dread had taken. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't just historical events, he argued, they were psychological ones, with rippling consequences. Living with the threat of annihilation threw "all relationships" into question. How could children trust their parents to keep them safe or churches provide spiritual continuity in such a world? Lifton attributed the rise of divorce, fundamentalism and extremism to the "radical futurelessness" the bomb had engendered.

Maybe one could dismiss the fallout shelters as theatre and the films as fiction. But then there were the bomb tests - great belches of radioactivity that previewed the otherworldly dangers of nuclear weapons. By 1980, the nuclear powers had run 528 atmospheric tests, raising mushroom clouds everywhere from the Pacific atoll of Kiritimati to the Chinese desert. A widely publicised 1961 study of 61,000 baby teeth collected in St Louis showed that children born after the first hydrogen bombs were tested had markedly higher levels of the carcinogen strontium-90, a byproduct of the tests, despite being some 1,500km away from the closest test site.

Unsurprisingly, nuclear tests stoked resistance. In 1954, a detonation by the US at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific got out of hand, irradiating the inhabited atoll of Rongelap and an unfortunate Japanese tuna fishing boat. When the boat's sickened crew returned to Japan, pandemonium erupted. Petitions describing Japan as "thrice victimised by nuclear bombs" and calling for a ban collected tens of millions of signatures. Ishiro Honda, a film director who'd seen the Hiroshima damage firsthand, made a wildly popular film about a monster, Gojira, awakened by the nuclear testing. Emitting "high levels of H-bomb radiation", Gojira attacks a fishing boat and then breathes fire on a Japanese city.

Gojira - or Godzilla, as he's known in English - wasn't the only one awakened by the 1954 Bikini test. The test put Hiroshima back in the spotlight and raised the profile of its survivors. In 1955, Kiyoshi Tanimoto brought 25 women, the "Hiroshima Maidens", to the US for reconstructive surgery. He appeared before 15 40 million viewers on the television show This Is Your Life and recounted his ordeal the day Hiroshima was attacked. (In an agonising moment, he was then made to shake hands with a surprise guest, a drunken Robert A Lewis, one of the two pilots who had bombed it.)

As the anti-nuclear movement spread, "Hiroshima" became less an unfortunate event in Japan's past than a semi-sacred one in world history, to be commemorated by morally serious people no matter their nationality. Tanimoto promoted "Hiroshima Day" and by the early 1960s there were protests and memorials on that day throughout the world. Denmark alone held demonstrations in 45 towns in 1963.

By then, Hiroshima occupied a similar place in public memory to Auschwitz, the other avatar of the unspeakable. The resemblance ran deep. Both terms identified specific events within the broader violence of the second world war - highlighting the Jews among Hitler's victims, and the atomic bomb victims among the many Japanese who were bombed - and marked them as morally distinct. Both Hiroshima and Auschwitz had been the site of "holocausts" (indeed, early writers more often used that term to describe atomic war than European genocide). And both Hiroshima and Auschwitz sent forth a new type of personage: the "survivor", a hallowed individual who had borne witness to a historically unique horror. What Elie Wiesel did to raise the stature of Europe's survivors, Tanimoto did for Japan's. In their hands, Hiroshima and Auschwitz shared a message: never forget, never again.

Yet the analogy was imperfect. The European Holocaust was the work of many hands. Mass killing, ordered from on high, had to be carried out by countless willing executioners, who snatched the victims from their homes, stuffed them on to trains, kept them in camps, shot them, gassed them and disposed of their corpses. By contrast, the nuclear apparatus, once in place, could be set into motion by a handful of men in only a few minutes.

This also meant, the world soon realised, that another Hiroshima could come by accident. The murder of Europe's Jews was many things, but it wasn't inadvertent. In nuclear standoffs, a plane crash, system malfunction or miscalibrated threat could all plausibly trigger annihilation.

uclear standoffs are dangerous by design. As in the game of chicken, the point is to set off on a collision course and frighten your opponent into swerving first. "Fill the nuclear glass to the brim," Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev advised his colleagues, "but don't pour the last drop."

Such brinksmanship requires leaders to quell their doubts, possibly even to convince themselves that they're willing to see the glass spill over. Perhaps some are. "The whole idea is to kill the bastards," said US general Thomas Power, when presented in 1960 with a nuclear plan designed to minimise casualties. "Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win." This is the man who led the US Strategic Air Command - responsible for its nuclear bombs and missiles - during the Cuban missile crisis.

Generals like Power, tasked with winning wars, pressed often for pre-emptive strikes. Yet they were fortunately overruled. Deterrence is surely one reason why, but memory played an important part, too. At key moments, decision-makers vividly imagined what would happen if they fired their weapons. They knew what nuclear aftermath looked like.

Even Truman, who had initially considered the bombing of Hiroshima "the greatest thing in history", found cause for restraint. When the UN forces became stalemated in the Korean war, their commander Douglas MacArthur requested "atomic capability", later explaining that he'd wanted to drop "between 30 and 50 atomic bombs". Although Truman readied nuclear weapons, he fired MacArthur and declined to use them.

Why? Looking back, Truman complained of his "locally minded" field generals who couldn't grasp what going nuclear would have meant. It would have meant an escalating war destroying cities containing millions of "innocent women, children and noncombatants", Truman imagined. Truman "just could not" drop the bombs, he wrote. And, he added, "I know I was right. "

Truman's successor, Dwight Eisenhower, felt the same. He built up his country's nuclear arsenal, but when his military advisers urged a preventative attack on the Soviet Union, he refused. He'd seen war, and he could easily envision a nuclear conflict. It would mean, he told them, a "great area from the Elbe to Vladivostok and down through south-east Asia torn up and destroyed without government, without its communications, just an area of starvation and disaster". He couldn't do it, either.

Such familiarity with war's horrors proved essential in the Cuban missile crisis. The US placement of nuclear missiles in Turkey, followed by the Soviet placement of them in Cuba, brought the two powers terrifyingly close to war. But after a series of escalating threats, Kennedy's Soviet counterpart Khrushchev changed the tone with a frantic, personal appeal. "I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction," he wrote. Kennedy, as a fellow "military man" who had also seen combat (Khrushchev mentioned this twice), would "understand perfectly what terrible forces" could be unleashed.

Kennedy did understand, and he veered away from what he called the "final failure". Yet even as Kennedy and Khrushchev were de-escalating their dangerous confrontation, a "far more dangerous" one was developing at sea, the late historian Martin Sherwin has argued. Its resolution suggests just how important experiential knowledge has been in keeping disaster at bay.

The situation involved a Cuba-bound Soviet submarine, carrying a nuclear warhead as powerful as the one that had decimated Hiroshima. The submarine, out of radio contact for days, had missed all the hasty diplomacy between Kennedy and Khrushchev. And so, when the sub's captain found himself beneath a US warship, he refused to surface when signalled. Instead, he stayed submerged while the US sailors grew more aggressive in their signalling. One skipper tried the unauthorised and reckless tactic of dropping grenades on the sub.

The explosions were terrifying, and the Soviet captain understandably assumed the war was on. He ordered the torpedo readied. "We're gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all - we will not become the shame of the fleet," the ship's radio officer remembered him shouting. Firing the first nuclear weapon since Nagasaki at the US navy near Cuba at the height of the missile crisis would have almost certainly triggered nuclear retaliation. "This was not only the most dangerous moment of the cold war," believed Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr, "It was the most dangerous moment in human history."

The disaster was prevented by a Soviet officer, Vasily Arkhipov, who by chance had been assigned to travel with the submarine. Fifteen months earlier, he'd served aboard a nuclear-powered submarine whose reactor coolant system had failed, exposing the crew to radiation and killing 22 of his 138 shipmates. "He'd seen with his own eyes what radiation did to people," his wife told a historian. "This tragedy was the reason he would say no to nuclear war." Now facing the likelihood of war in the Caribbean, Arkhipov talked the enraged captain down.

It was astonishing luck: the submarine poised to start a nuclear war randomly had aboard one of the few individuals on the planet with recent experience of nuclear disaster. The ability to clearly remember and imagine nuclear war's consequences had been, once again, essential to averting them.

n 1985, John Hersey returned to Hiroshima for the 40th anniversary of the bombing. He came to commemorate the past, but he found it fading. The survivors, on average, were now 62. Two of the six people he had profiled in his article were dead. Kiyoshi Tanimoto was still alive, but he was over 70 and retired. "His memory, like the world's, was getting spotty," Hersey wrote.

By then, the above-ground nuclear tests had stopped (the achievement of decades of antinuclear activism and treaties). Apocalyptic movies continued, but more often featuring zombies, aliens, intelligent machines, diseases or climate change than nuclear catastrophe. Hiroshima's resonance, which once matched Auschwitz's, was growing muffled. Today, knowledge of the Holocaust is kept alive by more than 100 museums and memorials, including in such unexpected countries as Cuba, Indonesia and Taiwan. But there is no comparable memory industry outside of Japan to remind people of nuclear war.

The result is a profound generational split, evident in nearly every family in a nuclear state. My father, born a month after Hiroshima was bombed, remembers going to a concert during the Cuban missile crisis "wondering if I would survive to the end". My mother had constant nightmares of nuclear war. By contrast, I was born the year the atmospheric testing stopped, and such thoughts never crossed my mind. The extent of my nuclear consciousness was the hours I spent playing a video game called Duke Nukem. That game debuted in 1991, the year the cold war ended and Mikhail Gorbachev declared that "the risk of a global nuclear war has practically disappeared".

We should feel relief, but the dispelling of dread has made it hard for many to take nuclear war seriously. "I hear people talk about nuclear weapons," arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis told me recently, "and it's just so divorced from reality." They've become "dead metaphors", Lewis feels, lacking the concreteness to disturb our thoughts or constrain our behaviours.

With nuclear threats far from mind, voters seem more tolerant of reckless politicians. Donald Trump, a case in point, has made outrageous threats, praised his own "unpredictability" in nuclear affairs and suggested using nuclear bombs against hurricanes ("you could hear a gnat fart in that meeting", a source told Axios). Yet in the energetic discussion about the risks of Trump's running for president in 2024 and winning, nuclear issues are far from central.

Nor is it only Trump. The nine nuclear states have had an impressive string of norm-breakers among their recent leaders, including Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Kim Jong-un and Benjamin Netanyahu. With such erratic men talking wildly and tearing up rulebooks, it's plausible that one of them might be provoked to break the ultimate norm: don't start a nuclear war.

Caution does not seem in abundance nowadays. Invading Ukraine, Russia turned Chernobyl into a battlefield and recklessly shelled Europe's largest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. The Zaporizhzhia attack unsurprisingly set part of the site aflame. It was "the first time in history" that a nuclear plant had been attacked, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy pointed out. "If there is an explosion, it is the end of everything."

But how guided are leaders by such fears? In the past 20 years, the US has pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and two of the three main treaties restraining its arms race with Russia ( the third is in bad shape). Meanwhile, China has been developing aggressive new weapons. In 2019, India made an airstrike in Pakistan, the first time its planes crossed the military border in Kashmir - known as the Line of Control - since either state acquired nuclear weapons. India has "stopped the policy of getting scared of Pakistan's threats", its prime minister, Modi, declared. India has the "mother of nuclear bombs" and its arsenal is "not being kept for Diwali".

The cost of the shredded norms and torn-up treaties may be paid in Ukraine. Russia invested heavily in its nuclear arsenal after the cold war; it now has the world's largest. The worse the war in Ukraine goes, the more Putin might be tempted to reach for a tactical nuclear weapon to signal his resolve. Already, Russia has threatened nuclear war multiple times, and yet Nato countries increase their aid to Ukraine. The "current generation of Nato politicians", Russia's exasperated ambassador in Washington has complained, "does not take the nuclear threat seriously".

Maybe they don't. Hiroshima lies just outside their collective memory. The oldest of the 30 Nato leaders, Joe Biden, was two years old in August 1945. The youngest, prime minister Dritan Abazović of Montenegro, may not even remember the cold war, as he was five when the Soviet Union collapsed.

That is what time does. Traumas fade, fortunately for us all. It is a profound achievement - though surely aided by luck - that no nuclear war has refreshed our memories since 1945. We should rejoice, too, that the looming dread engulfing past generations has largely dissipated. This is what we want nuclear war to be: an archaic practice, relegated safely to the past.

But we can't drive nuclear war to extinction by ignoring it. Instead, we must dismantle arsenals, strengthen treaties and reinforce antinuclear norms. Right now, we're doing the opposite. And we're doing it just at the time when those who have most effectively testified to nuclear war's horrors - the survivors - are entering their 90s. Our nuclear consciousness is badly atrophied. We're left with a world full of nuclear weapons but emptying of people who understand their consequences.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

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The US, UK and Australia are setting up a trilateral security partnership aimed at confronting China, which will include helping Australia to build nuclear-powered submarines.

The initiative, called Aukus, was announced jointly by US president Joe Biden and prime ministers Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison, joined virtually by videoconference. They presented it as the next critical step in an old alliance.

Morrison said teams from the three countries would draw up a joint plan over the coming 18 months for assembling the new Australian nuclear-powered submarine fleet, which will be built in Adelaide. The project will make Australia only the seventh country in the world to have submarines propelled by nuclear reactors.

"This will include an intense examination of what we need to do to exercise our nuclear stewardship responsibilities here in Australia," the Australian prime minister said, referring to the international treaty obligations on handling nuclear fuel. Morrison added: "But let me be clear. Australia is not seeking to acquire nuclear weapons or establish a civil nuclear capability."

None of the three leaders mentioned China, but there was no doubt that the initiative was a response to China's expansionist drive in the South China Sea and increasing belligerence towards Taiwan.

"We need to be able to address both the current strategic environment in the region, and how it may evolve, because the future of each of our nations and indeed the world, depends on a free and open Indo-Pacific enduring and flourishing in the decades ahead," Biden said.

Speaking from London, Johnson said the three countries were "natural allies" even though "we may be separated geographically" and said the alliance would create "a new defence partnership and driving jobs and prosperity".

Turning to the Australian submarine-building plan, Johnson said: "This will be one of the most complex and technically demanding projects in the world, lasting decades and requiring the most advanced technology.

A senior US official described the agreement as "a fundamental decision, that binds decisively Australia to the United States and Great Britain for generations".

The agreement spells the end for a $90bn contract Australia signed with the French company Naval Group in 2016. That deal had become bogged down in cost over-runs, delays and design changes. It marks a setback for President Emmanuel Macron.

"The world is a jungle," the former French ambassador to Washington, Gérard Araud, observed on Twitter. "France has just been reminded this bitter truth by the way the US and the UK have stabbed her in the back in Australia. C'est la vie."

Naval Group, which had been contracted to build 12 state-of-the-art attack class submarines, said the new agreement was a "great disappointment".

Australia insists that it has no intention of pursuing nuclear weapons and will abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but critics said the decision could still indirectly spur the proliferation of weapons.

Any new nuclear-powered submarines, which are powered with the help of enriched uranium, will take years - possibly over a decade - to develop. But once at sea, the aim is to put Australia's currently diesel-powered navy on a technological par with China's navy, the world largest.

As well as cooperation on naval technology, the partnership will involve closer alignment of regional policies and actions, and greater integration of the militaries and the defence industries of the three allies. The three also intend to work together on cyberwarfare and on artificial intelligence capabilities.

British officials said they hoped the UK would benefit from defence companies supplying technology to Australia. Derby-based Rolls-Royce supplies reactors for Royal Navy submarines, which are eventually decommissioned in the UK when spent. But it is not yet clear how the Australian reactors will be supplied or decommissioned.

The formation of Aukus comes at a time of rising tensions, especially over the South China Sea and Taiwan. A new book about the last weeks of the Donald Trump administration said that in late 2020 the US became concerned that China was increasingly convinced it would be the target of a pre-emptive attack.

According to Peril, by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley called his Chinese counterpart, Gen Li Zuocheng, twice to reassure him that no attack would happen, and that Milley would personally give a warning if Trump issued such an order.

In July, the UK's new aircraft carrier, the Queen Elizabeth, arrived in the South China Sea, the focal point of US-Chinese tensions, triggering denunciations from Beijing. The US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, welcomed the deployment at the time but wondered "are there areas that the UK can be more helpful in other parts of the world".

A senior US official suggested that the UK government had pushed for a heightened role in the region.

"Great Britain is very focused on the concept of global Britain, and their tilt is about engaging much more deeply with the Indo-Pacific and this is a down payment on that effort," the official said.

Before now, the US has only shared its nuclear propulsion technology with the UK, in an arrangement dating back to 1958, but a senior US official said "This is a unique set of circumstances."

Nuclear power will allow Australian attack submarines to remain at sea for as long as five months and operate more quietly than the country's existing Collins class diesel powered vessels, allowing them to better evade enemy detection.

Some critics of the agreement warn that it sets a dangerous precedent for countries to exploit a loophole in the NPT. The treaty allows non nuclear weapon countries to build nuclear-powered submarines, and to remove the fissile material they need for the submarine reactors from the stockpile monitored by the global watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, opening up the possibility it could be diverted to making weapons. Australia would be the first country to make use of the loophole.

"My concern is not that Australia would misuse the nuclear material we give them and use the loophole to build nuclear weapons," James Acton, co-chair of the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said. "My concern is it sets a terrible precedent that other countries could abuse. "Iran is the obvious example here. We would go batshit if Iran removed nuclear material from safeguards."

David Cullen of the Nuclear Information Service, said: "This has only happened once before in history, when the US helped the UK develop its first nuclear-powered submarines.

"What's interesting is that the US appears to have thrown the UK a bone by allowing Britain to help design and build the new Australian submarines," Cullen said. "The question will be how will the Australians be supplied and whether they want to develop their own nuclear capability to enrich uranium fuel."

British sources said the conversations about the nuclear power deal were initiated by the Australians in March.

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US, UK and Australia forge military alliance to counter China

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The US, UK and Australia are setting up a trilateral security partnership aimed at confronting China, which will include helping Australia to build nuclear-powered submarines. The initiative, called Aukus, was announced jointly by US president Joe Biden and prime ministers Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison, joined virtually by videoconference.

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4. CE - Eisenstein's letter to Roosevelt

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4. CE - Eisenstein's letter to Roosevelt

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Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Enola Gay (Official Music Video)

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Peace activists today

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LOOK and GUESS what this is / what it MAY SAY

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What's this COMMENT on what you see.

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Iraq's invasion in 2003. Why it went wrong.

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Iraq's invasion in 2003. Why it went wrong.

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Chilcot report - What is it and why does it matter? BBC News

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The official report into the UK's involvement in the 2003 Iraq War will be published on Wednesday 6 July. But what is it all about and why is it likely to be controversial?

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Chilcot's damning report in invading Iraq

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Chilcot's damning report in invading Iraq

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Sir John Chilcot has outlined his findings on the UK's involvement in the 2003 Iraq War and the lessons to be learned from it.

The report spans almost a decade of UK government policy decisions between 2001 and 2009.

It covers the background to the decision to go to war, whether troops were properly prepared, how the conflict was conducted and what planning there was for its aftermath, a period in which there was intense sectarian violence.

The main points are:

Military action

The UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before all peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort

Military action might have been necessary later, but in March 2003, it said, there was no imminent threat from the then Iraq leader Saddam Hussein, the strategy of containment could have been adapted and continued for some time and the majority of the Security Council supported continuing UN inspections and monitoring

On 28 July 2002, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair assured US President George W Bush he would be with him "whatever". But in the letter, he pointed out that a US coalition for military action would need: Progress on the Middle East peace process, UN authority and a shift in public opinion in the UK, Europe, and among Arab leaders

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - or WMD - were presented with a certainty that was not justified

Intelligence had "not established beyond doubt" that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons

The Joint Intelligence Committee said Iraq has "continued to produce chemical and biological agents" and there had been "recent production". It said Iraq had the means to deliver chemical and biological weapons. But it did not say that Iraq had continued to produce weapons

Policy on the Iraq invasion was made on the basis of flawed intelligence assessments. It was not challenged, and should have been

The legal case

The circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were "far from satisfactory"

The invasion began on 20 March 2003 but not until 13 March did then Attorney General Lord Goldsmith advise there was, on balance, a secure legal basis for military action. Apart from No 10's response to his letter on 14 March, no formal record was made of that decision and the precise grounds on which it was made remain unclear

The UK's actions undermined the authority of the United Nations Security Council: The UN's Charter puts responsibility for the maintenance of peace and security in the Security Council. The UK government was claiming to act on behalf of the international community "to uphold the authority of the Security Council". But it knew it did not have a majority supporting its actions

In Cabinet, there was little questioning of Lord Goldsmith about his advice and no substantive discussion of the legal issues recorded

Military preparedness

There was "little time" to properly prepare three military brigades for deployment in Iraq. The risks were neither "properly identified nor fully exposed" to ministers, resulting in "equipment shortfalls"

Between 2003 and 2009, UK forces in Iraq faced gaps in some key capability areas - including armoured vehicles, reconnaissance and intelligence assets and helicopter support

It was not sufficiently clear which person in the department within the Ministry of Defence had responsibility for identifying and articulating such gaps

Delays in providing adequate medium weight protected patrol vehicles and the failure to meet the needs of UK forces for reconnaissance and intelligence equipment and helicopters should not have been tolerated

Iraq's aftermath

Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated. The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were "wholly inadequate"

The government failed to achieve the stated objectives it had set itself in Iraq. More than 200 British citizens died as a result of the conflict. Iraqi people suffered greatly. By July 2009, at least 150,000 Iraqis had died, probably many more. More than one million were displaced

Lessons to learn

The report found Mr Blair overestimated his ability to influence US decisions on Iraq; and the UK's relationship with the US does not require unconditional support

It said ministerial discussion which encourages frank and informed debate and challenge is important. As is ensuring civilian and military arms of government are properly equipped

In future, all aspects of any intervention need to be calculated, debated and challenged with rigour. Decisions need to be fully implemented

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Chilcot report: Findings at-a-glance - BBC News

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Sir John Chilcot has outlined his findings on the UK's involvement in the 2003 Iraq War and the lessons to be learned from it. The report spans almost a decade of UK government policy decisions between 2001 and 2009.

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The OMD    (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark)  -  ♦ ENOLA  GAY ♦

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1. LISTEN to - 'There will come soft rain' 

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1. LISTEN to - 'There will come soft rain' 

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- Feelings?
- Talk about place, problem,
- Where are the people?

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2. There will come soft rain, Ray Bradbury, 1950

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2. There will come soft rain, Ray Bradbury, 1950

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LISTEN again as you & READ
- DRAW THE SCENE
- COMPARE drawings

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3. CO - EEO : Dr Strangelove, or How I came to love the bomb, Stanley Kubrick, 1964.

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3. CO - EEO : Dr Strangelove, or How I came to love the bomb, Stanley Kubrick, 1964.

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MONTRER jusqu'à 0.40 mn & FREEZE on room.

COnsigne:
WATCH AND SAY. Who? Where? When? WHY?
WRITE the other end of the dialogue.

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Scene from Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove (1964). In this scene, the President of the United States (Sellers) informs the Russian Prime Minister of some very distressing news.