A Long Essay on the Impact of the Nuclear Age on Youth Culture, My Life, and The Beats
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Most of us have lived our lives — since Aug. 6, 1945, when the United States incinerated much of Hiroshima, Japan, with an atomic bomb — under the shadow of armageddon, whether we want to admit it or not. The development of then atomic weapons program, the use of the bomb on Japanese cities and the subsequent campaign to find bigger and more destructive nuclear bombs has been with us, even if we have learned to push the reality to the background.
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The film Oppenheimer brought the reality back to our consciousness, but in a historical rather than real, immediate way. Iran’s efforts to develop a bomb and join a small coterie of nations with nuclear weapons has the United States (the only nation to use the weapon offensively) and Israel (which is part of the nuclear club) prepared to go to war. India and Pakistan — both with bombs — are in permanent face off. And Vladimir Putin has refused to take nukes off the table in Russia’s war on Ukraine.
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As Ira Helfand writes in The Progressive, the “the danger of nuclear war is great and growing.”
So far this year, five of the nine nations that possess nuclear weapons have been engaged in active military operations that could have, and might still, escalate to the use of those weapons. Russia continues its war of conquest in Ukraine and its oft-repeated threats to use nuclear weapons. Israel and the United States have attacked sites in Iran that might be used to build nuclear bombs. And India and Pakistan fought another, fortunately brief, war over Kashmir.
The world can no longer indulge in the denial which has marked our thinking since the end of the Cold War. Nuclear war is a real and present danger that we must acknowledge and confront.
For the first 40 years of the nuclear age, the threat seemed palpable, but after Reagan-Gorbachev truce on nukes we pretended the threat was minimal, even as neocons were pushing to modernize and expand our arsenal and smaller nations were jumping in.
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We’ve also not had the reckoning on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that we should, beyond academic efforts. Public debate has been constrained by our hagiographic approach to history, the notion that America as exceptional nation always acts in the best interest of democracy and the world. So we assume the reasons that Harry Truman offered the American public for the bombings were unassailable, though perhaps that is changing.
The essay I’m offering today is part of a larger project that I call Paradise Revisited, a series of essays loosely tied together by a lifetime of reading Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and other beat writers. It was inspired by the badly flawed Norman Mailer essay, “The White Negro,” which does raise some interesting questions about the impact that the bomb and the Holocaust and their very modern connection to technology and mechanization had on arts and culture.
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Hank Kalet 