Nuclear Targeting: The First 60 Years

By Arjun Makhijani

On May 5, 1943, the Military Policy Committee of the Manhattan Project met for the first time to discuss potential targets for the nascent atomic bomb. While Manhattan Project scientists had been pursuing the bomb with the single-minded desire to beat Hitler to the punch, the meeting produced the first official signals that the government was beginning to take a much broader view of the project: Such a weapon could be used not only to deter the Nazis, but to craft and maintain a U.S.-dictated post-war new world order.

Between May 5, 1943 and early December 1944, the bomb acquired a rationale of absolute power and privilege. The exercise of that power on August 6, 1945 bred a military, political, social, moral, and legal monstrosity, whose nature is only now coming into fuller view. Rather than establishing long-term peace monitored and maintained by a single bomb-wielding overseer, the bomb made tangible the illusion of absolute power, spurring greater violence, human rights abuses, and near global annihilation in the quest to obtain and manage it. Yet the nuclear-bomb-equals-total-control formula survives today, and with recent moves away from arms controls, the threat from such an attitude is growing.

The global political fallout has been more than anyone considered at the outset of the Manhattan Project. Harold Urey, a leading project scientist, believed if Hitler got the bomb, "the war will be over in two weeks." In that time, in the deafening roar of the dictator's blitzkrieg across Europe, Hitler simply could not be allowed a monopoly on the weapon--other questions related to its development were secondary. What would happen if the United States gained a monopoly on the bomb? What would such absolute power do to those who wielded it? What would those leaders do to their societies and to the world?

Published by Alla Yaroshinskaya