Beyond Hiroshima: The Age of Omnicide

Eighty years have passed, and yet no instrument of war has emerged as absolute, as unrelenting, or as exquisitely engineered for annihilation as the nuclear weapon.

- BY NILANTHA ILANGAMUWA

Its shadow has loomed over international affairs ever since, petrifying geopolitical strategies and freezing conflicts into perennial standoffs. And yet, while the world reminisces annually on the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is a dangerous complacency in the modern imagination. We have failed to reckon with the grotesque escalation of nuclear lethality since 1945, and the global compact once designed to forestall such catastrophe the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has degenerated into ritualistic farce.

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—"Little Boy" and "Fat Man" respectively released explosive forces of 15 and 21 kilotons of TNT. They razed cities, incinerated tens of thousands in milliseconds, and ushered in an era where man's ingenuity outstripped his morality. Today, however, those early bombs would be considered antiquated firecrackers. The largest thermonuclear weapons in modern arsenals such as Russia's RS-28 Sarmat ("Satan II") or the US B83 are orders of magnitude more destructive, boasting yields exceeding 50 megatons. The Soviet Tsar Bomba, tested in 1961, yielded a blast so colossal estimated at 100 megatons before being deliberately scaled down that windows shattered 900 kilometres away, and the Earth's crust reportedly oscillated. Humanity is now in possession of bombs that can eradicate not just cities, but civilisations, possibly ecosystems.