A Fireball in the Marshall Islands

“Newsreels shown around the country reported that eyewitnesses of the Hiroshima bombing described the event as “Doomsday itself,””

“the voice of H. V. Kaltenborn declared on NBC that, “[f]or all we know, we have created a Frankenstein.””

“In The New York Times, journalist William Laurence wrote that Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked a profound turning point in human history, comparable to “the moment in the long ago when man first put fire to work for him.””

“The New York Herald Tribune similarly remarked that “one senses the foundation of one’s own universe trembling. […] It is as though we had put our hands upon the levers of a power too strange, too terrible, too unpredictable in all of its sudden consequences.””

“Some writers, like the German Jewish philosopher Günther Anders, contended that Hiroshima would prove more significant than the birth of Christ, and hence we should introduce a new calendar in which 1945 is set to year zero.”

“A cursory glance at the apocalyptic language following the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings can easily give the impression that people linked atomic weapons with the possibility of human extinction. But this is not true: almost no one drew a connection between our extinction and the catastrophic explosions of these bombs. No one worried that humanity itself could be extinguished by splitting the atom. Rather, atomic bombs were initially seen just as monumentally bigger hammers that individual states, in particular the United States and Soviet Union, could use to smash each other to pieces.”

“a war with atomic bombs wouldn’t end the human story, but it would slingshot us back into the Stone Age, or at least a new Dark Ages.”

“it wasn’t until nine years later, in 1954, that commentators explicitly worried about nuclear weapons killing literally everyone on Earth.”

“In late 1952, the United States tested the first hydrogen, or thermonuclear, weapon. Thermonuclear weapons produce their explosion through nuclear fusion rather than fission—that is, by fusing together atoms rather than, as happens with atomic bombs, splitting them into fragments.”

“the first detonation, which happened on March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll, was code-named Bravo. Physicists estimated that the explosive yield of this bomb would be about six megatons but, to their surprise, it produced a yield of about 15 megatons—2.5 times larger than expected.”

“Within seconds, a fireball expanded over three miles wide, catapulting some “[t]en million tons of pulverized coral debris […] coated with radioactive fission products” into the atmosphere. This debris rapidly fell back to Earth in the form of odorless, tasteless white flakes of radioactive coral, blanketing roughly 7,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean.”

“Prior to 1954, there were almost no references to human extinction. Immediately afterwards, such references were pretty much everywhere.”

“in 1954, Russell penned the short essay “Man’s Peril,” which he read over BBC radio to an audience of six or seven million people, two days before Christmas. With urgency and passion, he explained that a thermonuclear war would decimate entire metropolitan centers, including “London, New York, and Moscow.” But it would also threaten “universal death,” a phrase he used regularly after the Castle Bravo test.”

“Russell wrote to his friend Albert Einstein about releasing a joint statement on “the universal suicidal folly of a thermonuclear war,” and persuading a number of eminent scientists to sign it.”

“The resulting statement, signed by 10 other Nobel laureates, is known as the “Russell–Einstein Manifesto.” Now serving as a kind of last testament for the great scientist and pacifist, the manifesto repeated Russell’s warning that “if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death” to readers through hundreds of newspapers in dozens of languages across the world”

“In 1956, Günther Anders made the case that human history can be divided into three distinct periods: first, all human beings are mortal; second, all human beings are killable; and third, humankind as a whole is killable.”

“The industrial mass murder of the Jews during the Holocaust had inaugurated the second period, while the advent of thermonuclear weapons initiated the third.”

“Two years later, psychiatrist Karl Jaspers wrote in The Future of Mankind that “an altogether novel situation has been created by the […] bomb. Either all mankind will physically perish or there will be a change in the moral-political condition of man.””

“One year later, a theater critic named Kenneth Tynan published an article in The New Yorker which noted that “we are now equipped for a new crime, as yet untitled, though a good name for it would be omnicide—the murder of everyone.” The word “omnicide” was later popularized in the 1980s by a philosopher named John Somerville, who defined it variously as “the annihilation of all human beings by some human beings” or “the final madness of some humans killing all humans including themselves.” He described this as “the logical (and terminal) extension of the series of such nouns as suicide, infanticide, homicide, genocide.””

“For nearly all of human history, the notion that one group of humans could rapidly exterminate every person on Earth would have seemed absurd.”

“The most recent studies suggest that an all-out thermonuclear conflict would not, in fact, cause our extinction.”

“While figures like Russell and Einstein were right to worry about global thermonuclear fallout given the best science of the day, fears of total human extinction turned out to be overblown.”

“Yet the seduction of apocalyptic thinking is that this time could be different: a thousand failed prophecies do not guarantee that the next prophecy will be false.”