The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Doug Allen of Orono is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Maine. He is the author of 18 books and is a peace and justice activist scholar who has helped to organize Hiroshima Day commemorations for many decades.
Eighty years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, thus launching the nuclear age that increasingly threatens human and planetary survival. This was followed on Aug. 9 with the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
On July 16, 1945, an atomic bomb, developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico under the leadership of Robert Oppenheimer, with the scientific knowledge of Albert Einstein and other top scientists, was first tested at the Trinity site before an atomic bomb was deployed in Japan. We shall never know how many died, but the best estimates are that about 60,000 to 80,000 were immediately reduced to ashes or completely vaporized at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 200,000 suffered and died soon thereafter, as did hundreds of thousands over the decades through nuclear radiation, genetic defects, cancers, and life-threatening environmental pollution.
Most significantly, this launched the nuclear age with the understanding and technology to develop powerful and profitable nuclear weapons and delivery systems that would be used to threaten, control, and dominate the planet with the increasing possibility of destroying all human civilization.
When he witnessed the detonation of the atomic bomb at the Trinity site, Oppenheimer famously quoted (really paraphrased) the revelation in Chapter 11 of the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” Krishna, who had appeared to the warrior Arjuna in the human incarnational form as charioteer, is now revealed as Lord Krisna in the all-powerful, terrifying, cosmic form capable of complete death and destruction, which Oppenheimer symbolically experiences as our new terrifying nuclear capacity.
To provide a well-known sentence, the quoted and paraphrased dramatic assertion by Einstein: “I do not know with what weapons World War II will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Like Oppenheimer, Einstein was deeply concerned about the destructive potential of nuclear weapons, and how we now had the technological capacity, while lacking the moral and life-affirming values, to wipe out all civilization.
Einstein, Oppenheimer, and other leading scientists created the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1945 and their famous Doomsday Clock in 1947 indicating how close to midnight we are. Midnight, as estimated by Science and Security Board of the Bulletin, expresses the terrifying probability of nuclear apocalypse, complete and final destruction of the world, and nuclear holocaust, nuclear destruction on a planetary catastrophic scale.
In 2025, the Doomsday Clock was reset to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest we’ve ever been to the complete destruction of human civilization and our world. The scientists noted the dangerous nuclear developments in 2024 by Russia in Ukraine and by nations in the Middle East and elsewhere, and how in 2025 we have nine nuclear-armed counties, with plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize nuclear weapons and delivery systems, including the largest increased percentage of nuclear funds in the U.S. since 1962.
For several decades, after the Hiroshima bombing and especially in late 1970s and 1980s, there was a strong U.S. anti-nuclear movement for denuclearization priorities and life affirming alternatives, but we are now alarmingly moving in the opposite direction. As the scientists note, we find dominant political and economic commitments to the use of nuclear development, threats, and domination, with the United States, China, and Russia now with the greatest power to destroy civilization.
Millions of human beings at Davenport Park in Bangor, in the U.S., Japan, and throughout the world view the 2025 anniversary of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an urgently needed wake-up and call to action. Billions of us must push back against the power-dominant narrative that might makes right; that the purpose of living is to weaponize, profit, threaten, terrify, dominate, and exploit. We must push back with the life-affirming alternative views not to spend billions on nuclear weapons, war, and mass violence, but instead to focus on denuclearization, healthcare, education, environmental sustainability, compassion, loving kindness, justice, and human and planetary flourishing.
