I just finished reading Anne Jacobsen’s book “Nuclear War: A Scenario“. In the book, she walks the reader minute by minute from launch to impact of what goes on during a nuclear exchange. The scenario she gives is of North Korea launching on the continental US. She gives a very detailed account of the command structure in the USA, and goes on in deciding if there will be retaliation and how that happens. I won’t spoil the outcome, but suffice to say it does not end well for the world.
From the book after the bomb hits the Pentagon:
In the first fraction of a millisecond, a flash of light superheats the air to 18o million degrees Fahrenheit, incinerating people, places, and things, and absorbing a once bright, once powerful, once vibrant city center in a holocaust of fire and death. The fireball from this 1-megaton nuclear weapon that strikes the Pentagon is thousands of times more brilliant than the sun at noon. People from Baltimore, Maryland, to Quantico, Virginia, see this flash of light. Anyone staring directly at it is blinded by it.
In this first millisecond, the fireball is a 440-foot-diameter sphere. Over the next ten seconds, it expands to 5.700 feet in diameter, more than one mile of pure fire nineteen football fields of fire obliterating the nexus of American democracy.
The edges of the fireball stretch all the way to the Lincoln Memorial to the north and into Crystal City to the south. Everything and everyone that existed in this space is incinerated. Nothing remains. No human, no squirrel, no ladybug. No plants, no animals. No cellular life.
The air around the fireball’s edges compresses into a steeply fronted blast wave.
This dense wall of air pushes forward, mowing down everything and everyone in its path for three miles out, in every direction. Accompanied by several-hundred-mile-per-hour winds, it is as if Washington, D.C., just got hit by an asteroid and its accompanying wave.
In Ring 1- a nine-mile-diameter ring engineered structures change physical shape and most collapse. Piles of rubble left behind stand thirty or more feet high.
The initial thermonuclear flash has set everything in the fireball’s line of sight on fire. It melts lead, steel, titanium. It turns paved streets into molten asphalt.
At the outer edges of Ring I, rare survivors become trapped in liquified roadways, catch fire, and melt. The X-ray light of the nuclear flash burns skin off people’s bodies, leaving their extremities a shredded horror of bloody tendons and exposed bone. Wind rips the skin off people’s faces and tears away limbs. Survivors die of shock, heart attack, blood loss. Errant power lines whip through the air, electrocuting people and setting new fires alight everywhere.
As tens of seconds pass, the fireball rises three miles up into the air. Its ominous cloud cap turns the light of day into darkness. Some i to 2 million people are dead or dying, hundreds of thousands more now caught in the rubble and the flames.
A full nuclear exchange between the USA and Russia would result in the death of 360 million immediately, and 5 billion people in a few weeks from a global famine cause by the nuclear winter. Only Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Argentina and Paraguay would have any agriculture capabilities.
With an outcome like this, it seems the LDS Church, being the Lord’s One True Church, would have something to say about the use of nuclear weapons, as the loss of 5 billion people (63% of the worlds population)would put a serious dent in the plan of salvation. In fact with that scenario, I would guess the LDS Church would cease to function.
So what is the history of the LDS Church and the bomb? Probably the most direct and condemning statement comes from J Ruben Clark, counselor in the FP, in his Oct 1946 General Conference address, given after the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan.
. . .Then as the crowning savagery of the war, we Americans wiped out hundreds of thousands of civilian population [sic] with the atom bomb in Japan, few if any of the ordinary civilians being any more responsible for the war than were we, and perhaps most of them no more aiding Japan in the war than we were aiding America.
“Military men are now saying that the atom bomb was a mistake. It was more than that: it was a world tragedy. Thus we have lost all that we gained during the years from [Hugo Grotius, a scholar of international law] (1625) to 1912. And the worst of this atomic bomb tragedy is not that not only did the people of the United States not rise up in protest against this savagery, not only did it not shock us to read of this wholesale destruction of men, women, and children, and cripples, but that it actually drew from the nation at large a general approval of this fiendish butchery.
“[W]e in America are now deliberately searching out and developing the most savage, murderous means of exterminating peoples that Satan can plant in our minds. We do it not only shamelessly, but with a boast. God will not forgive us for this.
“If we are to avoid extermination, if the world is not to be wiped out, we must find some way to curb the fiendish ingenuity of men who have apparently no fear of God, man, or the devil, and who are willing to plot and plan and invent instrumentalities that will wipe out all the flesh of the earth. And, as one American citizen of one hundred thirty millions, as one in [the] one billion population of the world, I protest with all of the energy I possess against this fiendish activity, and as an American citizen, I call upon our government and its agencies to see that these unholy experimentations are stopped, and that somehow we get into the minds of our war-minded general staff and its satellites, and into the general staffs of all the world, a proper respect for human life.”
He does not pull any punches on this. He sounds like a liberal 1960’s anti war hippy! I especial like his “God will not forgive us” statement.
So what has the Church done since then? Probably the most significant was an official statement denouncing the deployment of the MX missile system in 1981. From the NY Times article on the statement:
Our fathers came to the Western area to establish a base from which to carry the gospel of peace to the peoples of the earth,” the statement said in part. ”It is ironic, and a denial of the very essence of that gospel, that in this same general area there should be constructed a mammoth weapons system potentially capable of destroying much of civilization.”
The church did not oppose the missile itself. ”With the most serious concern over the pressing moral question of possible nuclear conflict,” the statement said, ”we plead with our national leaders to marshal the genius of the nation to find viable alternatives which will secure at an earlier date and with fewer hazards the protection from possible enemy aggression which is our common concern.”
I take this opposition as not so much against the nuclear weapons per se, but the fact they would be based in Utah, this making the state a target for retaliation during a nuclear exchange with Russia.
Since then, I have only found general comments about the evils of war in general, like in in 2022, Church President Russell M. Nelson condemned the war in Ukraine as a “calamity” and a “horrifying violation of everything the Lord Jesus Christ stands for”. He called for prayers and fasting and urged members to “bury your weapons of war,” echoing the broader message of peacemaking and the importance of controlling one’s own actions in the pursuit of peace.
On the other side of the augment, is the revelation after Ensign Peak’s stock holding became public, that the Church has over $350 million invested in defense contractors with nuclear weapons contracts.
I think most leaders and members have the idea that the Lord knows that is going on, and that He will not let anything like a nuclear holocaust happen, or if it does it will be at the end of the world anyway. (like what the Church does with climate change and the water shortage in Utah)
What do you think of this? Is the Church doing enough about the real threat of Nuclear War? Can or should a church do anything? What are your personal feeling on this?
Wheat & Tares 
Its interesting that you highlight what would happen if a nuclear weapon was used against the United States and not what if the United States used a nuclear weapon against its enemies like Iran or Venezuela or Israel used its weapons against Palestinians or that Russia used them against a Western European nation. As far as I can tell, the US is the only country to have used a nuclear weapon against another nation and I think with the current leaders of the US, Israel, and Russia, these are more probable scenarios than a North Korean strike on DC.
But most American LDS members only care about America, so I guess it’s a good way for you (and the book’s author) to at least grab our attention about what a nuclear strike would do to those hit by it.
I think Spencer Kimball deeply believed in peace and was horrified by nuclear proliferation and the war mongering of Ronald Reagan (thus his statements against the MX missiles) while in contrast ET Benson was more a cheerleader for American power in all its jingoistic forms.
Since then there has been the occasional handwringing by LDS leaders about war as a means to an end, but that has not in any way diminished their strong support for American Imperialism like the invasion of Iraq. Gordon Hinckley’s talk at the start of the second Gulf War was a classic in showing familiarity with notion that Jesus had taught something about peace, but complete willingness to support American imperialists like Dick Cheney with his specious claims about Iraq’s making nuclear weapons to justify violent capture of foreign oil fields.
Since then, the LDS church as a whole seems to have even more fully embraced the kinds of American jingoism and nationalism (aka MAGA/Trumpism) that makes our use of first strike nuclear weapons much more probable. I can’t tell if this is what current LDS leaders also favor or they just don’t care enough to say anything. It does not seem far-fetched at all to think of Trump using nuclear weapons against another country like Venezuela or Iran. The only country that seems safe is Russia, given Trump’s complete embrace of Putin.
I don’t see the LDS church as being thought leaders on moral issues or exerting significant moral influence in any way. Not in the way that the current and recent Catholic Popes were/are or that many mainstream Protestant churches are. Of course, I am not sure that even if all the members of the LDS church actually turned against nuclear war and jingoism that it would change anything. But what is the point of calling yourself a prophet if you aren’t standing up for what is right in the face of power?
President Clark’s rebuke is fascinating in so many ways. One interesting point is that he twice states his authority “as an American citizen”, not as a prophet, seer, and revelator. The Church, and thus presumably God Himself, have never officially weighed in on the matter. Apparently, abstinence from tea and coffee is more important than the potential destruction of civilization as we know it.
Revelation 3:15-16, where Jesus says, “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I am about to spit you out of my mouth”. I Realized the this is talking more about spieitua;ity but non the less perhaps it couls cross pollinat at least it makes you think a ittle aboot neutrality.
Similar to Robert I’m in awe at the directness of Clark.
I cannot even picture such directness by any church leader today, unless it’s about defending the family (trademark pending).
May the pendulum quickly swing away from the emotional reactionary world leaders right now to calmer more mature leaders.
I do appreciate President Nelson’s calls for peace right now, notwithstanding feeling that he didn’t always model that.
It’s frightening to look back with clear hindsight and see the devastation caused by those two bombings. Even so, I can’t help but wonder if there may have been a greater number of casualties had we continued the war against Japan in the way we destroyed Tokyo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1945)
“Is the Church doing enough about the real threat of nuclear war?” I wonder what more one wants the Church to do on this issue. Maybe buy 30-second TV advertisement spots against it? Would such an advertising campaign deter the leaders of any nuclear-armed nations? A general authority could give a talk in general conference against nuclear war, but would that do any good? Should general conference be used to preach about big world issues, when world leaders do not view conference? or should conference talks focus on individuals living the gospel in their daily lives? Jesus didn’t preach to the emperor in Rome, nor to the emperors in Persia or China, but he did preach to individual hearers about love, forgiveness, repentance, etc. Maybe modern prophets should teach on these subjects.
So which leaders of nuclear armed countries are evil enough to use their nuclear weapons?
Netenyahu has enough conventional arms supplied by America to completely remove Palestine from the map along with its inhabitants. When the rest of the civilised world is trying to get Israel to behave in a moral and legal way, America continues to supply weapons and defend them in the UN. Australia has joined Canada, UK, France, and others in recognising the state of Palestine in the UN, And calling for Israel to end its attacks on the palistinian people. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Israel nuke an arab state.
Putin could go nuclear if he starts to loose the war in Ukraine. He doesn’t seem to have any moral limits.
Trump doesn’t seem to have any moral limits either, so if he felt threatened I think he would use nuclear weapons. He feels threatened by anyone who questions what he is doing. (Dismantling democracy )
I don’t know enough about the leaders of Pakistan and India to know if they are in this league?
Jack, for once I agree with you.
Y’all whining about how bad the bombs were, yeah you are right and the only thing worse would have been not using them.
Remember the monument to the Marines who stormed Iwo Jima, or the pictures of boats unloading at Normandy? Worst battle of the Pacific.
Remember the beaches at Normandy? My Dad was at Normandy, one of the later boats who couldn’t get close enough to the beach to unload, without getting the whole boatload of men blown to bits, so they unloaded in full battle gear in 18 feet of water. Too far out for the shells to reach them, but deep enough that more men drowned than made it to shore. It is impossible to swim in full battle gear and my dad says he watched his buddies down. And then he stops talking and so I never heard how he survived being dumped in 18 foot deep water in full battle gear with a gun you have to keep dry.
Now imagine doing that kind of beach landing operation on the island of Japan itself. Talk about impossible. How many more men would have died? And with the war before *the* bomb, more civilians were killed in traditional bombing than were killed by those two terrifying bombs. Were we seriously supposed to continue the war with traditional means when even more people would have been killed? Yes, the two bombs were terrible. Dammit, so was Normandy, so was Iwo Jima.
Most of y’all didn’t grow up in the Cold War terror of *the bomb*. I did. We had atom bomb drills at school. No, we were not supposed to hide under our desk. We were supposed to go down to the lunchroom and sit of the floor, because our school had a built a big addition, added in about 1960 with the lunch room built as sort of a “bomb shelter.” But it was just a big brick room with no real protection. Not built to really keep anybody alive, just to make people feel like something had been done about the threat of Russian attack. My neighbors built a fall out shelter in their back yard, and my dad laughed because it would not be real protection either. Having been through war, he said even a conventional bomb would take it out. So, yeah, I was raised on terror of the atom bomb. My in-laws were down-winders, both getting cancer from the fallout of the testing.
Dropping those bombs was terrible. But it was better than the alternative. And let’s not make America the bad guy, because we did not start that war, but we’re the victims of Japanese aggression.
But I hope that the US is never again in a position where atom bombs are used.
Anna,
I don’t know where you are getting the notion that most of us didn’t grow up during the Cold War. I am pretty sure most of the readers here did.I certainly remember the drills. My high school orientation and class rules had a while section on what we were to do in the case of a nuclear attack. I think most people on here could say the same
Also while it is impossible to know counterfactuals with certainty, a large number of historians would debate the claim that in the absence of dropping the bomb, the surrender of Japan would require the invasion of Japan. There is significant evidence that the Japanese were already considering surrending before the first bomb was dropped. I suggest you read The Myths of August by Steward Udall, former congressman and Secretary of Interior.
He collects lots of evidence that at least part of the motivation for the fire bombing of Tokyo and the use of the Atomic bombs seems to have been simply revenge, not strategic necessity. Revenge for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, for the cruelty that American POWs suffered at the hands of the Japanese, for the suicidal attacks on land and by air that increased American casualties, and because American leadership despised Japanese generals and admirals who had trained in the US and then turned around and used that training against their mentors.
But Americans didn’t want to see themselves as immoral, so we accepted the myth that a million men would had to have died in the invasion. Its certainly an easy way to dismiss our responsibilities for the suffering we caused. I find it interesting that Oppenheimer certainly felt that he had blood on his hands. I think you ought to read his writings carefully.
Anna,
I should also point at the many military historians think that Operation Detachment (the battle of Iwo Jima) was a strategic mistake, caused more by the rivalry between the Army and the Navy and their essentially pursuing separate and competing campaigns against Japan than by strategic necessity. But if you are part of the US high command and you have realized you have made strategic mistakes, your best strategy is to find some story, some myth to explain why you sent hundreds of young men to die in a battle that actually had no strategic value originally. Such was the case in Iwo Jima.
Look, I grew up reading pretty much every history of WWII battles for lay people and if you had asked me then, I would have said the things you said As I child and teenager, books on WWIi were most of what I read. I was completely inspired by the stories. Awed by the sacrifices. But living in the age of Reagan where it began to become apparent that some of the myths of American righteousness were darkly tainted, and being required by my AP history teacher to read books by real historians, not just hacks like Stephen Ambrose, started to change my outlook. Plus my dad who was wounded in Viet Nam started to really explain how combat reports actually work, what truths are and aren’t told.That made me realize that history and especially military history is pretty messy. I think we would do well to recognize that in the heat of war, even the most moral of people during times of peace can make decisions that are morally indefensible, for emotional reasons. And then if we make those kind of decisions, we often do our best to hide our shame by creating post-hoc rationales for what we did. But sometimes facing why we did what we did makes it possible not to repeat the mistake in a similar situation. I think we need to remember that when we have a President whose ego won’t let him make calm and rational choices for the good of mankind. The US high command is going to face hard moral choices and they are very much going to need to have learned from the mistakes of the past, including the recent past.
::raises hand::
I’m a Boomer too with a very clear memory of the under-the-desk-with-your-hands-over-the-back-of-your-head drills (as if…).
I also lived in Normandy after college and have a clear memory of dozens of tiny cemeteries for American soldiers dotting villages in from the coast. In the early 70s they were still tended by the French and you could still see fresh flowers.
The other memory I carry is that my father died of leukemia after serving in the South Pacific during the nuclear bomb tests. A contemporary friend’s father also died of cancer in the same circumstances. He was Army. My father was Navy. She sued the US government and was awarded damages for the US Military’s part in exposing those service people. I didn’t choose to. What would it have done to bring him back or relieved the suffering of his final months…
Live by the sword, die by the sword. But there are soooo many more ways to destroy whole societies now. Economies can be collapsed. Bots can gin up social discord setting one group against another. Leaders can, by design or ego or incompetence, dismantle governments.
We’re pawns. We type away at blogs and live with the consequences.
I beg to differ on the posture of Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese government toward the close of the war. According to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix, there was no willingness to surrender prior to dropping the two atomic bombs. Hirohito operated behind the scenes but was pulling the strings and refused to consider any surrender that did not guarantee the continuation of the emperor system.
He held out hope for mediation by the Soviet Union (that came to nothing) and the government’s plan was to have soldiers and civilians fight on the beaches and the streets as American troops landed on the main islands of Japan. The atomic bombs — along with Soviet troops attacking Japanese positions in China from the north — finally forced the Emperor to allow the government to surrender.
What has doomed nuclear non-proliferation is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the mid-1990s, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons (left over from the Soviet Union) in exchange for security agreements given by Russia AND THE UNITED STATES to respect the borders of Ukraine. Security assurances were given, which Russia flagrantly broke starting with the seizure of Crimea in 2014 and, of course, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. The United States has provided weapons and moral support to Ukraine since 2022, but honestly that falls short of the security assurances that were given. Obviously, if Ukraine had kept some of those nukes, Russia would likely not have invaded.
The lesson going forward: Keep your nukes. If you don’t have them, get them (as has North Korea). Treaties and assurances are worth very little anymore. In two decades, almost everyone will have nukes and some crazy or not so crazy leader, sooner or later, will start using them. It’s hard to see any other outcome. It will happen in our lifetime.
Like Robert and Chadwick, I’m impressed with JRC’s statement! Wow! He was a fundamentalist and an anti-semite, but at least on this issue, that’s some prophetic calling out! I kind of wonder if we don’t hear stuff like that from the GAs anymore because they’re concerned with breaking ranks with the evangelicals we’ve cozied up with, who are as nationalistic as we are.
I think 10ac is spot on about ETB being a thoroughgoing nationalist. I think one of his contemporaries also deserves mention. Bruce R. McConkie to me sounds like the doomsday preppers who were/are expecting and perhaps even looking forward to a nuclear war so all the baddies can get wiped out and Jesus can come back and set things right. Here’s a line from his 1979 Conference talk “Stand Independent above All Other Creatures”:
“It may be, for instance, that nothing except the power of faith and the authority of the priesthood can save individuals and congregations from the atomic holocausts that surely shall be.”
The atomic holocausts weren’t regrettably to be or anything like that. They were coming surely, and he doesn’t sound too broken up about it.
When the decision was made to drop the second bomb, dear emperor of Japan was still refusing to surrender. So, knowing what the bomb could do, he still refused. Don’t give me, “he was already considering surrender.” No, he wasn’t. That idea is rewriting history. We gave him the option to surrender after bomb #1 and he still refused. I guess he decided to see if we had more than one bomb. His choice. His fault. Don’t blame America.
I also realize that there are people trying to rewrite history and make Japan look innocent and totally victimized by the evil Americans with the bomb. Once I was at the Memorial at Pearl Harbor and there was a bus load of Japanese tourists. Some of them were arguing with the workers there about the version of history they had learned. The workers at the monument wanted to be polite, but did not know how to deal with the rewritten history. It would have been funny if it was not so sad that people want to change history to erase mistakes and prop up their own ego.
And sorry about that comment that sounded like I think y’all are dumb children and not fellow boomers. I am suffering from frustration that we all can’t learn from history because we refuse to see how our mistakes are just like history’s mistakes. We all do the best we know at the time, and the men who decided to drop an atom bomb did the best they could to end a war with as few deaths as possible. Second guessing that is not helpful and villainizing it is worse.
Armchair historians who think they are morally superior to the people of history because they think they would make other choices are a special kind of self righteous. We need to not repeat the horrible stuff by understanding how easy it is to do, not pat ourselves on the back about how we would not do that. Part of learning from the past is to learn that, yes, we would have owned slaves if we were a rich plantation owner in the south. Frankly, I cannot imagine how I would even go about trying to free my slaves and still survive economically. Part of learning from the concentration camps is to be horrified when modern politicians start saying that trans people need to be forcefully institutionalized. To see that yes, it can happen here because humans are still humans and we make exactly the same mistakes as the people in history. We are not better than them.
It can happen here because we are not remembering how and why dictatorships get voted into power.
Anna, we all learn a “version of history.” Currently many children are learning that U.S. chattel slavery was a benign institution where the enslaved were well-treated and got the benefit of being lovingly cared for by their White enslavers, with free food, clothing, housing, and health care, until such time as they had become civilized enough to be free. According to Charlie Kirk they still weren’t worthy as late as the 1960s…