Playing with Fire: The world's nuclear weapons enterprise is playing a dangerous game, but is anyone paying attention?

• Author: Carrier, Jim

The New York Times headline from Hiroshima on May 19, 2023, spoke volumes to anyone paying attention: "Biden Pays Silent Tribute to Victims of Hiroshima Bomb."

As the President laid a wreath to the city and its people destroyed by a U.S. atomic bomb, the gesture obscured a tragic reality: A new nuclear arms race is underway--more treacherous, expensive, and unpredictable than the one the United States set in motion seventy-eight years ago. In March, two months before his "silent tribute," Joe Biden proposed the largest nuclear weapons budget in history.

The President was in Hiroshima for the annual meeting of the Group of Seven (G7), invited by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to promote a "world without nuclear weapons." In what The Japan Times called "an unprecedented visit," the leaders toured the peace museum, met with eighty-five-year-old A-bomb survivor Keiko Ogura, planted a tree, and, standing before the Genbaku Dome, listened to Hiroshima's mayor describe the events of August 6, 1945, when more than 70,000 people died from a single bomb.

Afterward, Biden told a press conference that his visit was a "powerful reminder of the devastating reality of nuclear war and our shared responsibility to never cease our efforts to build for peace. And together with the leaders of the G7, we have reiterated our commitment to continuing to work toward a world free from the threat of nuclear weapons."

But as he and other G7 leaders left Hiroshima without taking any concrete steps toward that goal, anti-nuclear voices were harsh: "Hiroshima deserves to be more than a symbolic setting, and the world deserves more than thoughts and prayers for disarmament," wrote Derek Johnson, managing partner of Global Zero, a nonprofit campaigning for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

"Holocaust hypocrisy," John LaForge called it. He is co-director of Nukewatch, a nonprofit project of The Progressive Foundation that was established by this magazine in 1979, but is no longer affiliated.

While the world survived the madness of the Cold War when six countries, led by the United States and the Soviet Union, stockpiled 70,000 warheads, the threat of a second nuclear disaster looms again today. The Doomsday Clock, set each year by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is now ninety seconds to midnight--"the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been."

The reasons are numerous:

* Nine countries are now nuclear powers: Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. Together they possess 12,700 warheads, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.

* New nuclear bombs are being designed and...