Dead Man's Journey

1945

Though there were many steps leading up to it, geopolitical and scientific, one can consider today the 80th anniversary of the launch of the worldwide nuclear arms race.

J. Robert Oppenheimer assigned the code name to the trial run on July 16. Trinity, inspired by the work of the 16th century metaphysical poet John Donne, seems a vaguely religious name for the test of an atomic bomb. The physicists who built it didn’t actually know that it would explode. Trinity was detonated at what was then the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico. Spanish conquistadors had given the basin its prescient name: Dead Man’s Journey.

The decision makers in the US had a choice—they could have invited Japanese observers and dropped the first nuclear weapon used in wartime on an uninhabited area. But they didn’t want to “waste” the bomb and risk a Japanese decision to continue the fight. So President Truman agreed to bomb Hiroshima on August 6, 1945; then use our only other atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later.

1952

The thermonuclear bomb and I were born together—that was the first hydrogen fusion device with the power of 800 Hiroshima bombs. They called it the superbomb, the “city killer.” Enrico Fermi said its “practical effect is almost one of genocide.” This was a couple of weeks after I was born; I always knew the fear-begotten arms race and I grew up side by side.

The following year, the Soviet Union (USSR) tested a hydrogen bomb of its own.

At some point in my childhood, I started having nightmares and wishing I had a place to hide. After a cloud-free day jumping into the city swimming pool, nighttime fear fests saw fur-hatted soldiers coming to the pool’s edge and shooting at me while I held my breath, trying to dive deeper. They called it the Cold War, but I awoke sweating and crying in the dark. I couldn’t fathom why my dad wouldn’t build us a shelter in a hole in the ground like my friend Nancy’s so we could escape the atomic bombs.

1962

Ten days after my tenth birthday, the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out when the US and the USSR came close to nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba. Perhaps that scared them to the negotiating table because in 1963, we signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. But both countries still raced to develop and deploy increasingly sophisticated nukes, like MIRVs: multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, each with several warheads that could be aimed at different targets. With no apparent irony, in the US we called ours a “Peacekeeper” missile.

1972, 1979, the 1980s

We continued to sign treaties with one hand and intensify the arms race with the other. SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) limited the production of strategic nuclear weapons; SALT II was signed but the US never ratified it when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Meanwhile, new weapons systems were deployed, the US Pershing missiles and the Soviet SS-20 missiles. Then the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) eliminated a class of nuclear weapons, some ballistic and cruise missiles, and provided for on-site inspections. President Reagan said we would, “Trust but verify.”

1991 through 2010

Over two decades, the US and Russia made real headway towards reducing the overall threat of nuclear war by shrinking our arsenals. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) went into effect; START II went further, aiming to cut both countries’ nuclear arsenals by two-thirds, but it was never ratified in Russia. Then SORT, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, tried again, agreeing to significantly cut the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads within ten years. New START went further, and both countries have kept the number of intercontinental-range nukes under the agreed-on limits.

In 2010, the United States began a multi-decade, multi-billion dollar effort to modernize both its nuclear weapons arsenal and the infrastructure that supports it.

2016

My father was nearing ninety in 2016, living a mile or so from the house where I grew up. Whenever I visited, sharing family photos and stories helped keep his memory alive. With an engineer’s attention to detail, he’d organized his pictures into plastic sleeves in binders. One binder had my family camping at Yosemite and Lake Almanor, in Northern California. One was for the houses we lived in before we outgrew them. Another binder held photos from his various jobs, a few pages devoted to my father and his shirtless buddies enjoying their leisure time on Bikini and Enewetak Atolls in the South Pacific, at the end of sticky tropical days testing atomic bombs.

That’s how I learned my father worked on nuclear weapons in the mid-1950s.

Not long out of college, he had gone to work at a new U.C. Berkeley research lab. Sister to Los Alamos, the Lawrence Radiation Lab came to life as a “new ideas” facility to advance nuclear weapons technology. The lab was planted on an expansive former naval base outside Livermore, California, and was run by physicist Edward Teller (“Father of the Hydrogen Bomb”) during Dad’s tenure. But as a child, I just heard he worked at “LRL.”

“We never called it a bomb,” Dad said with a sort-of smile on that day in 2016. “We called it ‘the device.’” He worked regularly at the Nevada test site and, in 1956 and ’58, was sent to the big tests at the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands. My father gave me his badge from the “Redwing” test series in Enewetak, revealing his boyish twenty-eight-year-old face.

Black Rain (Reclining), 2019

Over the next few years, in my chilly basement studio, I began to grapple with our responsibility to the people of Japan and to the earth for the damage we inflicted. Infusing horror into my art, I imprinted the testimony of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) on reclining effigies and ghost kimonos. Doused figures in black rain. I wove August 9, 1945, “conversations” between Nagasaki hibakusha and the people of Pasco, Washington, where “Fat Man” fuel was brewed; they finally learned what they were building on the day that bomb was dropped.

2017

Then the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) received the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance speech, Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow said, “Today, I want you to feel in this hall the presence of all those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I want you to feel, above and around us, a great cloud of a quarter million souls. Each person had a name. Each person was loved by someone. Let us ensure that their deaths were not in vain.

“Tonight, as we march through the streets of Oslo with torches aflame, let us follow each other out of the dark night of nuclear terror. No matter what obstacles we face, we will keep moving and keep pushing and keep sharing this light with others. This is our passion and commitment for our one precious world to survive.”

2018

Donald Trump, announced a pull-out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which had eliminated an entire class of missiles for both the US and Russia. And he did the same for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which set limits on Iran’s nuclear program to ensure that it couldn’t produce nuclear weapons. 

2025

My father is gone now; he died last year. I wonder how he would feel about the rekindled arms race.

After 35 years of bipartisan US policy on reducing the number of nukes around the world, we are in recent times again responsible for escalating the arms race. The last major arms treaty between the US and Russia, the New START Treaty, is set to expire on February 5, 2026. It is the only remaining bilateral arms control treaty limiting the number of long-range nuclear weapons both countries can deploy, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. And last week Trump announced he was moving two nuclear submarines closer to Russia, in response to threatening rhetoric from a Kremlin official, he said. Two days before the 80^th commemoration of the day one nuke obliterated Hiroshima, killing hundreds of thousands, he confirmed the vessels were now “in the region.”

Now we are running backwards. I don’t overlook the delicate complexity of diplomacy, the difficult, noble dance required to reconcile the national interests of those of us with the power to incinerate the world. But diplomacy appears to be dead.

Now I watch in dread as world powers, and by that I mean the humans grabbing for power, once again undertake a dead man's journey, overlooking the consequences of our ungodly weapons.

© 2025 Su Cummings. All rights reserved.

Image: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.