August 2023

MARCIE SMITH—With the rise of the Reagan-era foreign policy of communist “rollback,” Sharp began promoting “strategic nonviolence” internationally through his Albert Einstein Institution (AEI). Sharp co-founded AEI with his former student Peter Ackerman, who was simultaneously right hand man to the notorious corporate raiding “junk bond king” Michael Milken. Later, Ackerman was a Cato Institute board member and advocate of disemboweling social security.

DAVE LINDORFF—Instead of sharing the bomb with the USSR, which, remember, was America’s ally in World War II, and then working for its being banned, the US began producing dozens and eventually hundreds of Nagasaki-sized atom bombs, moving quickly from hand-made devices to mass produced ones. The US also quickly started pursuing the development of a vastly more powerful bomb — the thermonuclear Hydrogen bomb — a weapon that theoretically has no limits to how great its destructive power could be.

M.K. BHADRAKUMAR—However, a historically contentious detail still remains without definitive conclusion — that the US had toyed with the idea of using atomic weapons against North Korea (and possibly China as well) with a view to shift the overall military balance in its favour and force them to the negotiating table. Indeed, both President Truman and his successor Dwight Eisenhower continued to posit that such an option was on the table, as it emerged by the end of the summer of 1950 already that the good guys would lose the war. Of course, in the event, an atomic attack by the US never materialised despite the fact that the Soviet atomic capabilities were still extremely limited compared to American ones, Washington’s nuclear monopoly was largely intact, and the US remained the only nation capable of delivering an atomic bomb to a distant target.