The United States is spending $60 billion per year to “modernize” our nuclear arsenal. The anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki earlier this month bring to mind our images of the catastrophes that befell those cities, but what we have learned from reporting like John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” and graphic novels like “Barefoot Gen” misleads us when we think of what a “modern” nuclear war will be like.

We shouldn’t picture the effects of the Hiroshima bomb, the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT dropped on a single city. Instead we should picture multiple bombs dropped on an entire region, each bomb exploding with the force of 100,000 tons of TNT. There can be no medical response to that kind of attack because the doctors, nurses, and pharmacists in the area will be killed in the first seconds of the attack and the hospitals and clinics will be vaporized.

Even a limited nuclear war, say, between Pakistan and India, will produce catastrophic effects worldwide.

When these weapons are used, whether because of hatefulness or someone’s mistake, they will destroy us all. As global climate climate change increases competition between nations, the risk of nuclear war goes up. President Ronald Reagan said, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

We have built the weapons and we know how to dismantle them. That is what we must do.

Henry W. Rosenberg

Northampton