Eighty Years of American Greatness: What the New York Times Chose to Remember
The cover of the NYT article
The New York Times has published an opinion piece informing its readers that Donald Trump is undoing “80 years of American greatness.” This greatness, as the accompanying photograph makes clear, begins at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1944, where the Manhattan Project built the machinery for the atomic bomb. It is a peculiar definition: greatness measured not by what was built for life, but by what was built to erase it. From this starting point, the eighty years are not only a record of achievement, but of destruction polished into achievement, and now offered as a standard to which the nation should aspire again.
The anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has long been marked in the United States with a certain ambivalence—an acknowledgment of the horror, followed quickly by a reaffirmation of the bomb as necessary. The Times’ opinion essay fits this pattern precisely. The deaths of more than a hundred thousand people—most of them civilians—are noted briefly, then set aside so the focus can shift to the “real” story: the ingenuity, the scale, the unprecedented unity of purpose. The bombs are framed not as the point of the story, but as its incidental product.
In August 1945, the bombs did exactly what they were designed to do. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in seconds. Fire and shock obliterated the center of each city; heat burned people alive where they stood; many who survived the blast died in the days and months after, poisoned from within by radiation. There was nothing accidental or uncertain in this outcome. The destruction was deliberate, the choice fully informed.
At the time, officials insisted this was the only way to end the war without even greater loss of life. That explanation, repeated until it hardened into fact, allowed the event to be recast. The human toll could be treated as the tragic but necessary price of peace. What remained at the center of the narrative was the achievement: a nation setting itself an extraordinary technical task and completing it in time to alter the course of history.
The Manhattan Project became more than a wartime operation; it became the model for how the United States would mobilize in the decades to follow. Its template was clear: vast funding, central command, the seamless marriage of scientific expertise and state power. The war ended, but the machinery stayed in place. Laboratories kept their contracts; universities, industry, and the military grew more tightly bound.
The Cold War gave this arrangement permanence. Weapons research drove technological innovation; technological innovation justified continued weapons research. Civilian gains—from nuclear energy to satellite communications—were cast as lucky side effects of the greater project of national security. The moral cost of the system was rarely confronted; the focus remained on what it could deliver when fully mobilized.
In this way, the Manhattan Project was transformed into an origin myth, a founding example of what “American greatness” could look like: unity of purpose, mastery of technique, and results that could not be ignored. That the results were cities burned to ash was acknowledged, but always in a way that reaffirmed the necessity of the act and the virtue of those who ordered it.
The Times’ opinion piece draws directly on this tradition. It treats the bomb as incidental and the method as the true legacy. The past is not examined so much as mined for its usefulness in the present. The essay laments that we have lost the will and capacity to mobilize on such a scale. Its prescription is clear: we should recover the structures that made the Manhattan Project possible.
Such calls are not limited to commemorations of 1945. The idea of a “new Manhattan Project” appears regularly in discussions of climate change, pandemic response, and competition in artificial intelligence. The language varies, but the appeal is the same: crisis as license for concentrated power, urgency as reason to sideline dissent, technical mastery as the measure of worth. The human costs, when they come, are presented as unfortunate but necessary, and the result—if successful—is remembered as another chapter in the story of national achievement.
That the Times can celebrate the original Manhattan Project as a high point in “80 years of American greatness” makes the continuity plain. In this telling, the burning of two cities is not a break with greatness but part of its foundation. The logic is intact: that mass killing, if carried out with enough skill and purpose, can be counted among a nation’s finest hours.
The power of such narratives is in what they normalize. They do not simply recall history; they set the terms for how similar actions might be justified again. By folding destruction into the language of necessity and capability, they make it possible to imagine repeating it—not as a failure of morality, but as a demonstration of it.
When an institution like the New York Times constructs “80 years of American greatness” on a foundation that begins at Oak Ridge, it tells us plainly what kind of acts can be held up as national virtues. It tells us that the dead, once acknowledged, can be cleared from the stage so the achievement can be admired in its pure form.
The destruction is not regretted—it is remembered as a triumph. That is the inhumanity of it.
Note: When an institution like the New York Times can fold the burning of two cities into a narrative of “greatness,” it is not misremembering the past; it is choosing what to remember and what to forget. That choice speaks more loudly than any claim to objectivity.
It is in moments like this that the paper’s moral authority erodes—not because it lacks facts, but because it has shown which facts it is willing to treat as incidental.
Article: Read the full NYT article here