The Bomb and the Architecture of Permission
In the summer of 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and announced it to the world not as a rupture in human history but as an achievement.
The New York Times described the bomb in terms of scale and progress: “the greatest destructive force in history,” a “military and scientific triumph.” The destruction of an entire city was measured not in lives lost, but in tons of TNT and scientific milestones. The dead were abstracted—unnamed, uncounted—while the engineers were exalted. There was no mention of fire, radiation, or children. Hiroshima was not presented as an act of annihilation but as a revelation: the United States now held the power to end cities, and by implication, to shape the future. The bomb did not merely destroy Hiroshima; it introduced a structure of exception in which the U.S. could determine who might live under the threat of nuclear violence, and who could not be trusted with even its possibility.
Eighty years later, this structure remains intact—refined, expanded, and enforced not only through weapons, but through discourse. In The Baffler, Mary Turfah’s essay “You’ll See” recounts the conditions under which Iran has been punished for a nuclear threat that does not exist. While Israel possesses at least ninety nuclear warheads—undeclared, uninspected, and outside the framework of the Non-Proliferation Treaty—it is Iran that is targeted, sanctioned, surveilled, and attacked. Israel’s arsenal is not treated as a problem; Iran’s enrichment of uranium to below weapons-grade levels is framed as crisis. Turfah shows that the United States and Israel do not wait for evidence; they act on projection. What Iran is being punished for is not the possession of weapons, but the capacity to think beyond its assigned place in the order. The logic is simple and brutal: nuclear capacity is not inherently dangerous—it is dangerous in the wrong hands. And those “wrong hands” are defined not by behavior but by geopolitical disobedience.
In both texts, the nuclear question is not one of principle but of permission. The 1945 article masks a crime behind the language of progress. There is no moral conflict in its tone—only procedural reporting of a successful technological deployment. President Truman’s statement is included to justify the act as a response to Japanese aggression and a means of avoiding further American casualties. But this framing—deliberate, engineered—does more than deflect criticism. It converts annihilation into responsibility. The bomb becomes not a horror but a burden. Only the United States, the article implies, had the wisdom and restraint to possess such a weapon.
This burden becomes a license. As Turfah documents, the same nation that claimed Hiroshima was necessary now weighs the possibility of using a tactical nuclear weapon on Iranian soil—not to respond to an attack, but to prevent a potential future capacity. A U.S. defense official, cited in the Guardian and referenced in Turfah’s piece, explained the logistical need: to destroy Iran’s underground facility, one would “have to first soften the ground with conventional bombs and then ultimately drop a tactical nuclear weapon from a B2 bomber.” [Turfah] The use of nuclear weapons, then, is not ruled out by their destructiveness; it is governed by a moral geometry in which some states hold the right to act outside the rules they impose.
Israel exemplifies this geometry. It does not confirm or deny its weapons. It is not a signatory to the NPT. It does not allow IAEA inspections. Yet it has repeatedly struck nuclear facilities in neighboring countries—most recently Iran, but also Iraq in 1981—under what it calls “anticipatory self-defense.” These strikes are named “preemptive,” not aggressive. They are embedded in doctrine: the Begin Doctrine, as Turfah outlines, grants Israel the right to destroy the nuclear infrastructure of any adversary state. The irony is sharp. Israel, a nuclear state outside international oversight, reserves the right to attack states that might develop nuclear capacity within legal frameworks. Its power is not subject to regulation; it is used to enforce a world in which others remain permanently non-nuclear.
The United States enables and protects this asymmetry. Turfah shows how the IAEA—meant to be a neutral body promoting peaceful nuclear energy—has repeatedly shaped its reports to serve American strategic interests. An initial report accused Iran of violations, only to be walked back later, admitting no real evidence of weapons pursuit. By then, strikes had already occurred. Diplomacy becomes cover. Compliance becomes proof of guilt. Iran is accused of deception even when it provides information; when it refuses, the refusal is cast as aggression. The logic is closed. The more Iran insists on sovereignty, the more it must be coerced into submission.
The power to possess nuclear weapons, then, is less about security than about order—an order in which the nuclear bomb, first used and then mythologized by the United States, remains a symbol of who may exercise ultimate violence without consequence. What Turfah’s reporting makes clear is that Iran is not being deterred from using nuclear weapons—it is being denied the right to deterrence at all. To possess deterrence would be to assert parity, to alter the asymmetry on which American and Israeli dominance rests. This is what cannot be tolerated. Hence the insistence that Iran must prove the absence of ambition, must negotiate from a position of constant vulnerability, must absorb sanctions and assassinations without reply. What Iran is being punished for is not aggression—it is imagination.
The story begins with Hiroshima, not only in fact but in structure. The U.S. used the bomb and then constructed a world in which no other rival or resister could ever do the same. This is not about ethics. It is about the monopoly on exception. The bomb’s power lies not only in its blast radius but in its symbolic function: the authority to define who is dangerous, who is legitimate, and who must be destroyed before they have a chance to act. It is not possession that marks a state as criminal—it is the desire to enter the field of sovereign deterrence that must be crushed.
The United States did not merely unleash the bomb. It transformed the act into a doctrine: a regime of permission, surveillance, and selective immunity. And for those who imagine themselves outside that structure—who imagine parity, or defense, or justice—the punishment is already underway.
Sources:
The New York Times. “First Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan; Missile Is Equal to 20,000 Tons of TNT; Truman Warns Foe of a ‘Rain of Ruin’.” August 7, 1945.
Turfah, Mary. “You’ll See.” The Baffler, August 6, 2025. https://thebaffler.com