—
In conflicts throughout the world, we observe moments in which the momentum of history can become overwhelming. The machine of war seems to be making decisions on its own. Leaders seem almost an afterthought.
During World War II, America’s top-secret Manhattan Project, a part of a massive war effort that conscripted all of the country’s scientific, technological, and material resources, resulted in the creation of the first atomic bombs. America’s subsequent use of these devastating bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, profoundly impacted both the war itself, and warfare into the future.
Many Americans assume that dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities was because of the imperative that “the war needed to be won.” But in just such moments, leaders need to be able to step outside their circumstances, question their most basic assumptions, and free themselves from the mental chains that the momentum of history imposes. Because, if indeed the war needed to be won at any price, that allows leaders to basically do anything in pursuit of victory. It means there are no lines that can’t be crossed.
Many also believe that America’s use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki shut the door on the possibility of using such weapons again. Seeing and understanding what nuclear weapons could do, as an international community we have worked to keep them under control. Still, the machine of death, of which nuclear weapons are a part, was never dismantled. The weapons available to the leaders of nuclear powers today make the atomic bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like sticks of dynamite.
World War II was not the end of an era, but the dawn of the era in which we’re now living. We haven’t truly renounced its destructive heritage or learned its deepest lessons. The machine of death is today bigger and stronger than ever. It’s sustained and propped up by people in power who have an interest in doing so, from nationalist politicians to weapons merchants to those who simply profit and prosper from its size and growth.
This is a global and not simply American phenomenon, as we live in a world that is generally armed to the teeth, but one can’t help but gasp at the annual defense budget of the United States — $816.7 billion in 2023, a sum that increases every year in bipartisan fashion. Americans, like others in the world, haven’t found the leaders who can master the machine, stand up to it, limit its power, try to dismantle it, or even question it.
The inability of leaders to make good decisions that go against the sometimes murderous momentum of history can lead to tragedy. Leaders can be warriors—in the direct sense of fighting a real war, by every means available — but if they fail to be rebels, against the history that produced them and the system in which they operate, they don’t make history as much as they are swept up in history’s momentum.
We know how close the world came to nuclear destruction, on more than one occasion, during the Cold War. For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the Soviets were poised to station nuclear missiles in Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev found themselves in a dangerous face off. Despite having generals and advisers urging President Kennedy to attack Cuba — an action that would trigger an atomic war — Kennedy kept his cool and worked with Khrushchev to defuse the situation.
Scholars and journalists have been fascinated that Kennedy and Khrushchev showed great responsibility in successfully bringing the world back from the brink of mutual destruction. While that is partly true, I’ve found it more important to wonder how these leaders found themselves in such a dangerous situation in the first place.
The main takeaway from the Cuban Missile Crisis is that powerful people in the United States, the USSR, and Cuba were quite prepared, out of some combination of zealotry, incompetence, stupidity, jingoism, paranoia, and machismo, to let possibly millions of people die in a nuclear war. Luckily, Kennedy was not one of them.
Today we continue to live in the shadow of an ongoing nuclear arms race in which we could all perish in the blink of an eye. One important legacy of World War II is that we humans have built weapons, technology, and military might that are beyond the capacity of our leaders to comprehend, let alone rein in or even control. We’ve given our leaders too much power. The idea of a selfish, narcissistic president in control of weaponry capable of destroying the planet many times over is especially worrisome — and given the conflicts happening in our world today, we have amplified reason for concern.
When we see a photo of Hiroshima after the atomic bombing, we need to ask how leaders got to the point where they had such weapons at their disposal, how they found themselves faced with the decision of whether to use them, how they came to see innocent civilians as legitimate targets of such weapons, and, finally, what we must learn about leadership, and about ourselves, from these decisions.
Moshik Temkin is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Leadership and History at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University, and a fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He has taught at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the École des Hautes Études in Paris, and has been a visiting professor and lecturer in India, South Korea, Spain, Mexico, France, and the United States. His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Journal of Democracy, New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times. His new book is Warriors, Rebels, and Saints: The Art of Leadership from Machiavelli to Malcolm X (PublicAffairs, Nov. 7, 2023). Learn more at moshiktemkin.com.
—