ON JULY 16, 1945—70 years ago today—the United States Army tested the first nuclear weapon in Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico. "For the first time in history there was a nuclear explosion," wrote General Leslie Groves two days later in a memorandum to the U.S. Secretary of War. "And what an explosion!" Less than one month later, bombs were dropped on the Japenese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 150,000 people were killed instantly and other deaths from radiation exposure followed.
In February 1977, Sojourners published our first issue on nuclear disarmament. “The physical death from the bomb may come sometime in the future,” wrote Liz McAllister in that issue, “but the spiritual death is obvious all around us.”
Those who’ve read Sojourners since the early days know that we’ve long voiced our opposition to nuclear weapons. As Christians, it was clear to us that making, possessing, and using these weapons was sin—a real and imminent threat to the physical and spiritual integrity of beings formed in the image of God.
But for many Christians today, the call to oppose nuclear weapons has neither been obvious nor urgent. To many people of faith, the threat these weapons pose has become remote, an outdated nightmare from a sepia-tinted past. And in a world where there are so many things to care about—mass incarceration, climate change, immigration reform, racism, to name a few—Christian opposition to the bomb lost momentum.
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