Nuclear Arms

On August fifth, 1945 at 7:16 PM Eastern Daylight Time, a Uranium-fission bomb was detonated 1,900 feet above the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The city vanished in fire as hot as the sun, and 80,000 lives were lost. During the following year, 60,000 more died as a result of injuries and radiation exposure.

That was the first time that the human race had used a nuclear weapon against itself.

Today, more than sixty years later, at least eight nations possess nuclear weapons. Hiroshima was bombed by a plane. Today, Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles can, at any time, from anywhere in the world, wipe a city from the face of the Earth.

Those nations with nuclear weapons possess the power to decide whether people will again face the hell, death, and waste, that was first seen on August fifth, 1945.

This was drawn in June 2002. It is in Prismacolor colored pencil and in 2B and 6B pencil. The original dimensions are 18 1/8" x 11". Click to view the 1024 x 617 pixel image.

This image depicts the flags of the eight nations with nuclear weapons along with missiles used to deliver those weapons. The countries represented by the flags are, from left to right, China, The United States, India, France, Israel, The United Kingdom, Pakistan, and Russia. The missiles, from left to right, are the Titan (U.S), the Agni II (India), the Minuteman III (U.S.), the Changzheng-1 (China), and the Vostok (Russia). Below the flags and the missiles is the arc of the Earth seen from afar. Beneath that are images of the bombing of Hiroshima drawn from photographs in National Geographic Magazine, August 1995.