On July 16, 1945, not long after dawn, a group of scientists and government officials gathered at a desolate stretch of sand in the New Mexico desert to witness humanity’s first test of a nuclear weapon. The explosion was described by an onlooker as “brilliant purple.” The thunder from the bomb’s detonation seemed to ricochet and linger in the desert. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had led the project that culminated in the test, contemplated that morning the possibility that this destructive power might somehow contribute to an enduring peace. He recalled the hope of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and philanthropist, that dynamite, which Nobel had invented, would end wars. After seeing how dynamite had been used in making bombs, Nobel confided to a friend that more capable weapons, not less, would be the best guarantors of peace. He wrote, “The only thing that will ever prevent nations from beginning war is terror.” Our temptation might be to recoil from this sort of grim calculus, to retreat into hope that a peaceable instinct in our species would prevail if only those with weapons would lay them down. It has been nearly 80 years since the first atomic test in New Mexico, however, and nuclear weapons have been used in war only twice, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For many, the bomb’s power and horror have grown distant and faint, almost abstract. The record of humanity’s management of the weapon — imperfect and, indeed, dozens of times nearly catastrophic — has been remarkable. Nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great-power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and grandchildren — have never known a world war. John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of military and naval history at Yale, has described the lack of major conflict in the postwar era as the “long peace.”

Full opinion : American tech companies need to help build AI weaponry.