Next month, we will be commemorating the day that the United States dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. It is important to have some of the history.

The scientists who worked on the secret Manhattan Project to produce the first nuclear bomb had misgivings. Physicists Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt, warning him of its potential. Six years later, the Manhattan Project sent a cautionary document to the Secretary of War, arguing that the United States should announce a public demonstration of the weapon in an uninhabited area, and use the threat to force Japan to surrender. The scientists were ignored.

Instead, our nation continued to build and test bombs, and when strontium 90 was found in the breast milk of mothers living near test sites, the testing was moved underground, while the manufacture of weapons continued, and the stockpiles of nuclear waste grew with no permanent and safe depository.

Scientific reports now show that even a nuclear war involving the lesser nuclear powers would result in enough soot from the explosions and endless fires being sent into the stratosphere to block the sun’s rays, resulting in a nuclear winter, when no crops would grow, humans and animals would compete for what was left, and famine would spread throughout the world. Again, the scientists have been ignored, while U.S. leaders “modernize” our nuclear arsenal, claiming that having a bigger arsenal would deter other nations from attacking us. Instead of deterring them, this policy has energized other nations to compete with their own nuclear arsenals.

During the past spring, a “Deterrence Summit” was held near Washington, D.C. Representatives from the “Military Industrial Complex,” of which President Eisenhower warned us, met to celebrate 15 years of financial and political power, and to plan how to keep it. There were sessions on “modernizing and upgrading the nuclear weapons enterprise,” as well as specific plans for more nuclear waste pits at our Los Alamos and Savannah River laboratories.

The summit had no sessions on the environmental consequences of the manufacture and testing of these weapons, and no scientists working to make people understand these consequences were invited to speak. There were no representatives from the United Nations to discuss the “United Nations Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,” made international law three years ago.

The promoters, organizers and participants at this summit remind me of the Hollow Men of whom T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem of the same name. Their justifications for what they are doing are “quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass/or rats’ feet/over broken glass.”

The American People rejected the fantasies of bomb shelters-turned-fallout- shelters of the early years of the nuclear weapons development, but energized by their need to maintain their political and financial power, these Hollow Men have created a new fantasy umbrella named “Deterrence” to shield our eyes from the terrifying reality of what a nuclear war would mean. This “umbrella” cannot protect us any more than the shelters of the 60s and 70’, and we know that but do not know how to expose the lie.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin is threatening to withdraw from disarmament agreements with the United States and has talked about using tactical nuclear weapons in his war on Ukraine. Over 90 nations without nuclear arsenals have signed the United Nations Treaty. The United States has not, and continues to “modernize” its arsenal, with the Hollow Men who dominate our defense planning using “deterrence” to create uncertainty among its critics.

The American people feel naked and afraid under this pretend umbrella. These men so driven by political and financial power are, after all, just Hollow Men with hollow ideas, and I borrow T.S. Eliot’s final words for the question we must ask ourselves, our friends and neighbors, as we think of the inevitable slow death of those humans and animals who survive the war: “Is this the way the world ends … not with a bang but a whimper?”

And I ask myself as we commemorate another Hiroshima Day next month, “Will we allow ourselves to be led by these Hollow Men toward the end of our world, or will we stop them?” The Doomsday Clock is ticking.

Cynthia Loring MacBain, of Southampton, is former president of the Connecticut Freeze Campaign, a lifetime member of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and an activist with Back from the Brink.