NAGASAKI, Japan • Eighty years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, as the Enola Gay winged its way back to the Pacific Island of Tinian, pilot Paul Tibbets reflected on his successful mission — the destruction of Hiroshima with a single atomic bomb.

“I reflected on the wonders of science and rejoiced that the new weapons had surely made future war unthinkable,” he later recalled. Three days later, a second bomb dropped on Nagasaki ended the deadliest war in history.

On Aug. 9, Japan will add several thousand names to a list of atomic bomb victims. As of last year the list totaled 198,785.

There are about 100,000 bomb survivors — hibakusha — still alive in Japan, their mean age 85, their numbers dropping by 6,000 a year. On this 80th anniversary of the bombing those that are able will be interviewed, visit classrooms where peace is taught as a subject, and join in ceremonies led by the cities’ two mayors. Gathered near “ground zeroes,” where the only two atomic bombs used in war exploded, they will again call for “lasting world peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons.”

Theirs is a powerful, personal plea. Last year, Nihon Hidankyo, an hibakusha group founded in 1954, won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was the sixth time since 1962 that the Nobel committee had awarded the medal for efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons.

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And yet, today, around the globe, another nuclear arms race is underway. Trillions of dollars are being earmarked to pay for new bombs, warheads, missiles, submarines, airplanes and infrastructure.

“We’re going in the wrong direction and we’re doing it at a very rapid pace right now,” said Peter Kuznick, a history professor and founder of American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute. “So all those years of cutting weapons, cutting back from 70,000 to 13,000 felt like we were at least going the right direction, and now everybody’s talking about expanding their arsenal again, in addition to making them more lethal. And we’ve got so many countries that are on the verge of joining the nuclear club.

“Seventy-three percent of the citizens in South Korea are in favor of South Korea getting its own nuclear weapons. Even in Japan, Shigeru Ishiba, (the new prime minister) called for Japan to have access to nuclear weapons. So it’s very disheartening,” Kuznick said.

Put another way, in the span of the lives of Japan’s atomic survivors, the world of nuclear weapons has gone from two American bombs in 1945 to 10,000 nuclear warheads now held by nine nations. Their cumulative firepower is more than enough to wipe Earth of life.

How did we get here?

Inertia, to begin with. As GIs came home, and the Japanese began cremating tens of thousands of dead, a third bomb was ready on Tinian with seven more being readied at Los Alamos for use by the end of October. Robert Oppenheimer thought it might take 50 bombs to force Japan’s surrender.

President Harry Truman stopped these plans. He told his staff that the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people and killing “all those kids” was too horrible. But Truman also disagreed with Oppenheimer’s recommendation to share the atomic secret through the United Nations, Kuznick said.

Meanwhile, the mighty factories of the Manhattan Project continued to turn out uranium and plutonium. Los Alamos was making two bombs a month.

“With the ending of the war, there was no national policy,” wrote project chief Gen. Leslie Groves. “The only guidance that I could obtain was that I should continue to operate the project as I thought best.”

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He did — even advocating in a secret memo that we bomb any rival that might develop a bomb of their own — until Feb. 1, 1947, when the new Atomic Energy Commission took charge of nuclear affairs.

A month after Nagasaki, the U.S. Army learned that Russia was gathering uranium. By Nov. 3, 1945, the Pentagon had a list of atomic targets in the Soviet Union. On Christmas eve 1945, an attache in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow warned “the USSR is out to get the atomic bomb. This has been officially stated.”

On March 5, 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared that Russia had dropped an Iron Curtain across Europe. Two years later, Russian invaded Czechoslovakia.

With blueprints of the Nagasaki bomb supplied by spy Klaus Fuchs, Russia exploded Joe 1, its first atomic bomb on Sept. 1, 1949. By then, the U.S. stockpile held 100 bombs.

Four months later Truman gave Los Alamos a green light to pursue a hydrogen bomb, the “Super,” which used a Nagasaki-type plutonium explosion to fuse tritium.

On Nov. 1, 1952, the U.S. exploded Mike, a 10.4-megaton H-bomb on Eniwetok. Nine months later, using Fuchs’ stolen papers, the Soviet Union exploded its first H bomb.

The Cold War began, a period of intense growth of nuclear weapons and tests. At its peak in 1986, more than 70,000 nuclear warheads were stockpiled by the U.S. and Russia. For the entire time, the United States was the leader in the arms race. “The U.S. was never behind,” wrote Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize winner of books on nuclear weapons.

“We pretty much introduced every new weapon system,” Kuznick added. Not until March 2018, “when Putin announced that Russia was developing five new nuclear weapons, all of which could avoid our missile defense, did Russia begin to try to compete with the United States in terms of coming up with new weapons.”

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The Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving a legacy of national debt, pollution, aging warheads, downwind cancers, nuclear waste and a national defense policy of “deterrence,” epitomized by the phrase, “mutually assured destruction,” made most visible by the “triad” of nuclear weapon systems — missiles, bombers and submarines.

“There was a hope for a peace dividend,” said Thom Mason, the director of Los Alamos. In a period between 1995 and 2015 successive administrations, both Republican and Democrat, “in their nuclear postures, talked about trying to reduce the role for nuclear weapons.”

Carson Marks, a Los Alamos bomb designer who invented an H-bomb light enough to be carried in an intercontinental missile, once said the U.S. needed no more than 100 warheads to defend itself, even as the nuclear club grew to include the United Kingdom in 1952, France in 1960, China in 1964, India in 1974, Pakistan 1998, Israel by 1979 and North Korea in 2006.

In an introduction to Paul Shambroom’s photo book, “Face to Face with the Bomb — Nuclear reality after the Cold War,” Richard Rhodes wrote:

“The vast gulf of numbers — between that minimum deterrent and the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that the superpowers stockpiled in the years of the cold war, and continue to maintain despite laudable reduction, reveals the extent to which nuclear arms have served purposes other than deterrent self-defense. Among those purposes have been political warfare, economic warfare, interservice rivalry and domestic economic stimulus.”

“For a member of Congress, having a nuclear facility in your district might bring in money and jobs,” said Jeff Knopf, a professor and program chair for nonproliferation and terrorism studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “There were rivalries among scientists (most famously between Oppenheimer and Edward Teller over development of the H bomb) that led to the creation of multiple national labs. And different military services have nuclear weapons, meaning there will be multiple Navy and Air Force bases where weapons are deployed.”

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Hopes for a peace dividend vanished when China began to increase its stockpile, and both Russia and North Korea rattled their nuclear sabers. In 2010, President Barack Obama, in a deal to ratify the New Start treaty, bowed to pressure from neoconservatives, the military, the labs and contractors, and opened the door to a $1.7 trillion “modernization” of both the Nuclear Security Enterprise, which makes the weapons, and the entire triad system to deliver them.

Today, the National Security Enterprise employs more than 65,000 people at labs, plants and nuclear sites, the vast majority of them operated by independent contractors, mostly huge corporations. They take their marching orders from the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency in the Department of Energy. But their ability to promote bigger budgets and control nuclear policy has grown, according to nuclear watchdog Greg Mello, founder of the Los Alamos Working Group.

For his part, President Donald Trump, in his first term, when told of the decline in the U.S. stockpile, told a meeting of advisers that the U.S. should increase it “tenfold,” NBC reported. He later denied saying it.

For now, the tip of the U.S. nuclear spear is a multibillion-dollar effort to create new plutonium “pits” at Los Alamos and Savannah River. So far, only one qualified, 7-pound, “war reserve” sphere of plutonium has been made. If and when a new warhead and a new missile are created, this “pit” will be tucked inside, ready to detonate a bomb of 400 kilotons, 20 times larger than the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.