On this 57th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have to look reality in its ugly face. The drive for the elimination of nuclear weapons is going very badly, and the use of these weapons may become a routine part of military strategy, according to President Bush’s recently disclosed Nuclear Posture Review.

Bush’s readiness to use nuclear weapons is but an egregious expression of the nuclear deterrence policy that has been pursued covertly by the United States ever since, or even before, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The scientists in the United Kingdom who initiated the research myself among them were humanitarian scientists. The thought of working on a weapon of mass destruction would have been abhorrent to us in normal circumstances. But the circumstances were not normal: We knew that a war was imminent, a war between democracy and the worst type of totalitarianism. We were afraid that if the bomb were developed in Germany, it would enable Adolf Hitler to win the war and impose on the world the evil Nazi regime.

We thought that the only way to prevent this from happening would be for us the Western allies also to have the bomb and threaten its use in retaliation.

As it happened, this thesis was never put to the test: Hitler was defeated by conventional weapons before the atom bomb was manufactured in the United States. By July 1945, when the first bomb was ready for testing, many scientists who initiated the project were strongly opposed, on moral grounds, to the use of the bomb on civilian populations. They used this moral argument in their petitions to President Truman.

The petitions were rejected. The politicians and the military leaders had their own ideas about the bomb; moral scruples hardly figured in them. More important was to demonstrate to the world and particularly to the Soviet Union the newly acquired might of the United States.

I personally happened to find this out, directly from the mouth of Gen. Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, who said in a casual conversation in 1944, “You realize, of course, that the main purpose of the project is to subdue the Russians.”

Today, the doctrine of extended deterrence the threat to use nuclear weapons even against a non-nuclear attack is the greatest obstacle to a safer world. The Bush policy is in direct conflict with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United States and 186 other nations that is 98 percent of the U.N. membership have signed and ratified the treaty.

Under its terms, the 182 non-nuclear countries undertook not to acquire nuclear weapons, and the five overt nuclear states undertook to get rid of theirs. In a statement issued after the 2000 NPT Review Conference signed by the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France, the nuclear powers gave “an unequivocal undertaking … to accomplish the total elimination of their arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament.”

By flouting this treaty, the Bush administration invites nuclear proliferation. The United States and its allies cannot coherently argue against the acquisition of nuclear weapons by other countries while retaining them for themselves. If, as the Bush administration contends, nuclear weapons are needed for U.S. security, then other countries are sure to want them.

The policy does not make sense even on military grounds. As the events of Sept. 11 have shown, the thousands of nuclear weapons still in the arsenals are useless against terrorists for the simple reason that terrorist groups do not usually present an identifiable target, unless the killing of thousands of innocent people is seen as collateral damage and thus acceptable. At the same time, the very existence in the world of nuclear weapons, or nuclear-weapon-grade materials, increases the threat, because these materials may be acquired by the terrorists.

But above all, the nuclear deterrent policy is unacceptable on ethical grounds. The whole concept of nuclear deterrence is based on making the threat of retaliation real. Bush must show convincingly that he has the kind of personality that would enable him to push the button and unleash an instrument of wholesale destruction, harming not only the alleged aggressor but mainly innocent people, and potentially imperiling the whole of our civilization.

I find it terrifying to think that among the necessary qualifications for leadership is the readiness to commit an act of genocide, because this is what it amounts to in the final analysis.