"Interviewing Hiroshima survivors, I came to see the weapons as inherently apocalyptic," he said. "This causes us to see them as God's work. It's a phenomenon I call nuclearism-the worship of these weapons."
Lifton's scholarly approach is self-described as focusing on shared themes. "It involves looking at people who have been powerfully affected by historical events and seeing what they have in common psychologically," he said.
Lifton connected the apocalyptic imagination to ideological totalism-reality manipulation similar to brainwashing-by citing Chinese Communist thought reformers, the Nazi doctors, the Ohm Shinrikyo Japanese terrorist cult and the current Bush administration.
"I find some reverberations of the Nazi doctors in American doctors in Abu Ghraib," Lifton said, referring to the U.S. military prison which came under heavy scrutiny this year after photos confirmed allegations of prisoner torture.
"They're not to be equated, but American doctors were implicit in the torture, first, in not reporting injuries. Second, in turning over medical records to find weak spots of detainees, and third, in falsifying or delaying death certificates to convey the sense that people had died of natural causes."
One must confront the present in order to consider the future. "It's important to look into the abyss to see beyond it," he said. "The immediate abyss is the war in Iraq and the mindset of those who created that war."
For Lifton, part of the problem with U.S. involvement in the Iraq war is that the involvement was unnecessary. "The war in Iraq is a war of choice," he said. "It was described as a pre-emptive war, but it is a preventive war. This approach becomes ever more grotesque in the nuclear age."
Drawing on the Chinese Communist Party's brainwashing, Lifton said that the Bush administration has similarly attempted to control reality and shape the mindset of the public. "It's more than just control of spin; it's an effort at ownership of the mind, or reality control," he said. "I have to say, though, reality is stubborn and not easily controlled."
The spector of weapons of mass destruction and their possible use, Lifton said, allows for the socialization of atrocity. Lifton explained that one such atrocity creation was the Vietnam War. "It was an atrocity-producing situation created by certain military policies-free-fire zones, body counts and the angry grief of soldiers," he said.
The current war in Iraq is another atrocity-producing situation, Lifton claimed. "We can see the Iraq version of the atrocity-producing situation in Abu Ghraib," he said. "And it is now a counter-insurgency war in an alien environment in a situation where the enemy is hostile and non-white."
Atrocity, according to Lifton, is created on three levels. "There's the nitty-gritty atrocity you see in those images," Lifton said. "Another level is the intelligence officers who sometimes gave specific instructions. A higher level is the planners of the war who are intent on justifying it. This creates an atrocity-producing situation, which becomes inseparable from the war as a whole."
Vietnam was also an apocalyptic situation, Lifton said, continuing to tie it to the war in Iraq. "Destroy to save," Lifton said. "One thinks of Falluja in similar terms. To attribute Abu Ghraib to a few bad apples is in total violation of all evidence and the nature of that war."
According to Lifton, the Nazi doctors' and Ohm Shinrikyo's visions of purifying society through violence can be seen in the Bush foreign policy. "Ohm Shinrikyo was trying to force the end, as in ancient literature," he said. "The existence of weapons of mass destruction contributes to that impulse of forcing the end."
Lifton went on to explain that the imagination causes such violence. "Apocalyptic violence is the product of apocalyptic imagination," he said. "Large-scale violence always is in the service of much yearned-for renewal or purification. This idea of purification makes apocalyptic violence more appealing."
"If you look at the Middle East … Hamas has an apocalyptic promise," Lifton continued. "Some Jewish extremists have an apocalyptic agenda. Apocalyptic thinking emerges from just about every major religious group in the world."
Lifton asserted that Osama bin Laden also fits the apocalyptic model. "He wants to purify the world in the Islamist image," he said.
Throughout his speech, Lifton criticized the Bush administration for strengthening the apocalyptic model rather than combating it. "The war on terror is itself apocalyptic because it is amorphous; it has no limits in time and space," he said. "It is apocalyptic and works in tandem with the Islamist apocalyptic."
According to Lifton, Bush will never escape from apocalypticism because of his dependence on violence. "Bush has a psychological style that draws upon a fundamentalist and apocalyptic tendency," Lifton said. "It can be called regeneration through violence. Ironically, nuclear weapons are proliferating in response to our nuclearistic policies. The super power is bedeviled by its vulnerability."
Finally, Lifton said that there is an alternative to the apocalyptic tendency. "There is a possibility in all of this for survivor illumination," he said. "What we're realizing is that atrocity-producing situations are not all America can produce. I say Abu Ghraib is not America. We can restore our moral compass. An anti-war movement could well focus on this alternative survivor mission. The survivor can either close down or open out. We can close down with fantasies of revenge or open out with survivor illumination."
Lifton has written more than 20 books. "Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima," a study of the survivors, won a National Book Award in 1968.