When the machine-gun was invented, people said it meant the end of war because such an efficient killing machine would be inhumane to use, even on soldiers.
When the airplane was invented, people said it meant an end to war because aerial bombing would kill too many innocent civilians.
When the atom bomb was invented, people said it meant the end of war because its widespread use would demolish or poison most of the planet, and all nations would lose.
Every weapon developed by man has been used in war, which quickly descends into barbarity. We have reason to fear that nukes will be unleashed in the Russia-Ukraine War, which is escalating.
Even if nuclear weapons are not used, they already have been critical to Russia’s strategy by keeping other superpowers out of the struggle to save the Ukraine.
Nuclear weapons are the world’s biggest problem that we don’t talk about. Climate change could make much of the planet inhospitable in 50 years. A nuclear exchange could do that in a few hours.
During the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s, an active anti-nuke movement kept the issue in the news. Priests, nuns and other spiritual leaders, some of the movement’s most motivated leaders, regularly made headlines with acts of civil disobedience like splashing lamb’s blood on warheads after entering weapons factories.
Why have we forgotten about the nuclear threat? Did the fall of the Soviet Union dispel our fear that the 14,000 nuclear warheads on Earth no longer posed a threat to us? Is it that the human animal is geared only to respond to immediate threats? Maybe, but maybe not.
Robert Jay Lifton, a preeminent social psychiatrist of the nuclear age, suspected something else was at work, a phenomenon he dubbed “psychic numbing,” a subconscious withdrawal from ideas too overwhelming for us to comprehend.
The most horrible horror is not a place we like our imaginations to go.
On witnessing the detonation of the first atomic test in the New Mexico desert in 1945, Kenneth Bainbridge, the director of the project uttered, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.” Bainbridge campaigned during his life to keep nuclear technology out of the hands of the military, a futile effort.
Perhaps he realized that politicians of all stripes hungered for power, that power is a gun, and a nuke is the biggest gun of all.
The scientists who developed nuclear technology developed a “Doomsday Clock” to notify the rest of us or our proximity to a man-made global catastrophe. We’re now 100 seconds to midnight, closer to Doomsday than we’ve been since the clock was set at 11:53 when the arms race started in 1947.
As many as nine nations now have nuclear bombs. They include Pakistan, North Korea and Israel, nations arguably more volatile than Russia.
If this war accomplishes nothing else, it might fire a renewed interest in the global abolition of nukes. War is always an atrocity and a disaster and a crime against humanity. Nuclear war is another beast altogether. It has the potential to amount to mass suicide for our species.
As terrible as that thought is, it’s still not as bad as suicide itself. And perhaps there’s a lesson for us in the comparison.
Many people succeed at suicide because friends and family members can’t imagine a suicidal person might actually go through with it. It’s our failure to imagine the unimaginable makes the unimaginable possible, and sometimes inevitable.
As a society – but more important as individuals – to ensure our future, we must confront the real possibility of nuclear war. The politicians won’t do it. Too many of them regard the atom bomb as an extension of their own, very dangerous, power.