Einstein had an idea from the confusion of his knowledge,
Then there were a thousand more turning to advantage.
They realised that their god was dead,
So they reclaimed power through the bomb instead.
Another’s code, another’s brain,
They’ll shower us all in deadly rain,–Where Next, Columbus? Crass
August 6th was the 64th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. I hardly noticed. My internet was experiencing problems and Toronto was busy celebrating the one year anniversary of a propane mishap. The ancient atomic blast was a minor story. The world has moved on. We have new fears. I still remember the old ones.
As a child, I was terrified of the nuclear bomb. Not intellectually but as a visceral thing. Knowing that humans could blow up the whole world and kill everyone on it, it seemed a forgone conclusion that they would. A mistake would be made. The Russians would attack. Something would go wrong. Then nothing.
I used to pray at night for one more day.
Not that there would be no nuclear war. Just that it wouldn’t happen today. That old grace, that perverse If I die before I wake, meant one thing: The nukes had gone off. How else would I die in bed? I was just a kid.
I doubt I was alone in this. Like being scared of the Doctor Who theme song, some things are just common. And it’s hard to say what sort of effect that thinking has on a child let alone whole generations of them. People of my generation have a nihilistic bent coupled with an end of the world mythos. How could we be any other way?
When I was a kid, I was first propagandised against the Russians. They (that is, whomever runs this anthill) had me terrified of them. Then they switched up the game and started saying they were our friends.
I can even recall the movie where it changed for me. Some kids rescued a KGB guy and, instead of killing him or the whole thing becoming Red Dawn, they befriended him, learned the Russians were people too and the movie ended with them all sitting down to read “War and Peace.”
What the fuck is this bullshit?! I wondered. You might as well have a zombie movie where the zombies turn out to be a swell bunch of guys. It made no sense. But they kept working on it and before this resulted in serious movies with serious actors like The Hunt for Red October, there were cinematic masterpieces like Red Heat.
This folk movie of the subgenre cop-buddy-flick, tells the story of a discipled Russkie and a slobby Yank teaming up to fight crime. The Russkie learns to enjoy hamburgers and the Yank learns to enjoy violating peoples civil liberties.
By the age of thirteen I was already fed two big lies: One about the Soviet menace, the next about our Russian friends. And that’s when things got weird. After Glasnost and the fall of Berlin Wall, the Russians started drinking Coke and we had no movie villains. They kept trying out new things. Columbian drug lords, Koreans, Arabs and then, in the late nineties, motherfucking space aliens. Space aliens! Of all things. Little green men.
And that whole time, the nukes still hung over us like the Sword of Damocles.
But we all forgot about it.
Nukes have not stopped existing. And they’re still ready to go off. They are not our last and best defence against an alien invasion nor are they the simple purview of rogue states and terrorists. There is no such thing as a tactical nuke and proliferation is not the only worry. The ones already in existence are more than enough to wipe every single living thing except cockroaches from this planet. In a matter of minutes. The people who already control them are just people. Whatever their intentions, it’s just too much god-damn power for anyone to have.
While it’s much more fashionable to be concerned about global warming and the new techno-threats, we still have an old one to worry us: The nuclear bomb. If, after 64 years, we still haven’t figured out how to deal with that, have failed to realize that war became obsolete on the day the A-Bomb was exploded, have failed to solve the problem and simply learned to ignore the whole situation while we live in the shadows of mushroom clouds, I simply lack hope about anything else. We can’t dismantle a bomb but we’re going to fix the weather?
That, my friends, is bullshit. We’re not fixing fuck-all. And you’ll have to excuse me if I have a hard time buying this week’s enemy, whether it be carbon or terrorism. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t jump on the atheist bandwagon and start talking about all the evil shit religion has done. It was not religion that nuked Hiroshima. That was science.
And maybe the only possible reaction to science like that is to pray. To cross your fingers and hope that you can ride this crazy bitch of a ride for one more day. That might be best we can hope for and it might be the best we can do.
But there is some good news. We’ll all go together when we go.
5 comments
Andriy says:
August 12, 2009 at 4:58 pm (UTC -5 )
I pretty much forgot about the threat of nuclear weapons until yesterday when I watched Threads, a BBC docu-drama from 1984 aboout what would happen to the UK in the event of a nuclear exchange. It’s not pretty.
Brian Dunbar says:
August 12, 2009 at 9:49 pm (UTC -5 )
We must be about the same age. I grew up knowing that a nuclear war was going to happen and there was nothing to do about it.
Standing a walking post in the Marines outside of DC in the late 80s … at night I would look up and wonder if you could see warheads re-entering.
Nuclear bombs are still around. But we’re not on a launch-on warning posture either.
The downside to this is that Our Leaders have probably not given the whole thing a lot of thought. SAC, the football – that stuff is still around but they seem to be relics of a distant past.
The problem here is that not having given any thought to the matter is that they are likely to over-react when presented with a fast-moving crisis.
It was not religion that nuked Hiroshima. That was science.
No. Science is a tool. What got Hiroshima nuked was politics.
Nadia Lewis says:
August 13, 2009 at 12:44 am (UTC -5 )
It’s weird — I was born in 1983, but I never felt the effects of Cold War or the possibility of nuclear doom while growing up in my crappy Vancouver suburb. It wasn’t until university, when I lived with an ex-pat Serb for eight years, watching loads of TV from post-nuclear Japan, that I become aware of either cultures.
The Serb wasn’t afraid of getting bombed either — just of zombies and gypsies.
Oh! Have you seen The Postal Service’s “We Will Become Silhouettes” video? It’s really happy, boppy and cute; it’ll give you a whole new take on the (possibly) impending doom.
Ryan Oakley says:
August 13, 2009 at 1:47 pm (UTC -5 )
I’m 31. I think I must be about as young as you can get and still remember the cold war. It was a childhood thing.
Well, we had politics before we had nukes and no one got nuked. It’s a bit like the guns don’t kill people, people kill people thing. It’s true but guns do still kill people.
Brian Dunbar says:
August 13, 2009 at 10:43 pm (UTC -5 )
It’s true but guns do still kill people.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one.