Seventy years on

Posted 8/21/12

The summer weather—hasn’t it been lovely, for the most part? The warm, clear days, the cool nights… the chirps of birds and peepers… sitting outside, your head on someone’s lap, looking up …

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Seventy years on

Posted

The summer weather—hasn’t it been lovely, for the most part? The warm, clear days, the cool nights… the chirps of birds and peepers… sitting outside, your head on someone’s lap, looking up at the stars in an August night sky, the sound of a river in the distance, a thought might occur to you:

How is it that we are still here?

Seriously, now, think about it: as of a few days ago, it’s been 70 years, nearly three-quarters of a century, since the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

(A moment of silence might be appropriate at this point.)

Since then, we have gone through the Korean conflict; the Cuban Missile Crisis; Vietnam; the brinksmanship of the Reagan/Gorbachev era; the breakup of the Soviet Union; and countless other flashpoints, provocations and crises, any of which could have triggered the grand nuclear conflagration that folks of my generation were trained to expect Any Moment Now. (By the way, if you have not watched the excellent documentary “Atomic Cafe,” which illustrates from primary sources the insanity of the Atomic Era, please do so at your earliest opportunity. It’s available online.)

And yet ... even after all that… we are still here. Amazing.

Some people think it’s because the Powers That Be finally came to their collective senses, and concluded (along with that computer from the movie “War Games”) that a nuclear war really is unwinnable. Some people think that the Powers That Be are more cynical than that, and realize that a nuclear war would only be bad for business and upset their presently comfortable situations. Some people think it’s because we haven’t (yet) become completely suicidal as a species. Some people think it’s just blind luck. Some people think that the ETs have interfered and kept us from offing ourselves—though whether it’s because they think we’re cute, or because we’re tasty, is not entirely clear.

Some people look at the example of Stanislav Y. Petrov (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov), who was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces. During a NATO war exercise, Petrov’s systems indicated a possible launch of a small number of missiles from America. He could have reported the apparent attack, which would probably had led to a reflexive retaliatory strike—but something about the circumstances didn’t seem right to him. He’d been trained to expect an all-out assault, so seeing just a little trickle didn’t make sense. He assumed that there had been a breakdown in the detection system, which turned out to be the right call.

And so here we are, perhaps a bit less worried about the overall immolation of the planet, but perhaps a bit more concerned about smaller tragedies, a suitcase nuke being planted by a terrorist or a misunderstanding between two neighboring nuclear powers. And we may have found new ways to doom ourselves.

But overall we seem to have come to some kind of consensus: this thing we call life on Earth, whatever its pains and inconveniences, whatever our arguments and disagreements, is nonetheless worth continuing.

Buried under the rubble, after all, how could we see the stars?

(Postscript: It may seem all too ironic to say that “life is worth continuing” in the aftermath of the seemingly contradictory decision recently made by my dear friend and colleague, the late Tom Kane. But I think that Tom was quite cognizant of the role of death within the ongoing, recurrent cycle of life. His end was not the act of a nihilist, of someone who saw no meaning or purpose in a cruel and empty world. It was not an act of despair, but of acceptance. Requiescas in pace, amice.)

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