Deadly Scourge

Yesterday, August 6, was the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, when an entire city was destroyed by a nuclear weapon. Tens of thousands of people died instantly. Many of those who made it through the initial blast and the intense heat died in the following weeks and months of gruesome radiation-related illnesses. Long term survivors carried the scars of their burns and the shock of witnessing the most horrifying spectacle in the history of warfare.

It amazes me that so few people are aware of the date and its significance. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 9) are not dusty chapters of history; they are harbingers of a horrifyingly probable future. There are thousands of nuclear weapons in the world today, each of them far more powerful than the devices that were deployed in Japan in 1945. Any one of these devices could massacre millions of human beings in an instant. Mankind has lost the sense of the seriousness of nuclear war would be. It’s become an abstract idea, like a scene from a heroic movie that we can switch off when we want to. But we can never switch off the threat of deployment of weapons of mass destruction. They are real, they are terrifying, and the people in charge of their deployment are, in some cases, reckless in irresponsible. As long as these weapons exist, the threat of their deployment is imminent, and the damage that they would cause is incalculable, a massive deadly scourge on an already troubled and brittle planet.