Tomorrow, Aug. 15, is the day Japan surrendered in 1945, following two atomic bombs dropped, one on Hiroshima and one on Nagasaki. Thereafter the world entered the Nuclear Age and, as historians named it, the Age of Anxiety under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation for the precarious peace it provides. The most amazing thing about the nuclear bomb is that what it accomplishes would be exactly the same if it did not exist. Let’s say world peace, whatever it is, is maintained by the existence of the bomb on both sides (the U.S. and its allies and their “enemy”): But this “peace” is just the same, a state of no war, if it is maintained without the bomb. It is the same peace with the bomb, and the same peace without the bomb. But for humanity, unfortunately, it is peace with the bomb, and the consequences of this peace are catastrophic.
With 17,300 warheads in various nations on earth, mostly in the U.S. and Russia, the question of a nuclear holocaust is not if, but when. The world, and all its life form, ending in a fiery nuclear blowup, is quite certain. We do not base this conclusion on any particular inside information or prescience, but on a simple understanding of human nature: The nuclear weapon is power and all power, sooner or later, is used by the power-holder. It’s like having money and not spending it: It does happen, but only as an exception and humanity cannot live on exceptions forever. The irony of a nuclear holocaust in the form of World War III is mind-boggling in the simple fact that it does not boggle anybody’s mind any more.
How close are we to the total, ultimate annihilation of this earth? The physicists of the world have a device called the “Doomsday Clock,” to indicate, in the form of a clock ticking toward the midnight of our exit from this world, how close we are to the Ultimate Blowup. The Doomsday Clock (the last time I checked it) says, according to the scientists who study such things, that we are five minutes from the end. Five minutes!
But, what does this span of five-minutes of life mean? The five minutes, any five minutes, means little unless we put the five-minute span in some perspective. So, what is the last five minutes of life on earth? It is what’s left of the 24-hour span in which we have been preparing to blow up the world! All day long, we have been manufacturing the bombs, training the soldiers on how to deliver the bombs, testing and retesting the mechanisms, improving their effectiveness and enlarging their efficiency, and finding strategic and tactical reasons to use them on our enemy, for the whole day, until there is five minutes left on the ultimate, total blowup! The last five minutes, in which everything is ready, with bowstrings tightly pulled and arrows ready to fly! How long can humanity hold onto the bows and arrows that have been pulled tight all day?
In the span of 24 hours, there are 288 five-minute units, which means, according to the Doomsday Clock, we have taken the first 287 steps to the final annihilation, and we have one more step (the last five-minute span) left to take. Is there any betting in Las Vegas on the chances of humanity surviving its own follies? What is your own bet on someone who has already taken 287 requisite steps toward his goal and not taking the last one, the 287th, only because his pure rational thinking is stopping him from taking the last step? Is it likely, after having taken the first 287 steps, with untold amounts of expense and energy consumed in those steps, that we are going to stop at the last step only because it’s not a rational thing to do for mankind’s wellbeing?
We hang our safety on something called “Mutually Assured Destruction,” known as “MAD.” MAD is based on the idea that nobody will start a nuclear war knowing that mutual death is certain for both sides. This thinking assumes human rationality as its core calculus: Surely, nobody would be stupid enough to cause his own certain death, even at the pleasure of seeing the enemy destroyed at the same time. Obviously, we overestimate the Homo sapiens who make up the only species capable of doing deliberate harm to itself. In case anyone thinks prayer meetings and protests are going to solve the nuclear problem, remember that it is human evolution that created the Bomb and the evolution is surely destined to take its natural course. We should also remember that the forces that push the Bomb toward its final explosion are a million times stronger than the human reason that cries out for rationality.
My own prediction of absolute certainty: There will be no WW III because there will be nobody alive to write down, or read about, what happened.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and Professor Emeritus, is the author of “The Dead End,” a book which TIME magazine called “an important and brilliant book (about) America’s national death wish.” He lives in Greenfield.