Reflections on the future,  inspired by memories of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki —

I grew up in a world where the very idea of the existence of a ‘future’ was in question.  Some of you remember those days.  Heads down on your desk, you waited, as I did, for the atomic bomb to fall not far from your hometown.  Fallout shelters, early warning signals blasting out of radios and test patterns interrupting television programming were all part of the preparations we made, hoping to insure that the greatest numbers of people would survive that big blast. Somewhere along the way, someone got the bright idea that outgunning each other wasn’t the only way human beings might proceed to live together on one small planet.  Nations began to adopt treaties and agreements that could safeguard the trigger happy from themselves and each other. The ‘mutually assured destruction’ of atomic and nuclear weapons led governments to the brink of taking action for mutually assured survival.

 

As we consider the prospects for annihilation that still threaten our future, we do not stand so very far from the observation shared by Gen. Omar Bradley after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said, “The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom.  Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.  We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

 

Today, it seems we know more about Weapons of Mass Destruction than we do about Strategies for Mass Survival.  But, those strategies are just where we need to put our energies in our future…in the future we want to create, in the future we can create for our children, and their children, and their children’s children.

 

There are Strategies for Mass Survival that can be attended to today to aide in securing our future.

 

We can follow, support, and work to enhance the half dozen treaties that protect portions of our future, like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Seabed Arms Control Treaty.

 

We can accept as a fact of our human nature that new and equally destructive methods of mass murder have been invented, and we can follow, support and enhance agreements that attempt to control the use of biological and chemical weapons.

 

We can accept as a further fact, that in our brilliance – new and terrifying weapons are being developed, like the class of weapons known as directed energy weapons.  While those weapons are not operational today, we’re already being told that they will be useful for defense, not necessarily aggression.  But, we’ve heard that story before haven’t we?  The bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were used in ‘defense’ against an aggressor – and the thousands upon thousands of lives lost generation upon generation were treated like so much collateral damage that couldn’t be avoided.  Because we know our past includes the potential to visit generations of innocents with the consequences of war, we need to be especially careful to carry not only the ‘brilliance’ of weaponry into the future, but, also the wisdom to turn aside a new era of horror.

 

In the future we need to nurture the wisdom that will lead us closer to a world free of nuclear weapons.  We need to nurture an ethical stance that cares for all humanity, not just our own nationals.  We need to make peace our goal as small conflicts threaten the stability of our world.  We need to make ourselves brilliant in the tactics of living together in justice, compassion and equality.  We need to learn the fundamentals for mutually assured survival.