Hiroshima redux
This week's Guardian has an incredible spread on the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings, with an edited version of John Hersey's original article (later lengthened into the book Hiroshima), interviews with survivors who were then kids, etc. Be sure to read the various articles linked to part two.
Once done... write your senators, congressmen, etc., telling them to stop the madness and oppose new nuclear weapons. We can and should make changes now... but part of me is afraid it'll take another Hiroshima before we do and that if that happens it won't just be one or two cities. Prove me wrong.
posted by Jay Denari @ 7/25/2005 01:46:00 PM
3 Comments:
Sure wish you were in politics. A blog devoted to far-sightedness...
With the "next election" focus and corporate control over the "last remaining superpower," I really wonder myself about our species being able to survive for long.
Remember that string of asteroids that slammed into Jupiter in ninety-whatever, with some of the explosions larger than the earth? In cosmic terms, an incredibly near miss. And I've read that we just haven't gotten around yet to mapping out the trajectories of ninety percent of the asteroids that intersect earth's orbit, let alone developing and deploying the technology for hitting one when it comes at us.
And it isn't if, it's when. But since it probably won't bother any of us, who cares, right, about distant generations? It would be nice, though, if some of the people running things did...
The dinosaurs didn't know the asteroid was coming. We do. We choose not to do anything about it.
Which species is stupider?
Hi, Paul,
I think we'll survive even if we do have a severe nuclear war... but I seriously doubt we'd ever again become a high-tech civilization in part b/c of all the resources we've already consumed to get this far. This is our one chance to reach the stars, and to do that we MUST have peace.
Yeah, I remember Jupiter -- it was Comet Shoemaker-Levy. That was a wake up call to astronomers, but was all but ignored by most people. We often have reports of some asteroid that might hit us in some future years; there's even a website that tracks all of the ones so far found & gives them probabilities.
Most people ignore them, but think of what could've happened if the Tunguska comet had hit Russia 50 years later than it did (in 1904, I think) -- it could've sparked nuclear war. Or if it had hit just a couple of minutes later -- it could've obliterated Moscow, St. Petersburg, or another major city, killing a million people even in those days.
I intend to write about this issue soon, so keep watching...
Hi, T,
Why we do this...
I think it's often b/c we're afraid to look too deeply b/c we might not like what we find; we're afraid to prepare for catastrophe b/c that seems to be acknowledging that our lives and society might be on the wrong track AND that our efforts to prevent it might not work. And, of course, there's the social image -- when almost everyone denies the possibility of horror really happening (and, indirectly, their own inner darkness), those who accept it are often branded as "weird." Most of us are sane enough to want to avoid being ostracized.
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