Echoes of past fears drift toward self-destruction

“Nations, fearing one another, gliding into a suicidal attitude. Then they departed from the course of life and plunged into the adventure of death. They dethroned reason and espoused force, until large tracts of habitable earth became fatal playgrounds for maddened millions, whilst the masses of the home population watched, and upheld, and encouraged, and loudly applauded the murderous game.”

The quote is by English author and historian Caroline Playne reflecting on the summer of 1914. The Great War saw astounding innovations in human suffering: tanks, machine guns, poison gas. However, a weapon that would later coin the term ‘megadeath’ was still in the theoretical stage.

The first atomic bomb, code-named ‘Trinity,’ was tested July 16, 1945. Shortly before the Trinity test, a number of scientists, most notably Edward Teller, worried the explosion could ignite the atmosphere, destroying all life on earth. The idea was dismissed and the detonation was carried out anyway. To relieve tension, Enrico Fermi took bets on whether the atmosphere would catch fire.

Enrico Fermi is most well-known for the Fermi Paradox, which speculates on why we haven’t been visited by alien life. One of the reasons for apparently being alone in the universe is that civilizations wipe themselves out before reaching the stars and colonizing other solar systems. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Los Alamos Project and father of the atomic bomb echoed this sentiment, albeit, a little closer to home.

In a 1965 interview he was asked if the atomic bomb test on the sands of Trinity New Mexico was in fact the first test of its kind? J. Robert Oppenheimer responded, “Yes, in modern times.” The sands at the test site were turned to glass from the explosion - something only seen with extremely intense temperatures.

When seeing the glass, a scientist on the project had a flashback to many years ago when he was on assignment in eastern Libya and a strange crunching sound caused the group to stop their jeep and inspect the glass under wheel. It had to be made by a meteor yet there was no crater anywhere near.

It got Oppenheimer thinking. He was a student of Sanskrit and familiar with the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu text that describes a battle where an unknown weapon created an incandescent column of smoke and fire, laid waste to armies, blowing the soldiers away like leaves in the wind, induced sickness reminiscent of radiation poisoning, and affected the soil so crops wouldn’t grow for years after. Perhaps this is what he was referring to, a prehistoric war that employed nuclear weapons.

Five years later the Russians caught up with America in developing an atomic bomb; however, by this time we’d moved on to the hydrogen bomb. The nuclear arms race was on and we’ve been under the hanging sword of Damocles ever since. Duck and cover.

The closest we’ve come to nuclear annihilation was in October of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Us Americans didn’t appreciate missiles in Havana 240 miles from Miami.

There are religious scholars who say that with the onset of World War I the devil was loosed upon the world and perhaps he gains more power with every atomic bomb test. Possibly the whole thing is a ruse. Henry Kissinger is rumored to have said, “The fear of nuclear war serves a bigger purpose than actual nuclear war.” Perhaps this is all distraction as the total-control AI surveillance system is being rolled out?

Someday, in the distant future, maybe alien archaeologists will find some petroglyphs in a cave describing what happened to the human race and come to the conclusion that, in the end, we lost the message taught by Jesus and chose paranoia and hatred instead of empathy and love, and annihilated ourselves in the process. As the slogan from the 1960’s goes, “Get active or get radioactive.”

This holiday season, let’s be thankful that we are all still here on planet Earth and relatively safe.

Eric Coleman is a free-lance reporter living in Pahrump whose political cartoons appear weekly in the Pahrump and Tonopah newspapers. Contact him at ericjamescoleman@gmail.com.