The 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared August 29 as the International Day against Nuclear Tests. This ban is an essential first step toward the total elimination of nuclear weapons around the world. In view of the conflicts and hatreds that still exist, this effort might be seen as Utopian and futile. But it is a goal crucial to our survival.

Our energies are now consumed by squabbles having to do with the building of an Islamic Cultural Center and prayer room two blocks from the site of 9/11, the imagined conspiracies by liberal and conservative constituencies, our obsession with the nocturnal excursions of celebrities and the transgressions of politicians. In all this clamor we lose sight of the agonizing dilemma facing mankind, finding the will and the wisdom to eliminate nuclear weapons from the world’s arsenals. Conventional weapons can do terrible damage. Only nuclear weapons have the potential to end all life on earth.

The first step to understanding and accepting that this Armagedon can happen is to project the horrific destruction that would occur if an atomic bomb were detonated on our own soil, a catastrophe with a loss of life greater than a million 9/11s.

The human mind may find it difficult to encompass the death of the earth but that is what we are facing. Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan conquered cities but the stake in nuclear war is the annihilation of mankind.

One has only to read a few of the many books published as warnings. Jonathan Schell writes in The Fate of the Earth: “These bombs grew out of history yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man.”

Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner, writes of the victims in Hiroshima Notes: “An old man who had cancer in all his organs and a backbone that became like pumice. A powerful sumo wrestler suffering from radiation poisoning, whose body became monstrously swollen. Soon afterwards he coughed up a bucketful of blood and died. A woman who had been exposed to the atomic bomb when she was a new-born baby; after eighteen years she developed symptoms of leukemia and died soon after giving birth to her own baby.”

I am an old man now, sitting at my desk in this pleasant Midwestern summer, feeling powerless and resigned. I think of the achievements of mankind through the centuries, the works of art, literature and music, the progressions of science, the stunning advances in medicine and communications. Above all, those human endearments of laughter, kindness and tenderness, valor in the face of adversity, the sheer joy which life can sometimes provide.

Then I recall a few lines from Aristophanes, the ancient Greek playwright known for his humor but also the writer of these grim, prophetic words: “Mankind, fleet of life, like tree leaves, weak creatures of clay, unsubstantial as shadows, wingless, ephemeral, wretched, mortal and dreamlike.”

I may not live to experience the catastrophe nor may my sons in their lifetimes. But somewhere, sometime, unless we acquire a wisdom still eluding us, and a compassion for our human brothers and sisters still lacking, it will happen, that death of the earth and all life as we now know it, our planet become a great dead star whirling endlessly in the endless darkness of space.

--Harry Mark Petrakis is a novelist and short story writer who has lived in the Duneland area since 1968.

Posted 9/9/2010