The Abyss

Evil must be recognized as that which makes us think we are innocent of it.

As I age, I am inevitably drawn to envisioning the world my unborn children will live in. I come to understand how my parents must have felt, bringing me into a world where men regarded as displaying "leadership" could talk of nuclear war as others might talk of baseball or television shows. To talk of nuclear war is impossible, because nuclear war would destroy all that is, including words and the men foolish enough to utter them so nonchalantly regarding the end of existence.

Nuclear war is not war. It is extinction. It is the very definition of evil, and all that can be said for it is that, along with everything else, perhaps it would destroy evil as well. As hard as it has been for me to realize this, I have grown, like my parents before me, in a culture that has lost its mind, as it casually weilds the capability to destroy all that exists and even more casually calls this "security".

Such unfathomable things are hard to write about. We have given to a select few men, who are every bit as prone to rage, irrationality, or mistake as anyone else, the power to destroy everything that exists. Every word, every thought, every work of art and industry that has ever been created. And, of course, every person, born or unborn, from Osama bin Laden to you to 2 billion Chinese to my infant neice. Everything. Gone.

We give ourselves this power with the implicit assumption that we can control it, that we can be responsible with it. But how many mistakes would it take to prove us wrong? To make civilization itself, the very medium for how everything is defined and understood, vanish from existence? The end of the last episode of the Sopranos writ large, with no credits following the sudden blacking of the screne, just billions of incinerated, melted, and charred human beings, with millions of the unlucky, the survivors, who range the moonscape waiting for death from poisoning, a death that can't come too soon.

We would take the Earth with us, for good measure. As the dust, the infinite particles of concrete and human flesh flooded the atmosphere, the sun would be blocked our for years, killing every living thing on Earth and, as far as we know for sure at this point, in the universe. In our act of collective suicide, we would destroy the very universe that gave us birth, ensuring that nothing could or would come after.

This is not hyperbole; this is prophecy. This is inevitable unless and until these weapons are destroyed. Unless and until, in other words, the United States destroys them. I don't want Iran to have 1 nuclear weapon; that would, indeed, be destabilizing. I also don't want us to have 30,000 of them because, given a madman or a computer glitch, that could end everything. Everything.

We built one because we feared Hitler might. When we learned that he wasn't, some urged us to stop. We didn't. We completed the project. When we had them, we used them. Some urged us not to, insisting that Japan would surrender regardless. We went ahead with the use, and killed 200,000 civilians in 2 days.

We could have banned these weapons then, destroying the few we had and removing the motive for poorer nations to attempt to build them. We didn't. We stockpiled hundreds of these weapons, forcing others to do the same. We could have stopped with the atomic bomb, understanding that hydrogen bombs would have thousands of times the destuctive capacity as atomic bombs. We didn't. We built tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs.

We got to the point, in the 1950's, where we had enough hydrogen bombs to kill every living thing on earth. We could have stopped there. We didn't. Even if you are inclined to look at every prior step as a necessary evil to contain the Communists, this final step, this step of ensuring that we could destroy all of existence more than once must be seen as the very definition of insanity.

For all of the talk of Christianity, democracy, freedom, and liberty, what have we become when we presume to "protect" these virtues by maintaining that we will destroy all that exists if we feel a need? After the Communist threat, vastly exagerated and partially self-inflicted, faded away in 1991, we could have begun destroying these weapons, as the Russians did. We could have, perhaps, reduced our stockpile to the point where we could destroy every city on earth, but no more than that. We didn't.

We wonder why people fear the United States. If we share a house with a multitude of other peoples, and we insist on maintaining the ability to destroy the house and all within it if we unilaterally decide we must, or mistakenly do so, in what universe would we not be feared?

This is the abyss that we inherit. Where men who claim to be guardians of the greatest repository of freedom, justice, and Christian ethics that the world has ever known tell us with a straight face that such gifts are only secured by the willingness to destroy all that exists on a moment's notice. What have we become? To my unborn children, I apologize.