A silent gong went off at some point in the mid-1960s. Although nobody heard it, its message was loud, clear and world changing. It was definitely the loudest noise nobody ever heard!
Europe had fallen into the habit of igniting "world wars" every few decades or so. There was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, followed by World War I beginning in 1914, followed by World War II beginning in 1939. The "gong" that "sounded" squarely in the mid-1960s signaled the moment when the same period of time had elapsed from the end of World War I to the beginning of World War II as had elapsed since the end of World War II and the bang of that gong. History knocked on our stateroom door and announced it was time for another war. And guess what? No war! How come?
World War II had the distinction of being the only war in history to be ended by two atomic bombs, dropped in rapid succession on Japan. Infantry charges "over the top" of the trenches were the protein of war. Cannonades were commonplace. Then not just Japan but the entire world saw Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the entire world, informally, without any official vote, decided it might be a good idea not to engender situations that would lead to more nuclear bombs falling, this time on who knows whom!
If you're of liberal bent, I'd advise you stop reading here before your nervous and digestive systems suffer irreversible imbalance. If you're a Common-Sense-Realist, you'll join me in gratitude for the weapon that did more to foment peace and discourage war than any gaggle of diplomats ever to meet in the U.N.'s North Delegates' Lounge for a drink, or any place else! The Cold War promised to get hotter rather than colder. And it ended without either of the world's two superpowers nuking the other. Are you aware that Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev agreed – or rather rushed pell-mell – to remove Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles from Cuba because a sadistic maniac (quite literally!), Ché Guevara, who was known to have some influence over the Castro brothers in Cuba, begged the Soviets to nuke America's heartland?
Guevara wrote to Khrushchev, in what reads like a far-from-the-top college humor magazine, that even though the Yankee imperialists would surely destroy Cuba completely, that was a small price to pay for the advancement of Communism! A furious and terrified Khrushchev demanded the immediate withdrawal of the Soviet missiles, yelling to his aides in Moscow, "Our Cuban allies are idiots!"
A roll call of other dictatorial "idiots" who were bad enough to nuke their enemies but were restrained by far greater force than pleas, sermons and full-page ads in the New York Times includes Gadhafi, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Arafat, Mao and many more. Fear, yes, but no blast since August of 1945.
Meanwhile the list of countries that have nuclear weapons enlarges. Do you remember in the early 1960s America, Britain and the Soviet Union did their best to keep France from getting the bomb, on grounds the French were "irresponsible"? This is the "gun control argument" magnified. A New Age editor of a trendy magazine squeezed a laugh out of me when she dismissively said she simply wouldn't talk to people who haven't had their medication yet! There's something stylish in there somewhere. Likewise, I won't argue gun control with people who can't admit upfront that criminals will always find a way to get firearms. We can then go back and forth about "background checks" and "concealed carry permits," but why waste my education on those who believe guns can be legislated out of bad hands?
And Ditto! with the atomic bomb. Given the number of countries that already have the nuclear bomb and those on the way (Iran!), add the inevitability of smart scientists and rogue dictators either now or soon or someday willing to sell another bad guy a bomb or the recipe, if the day hasn't already arrived! You can depend that we will see that nuclear proliferation wins the war against nuclear control. And at that point all that civilization will have to preserve itself is the horror of the failure of nuclear restraint. The two countries figured most likely to nuke each other are India and Pakistan. Yet look how long both have been nuclear powers without nuclear misbehavior!
So why no nuclear attacks since 1945? After rocks, bows and arrows, crossbows, spears, muskets, rifles, machine guns – you get the drift – Gen. Leslie Groves' team at Los Alamos finally came up with the weapon that makes its own use unthinkable. I read in one credible journal that a chemistry student in a good American high school could manufacture an A-bomb if he could get the needed fissionable material.
You may feel protected by Iran's nuke deal with Obama. I take much more comfort knowing Israel has hundreds of them.
You may not yet be ready to join me in gratitude for the advent of the nuclear bomb. But after mankind's many spectacular failures, can you open your mind, consider and even warm to the possibility that perhaps, just maybe, the nuclear bomb deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?
Media wishing to interview Barry Farber, please contact [email protected].
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