Word: bomb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This refusal to face the bomb squarely might help explain why the attempts to control nuclear proliferation have been so ineffectual. On the one hand, the world has seen more than 30 major good-faith efforts at containing proliferation-a dogged series of pacts, treaties and conferences, extending from three months after Hiroshima through the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1957, the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1968, and the International Fuel Cycle Evaluation, the barely pronounceable INFCE, in 1977, that undertook the apparently futile task of dispersing the power without...
...present, six nations definitely have the bomb, two probably have it, and by the end of the 1980s the prize will be within reach of some 40 other countries, not including roving mad-dog nations like the Red Brigades, which are panting to steal one readymade. For these gifts and expectations they may thank the current nuclear nations, some of which have been dispensing nuclear equipment as if there were no tomorrow...
Meanwhile, on another front entirely, national leaders have sprung up who seem incapable of second thoughts. Rather than divert their gaze from the silent toy within their reach, they muse and wonder what the thing might actually accomplish. These bombs have lain shelved for quite a while now, and a test is only a test, after all. Nor is such madness confined to the certifiable. Even the meekest citizen knows moments wherein he dreams of Armageddon. Whence otherwise could come such colliding terms as "population explosion" and "baby boom" but the amazing bicameral mind? It is a two-pole world...
...long would it be before individual fears overtook the collective, and still another agreement were broken? To avoid that, there would have to be a third way taken simultaneously, one that addressed the mind that brought us to the place we are. It is time to see the bomb as a real weapon again, and not an amorphous threat or a political lever. It is time to look straight at its drab snout and recall quite clearly what it once did and still can do. A new book of drawings by Hiroshima's survivors is called Unforgettable Fire...
...problem sound naive, the sophisticated answers being either to take up arms or to give up entirely. Yet as of now no one is even talking; neither the Soviets, Americans, Israelis nor Arabs. Generals glower, missiles are rolled into place, and the silence in the world is like the bomb's own-thus proving that people have achieved no mastery over nature that their stupidity has not neutralized. The mind made the bomb, the mind denied it, and the mind can stop it cold. If that should sound impossible, consider how impossible nuclear fission must have seemed...