Don't get rid of all the nukes.

No one who has seen the destruction that a nuclear bomb inflicted on Japanese cities toward the end of World War Two can forget it. Something new and terrifying had been unleashed on the world. On the innocent and guilty alike. The genie was out of the bottle. Pandora's box had been opened. A demon was loose.


For the first time, obliteration was possible on a global scale. A single bomb could blow away most of a big city and leave the rest of it in such a state that life as usual was impossible.

Flesh was peeled from bones, and radioactive fall-out polluted generations to come. It was a terrible thing, violence on a scale the world had never seen.

Still, Japan didn't surrender, even after the emperor had seen armageddon in his own country. So a second bomb was dropped, and the devastation was almost the same. Thousands of ordinary citizens combusted, dying agonizing deaths. Japan finally gave up.


There have only been two nuclear bombs dropped in warfare, and the United States dropped both.


No one except extreme idealogists wants to see a third one detonated.

To this day, all the nations of the world are very worried about it happening again. In the old days -- the Fifties, even the Sixties -- only the U.S. and Russia had such bombs. Nowadays, there are a number of countries who have them, including India and Pakistan and Israel and France and England and others. We're all sitting, literally, on time-bombs.


The big fear is not that one of those countries will drop it on another -- although it's possible -- but that some renegrade countries who don't agree to play by the rules may discover the complicated recipe for making such bombs and will begin producing them, as Iran and North Korea appear to be doing now. But an even bigger fear is terrorist groups. The smallest of such nuclear devices, bought ready-made from one of those renegade countries, carried in a briefcase by someone who didn't set off airport security, might blow to smithereens The Metropolitan Museum of Art and all its treasures. Or an airport terminal and everyone in it. Maybe a whole airport. A big bridge. A stadium full of our fellow citizens. Trying to keep nuclear bombs and the accomanying technology out of the hands of crazy people is probably the greatest challenge we humans will have to deal with going forward.


So do we try to rid the world of them?

Nice idea, but too late. The technology is out there. We can't put the evils back in the box.

All we can do is keep more for ourselves in what we consider intelligent countries than we think the crazies -- countries or individuals -- have. The mere threat of mutual nuclear destruction will probably deter most governments from launching any such weapons. But it won't keep the suidical lunatic from doing so.

Regrettably, we can't get rid of all nukes. Sorry, but I think we created a dragon that we keep caged and have to keep feeding because we know there are other dragons just like him in cages around the world -- cages maybe not as secure as ours.

It's our curse that we developed a weapon that could destroy cities. The early scientists who helped make it understood and warned against its use. They knew that, once unleashed, it would be hard to control. Einstein knew it. So did Teller. So did lots of others. We needed it at the time to defeat Japan -- and it worked -- but now we're trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Pretend we didn't invent it. Is it possible to un-think something?

Wishful thinking. It's what we humans are all about.