George Ayoub: Whole generation learning to live with human power

Dr. Strangelove told us to stop worrying and love the bomb.

The truth was, we learned to live with it, however uneasy.

This week marks the 63rd anniversary of the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians and essentially ending World War II.

Two thirds of Hiroshima was destroyed on Aug. 6, 1945. Seventy thousand died instantly when the bomb exploded 1,900 feet above the city. Another 70,000 died from radiation poisoning within five years.

Three days later, the U.S. exploded an atomic bomb over Nagasaki. Within a year, another 70,000 of that city's inhabitants were dead.

Nature's deadliest secret was exposed. We now had the power to destroy ourselves and the planet.

It would burden the psyche of an entire generation -- my generation.

In 1953, the U.S. detonated an H-bomb, 2,500 times more powerful than Hiroshima. The Russians joined the club a year later. By 1961, we had enough nuclear weapons between us to wipe out the world.

Our defensive philosophy with the Soviets was massive retaliation, a strike so devastating that it would mean an end to the Russians, who pretty much said, "Right back at you." The strategy was called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), an acronym of obvious irony.

The grownups called it deterrence. School children simply figured out that the end to the world was a real thing.



Not a good thing

Despite this maddeningly well-developed sense of overkill, we kept making weapons. In the 1960s, both countries added planes and rockets and missiles that could deliver a nuclear knockout at the touch of a button. By 1986, there were 40,000 atomic bombs on earth. That thermonuclear math worked out to one million Hiroshimas.

Long before then, however, the bomb became my generation's bogeyman, our destroyer of worlds, the 800-megaton gorilla in the room.

Our parents, the adults, talked about foreign policy and blockades and throw weights.

We children squirreled away scary tidbits, such as the enormously bright flash that would signal we had about a second before we were vaporized.

We were curious, too, about whether being under our desks would save us from such a gigantic bomb.

We wondered what one looked like, the bomb those serious men in suits talked about on TV.

We had never met any Russians and had no idea what they had against us, but it had to be pretty awful if they were mad enough to kill us and die, too. Most adults explained this conundrum with words like godlessness, Commie and pinko. After all, Krushchev said they would bury us. And he had a bomb to do it.

We knew that couldn't be a good thing, even in our insulated, self-centered, 7-year-old worlds.



No explanation needed

My parents' generation had Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, a scary triumvirate whose evil shaped their lives and the world.

My son's peers are growing up with 911 and Osama bin Laden. Terrorism is their frightening shorthand for a world whose future can be compromised with human hands.

We had the bomb.

Today the earth is home to about 11,000 nuclear weapons, the progress of treaties and the changes in the hearts and minds of those with their hands on the buttons and those who would give them that planetary responsibility.

Nor has anyone found it necessary to kill people with one for the last 63 years.

Learning to live with the end of the world can do that.

Nor do I know if my generation winces any more than the last or the next when we hear about some lunatic group getting its hands on a nuclear weapon.

The full title of the 1964 movie is "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," an especially dark comedy about a wing nut general who tries to start World War III.

In 1964, there was no need to explain to us kids which bomb they were talking about.

It was our bomb, the bomb.



George Ayoub is senior writer at The Independent.