On the recordSeptember 19, 2012
To my friend, Mr. Hastings, the technology which created the bomb cannot be separated from the horror which the bomb created. The celebration of the technology of the bomb bespeaks a moral blindness to its effects, which include not only the devastation of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the $10 trillion Cold War between the U.S. and Russia and the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons which today hang over the world like so many swords of Damocles. At a time when we should be organizing the world towards abolishing nuclear weapons before they abolish us, we are instead indulging in admiration at our cleverness as a species. The bomb is about graveyards; it's not about national parks. The philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote: The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur. I reserve the balance of my time.
