Physics more than Friends

There's no reason to hurry off to a Hallmark store today as I doubt they have any cards for us to send to anyone for tomorrow's sixty-ninth anniversary of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Many cities around the world and across our nation will mark the moment or, like us here in Norwich, will do so on Saturday to commemorate the bombing of Nagasaki.

I've never really understood the name we came to call the effort to develop the weapon, the Manhattan Project, but as much reading as I've done on the era and epoch that created the circumstances where the notion of such a weapon's existence was posited and then created, I'm grateful to have been born in the decade that followed it.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom we've called the 'father of the atomic bomb' for decades in popular history, was probably not comfortable with that sobriquet and spent much of the rest of his life attempting to create a world where such weapons, that we now call Weapons of Mass Destruction, would not/could not ever be used.

We are an amazing species capable of hunting other species and one another to the point of extinction while expending more time, energy and money on weapons of death and destruction than on anything that might in any way enhance our quality or quantity of life.

I've read varying opinions on whether or not war is the natural state of homo sapiens and I've never grasped how we can think waging it in any of the varieties in which it is done helps us prove who is right when all that remains is who is left.

I served in the US Air Force for eight years, and like everyone you or I will ever meet in any branch at any time, I've never met anyone who wasn't a pacifist, because we know who always bears the concrete consequences and costs of that grand abstraction, a declaration of war.

Look at all the places in the world where at this moment we have armed conflict and it's impossible to understand how we can continue to believe unconditionally that we will never again feel ourselves so provoked and/or otherwise bereft of choices but to turn Oppenheimer's Deadly Toy on one another.

And when all those who can, have indeed done so, who will be left to bury the dead and console the dying as what's left of our world descends into a final darkness of the last night as the unending winter of despair envelopes us all?
-bill kenny