Eve of Destruction

Richard Feynman, who had driven his roommate Klaus Fuchs’s old Buick down to Albuquerque the previous June, in the midst of the final effort to finish the bombs, to keep vigil with his young wife Arlene while she died of tuberculosis, found himself lost between worlds. Before he left Los Alamos he had thought about what the bomb meant and had made some notes. He had calculated that Little Boys in mass production would cost about as much as B-29s. “No monopoly,” he had written.863 “No defense.” And: “No security until we have control on a world level. . . . Other peoples are not being hindered in the development of the bomb by any secrets we are keeping. . . . Soon they will be able to do to Columbus, Ohio, and hundreds of cities like it what we did to Hiroshima. And we scientists are clever—too clever—are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!” The twenty-six-year-old widower may have seen too much of death. He sat in a bar in Manhattan one afternoon in the months after the war looking out the window at all the people going by and shaking his head, thinking how sad it was that they didn’t realize they had only a few years to live.

Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (p. 202). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

The world has avoided nuclear destruction for 70 some years through deterrence. Now it looks like nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them are falling into the hands of religious fanatics and dangerously homicidal dictators. How long can this unstable equilibrium last? Not only that, but the leaders of two of the world's three nuclear superpowers are aggressive and far from intelligent.