Forty years ago today, the world was not destroyed. It was not destroyed because one man, Stanislav Petrov was willing to defy the soviet chain of command, in order to save the lives of hundreds of millions of strangers, in a country he would only see once. We honor his heroism and celebrate today as the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. While it’s common to see nuclear weapons in media, the true power and horror of this weaponry is often poorly conveyed.
As of January this year, there are over 12,000 nuclear weapons of a destructive scale an order of magnitude more deadly than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, still in active circulation among the world’s militaries. We all live under the perpetual shadow of mutual annihilation.
And none of us but the most deranged killers want that, none of us. There’s no story where some country wins, where some side comes out on top and emerges victorious. Everyone loses and everyone knows it. Fallout and Metro 2033 are perfect mirrors of each other. It’s not worth it, it will never be worth it. Even if a war must be fought, just fight the war, risk the loss and the conquest and then rise up from within to overthrow your would-be oppressors later. If you are right then have faith that your truth will always carry the day in the long run, and don’t doom that future with desperation.
If when we had first learned to split the atom, if that vast power was not immediately poisoned with an act of horrific violence, we might already have orion drives, cheap ubiquitous nuclear energy, nuclear explosive asteroid mining, we could have space colonies and clean air. Instead…
In 1945, Japan paid the price for the United States lack of restraint. Japan was an imperialist warmongering empire that had committed their own repeated atrocities, so was that an act of Justice? Did all those children have it coming too? No, this was an act of petty cruelty. By that point, so much horror and violence had been committed by all nations involved in the conflict that was the second world war, that the idea of anyone showing restraint for their enemies was clearly a fool, war was unavoidably total, that was, until Hiroshima and Nagasaki burned.
Because, how could you possibly go to far when your enemies were literally committing the holocaust? What would too far even mean? No one understood, no one could understand, besides the scientists who assembled the weapons. And then they went too far.
Humanity has never really recovered from that moment. We’re still lost, staring shell shocked into the retina burning heat of that atomic afterglow. Complicity and wonder, horror and awe. What demon did we create that day? What horror had been birthed into the world? What did that creation mean for all of us? What had we done?
The more time that has passed since August 8th 1945, the deeper the implications of that terror at our creations, and our fears of each other wielding those creations, have settled into the pits of our cultures and our memeplexes. We stepped off the ledge that day, out of the Dreamtime and into the Afterglow.
Because there was an easy lesson to learn from the atomic bombing of Japan, which was that it was not necessary. It broke not just the will of a despotic empire, it broke the collective will of humanity, it crushed our willingness to truly fight, when truly fighting meant…
The lesson to learn was simple: Never again. We must never do this again or allow this to happen again. But that was not the lesson anyone was willing to learn, besides Japan itself. Fear, greed, desperation, the need for control of a world rapidly spinning out of our control. Better to destroy everything than let our enemies have an inch, better to summon more demons for our own causes than to accept that demon summoning for the horror it was. And so instead we built 50,000 of them, to make sure our side could always end the world too.
But perhaps ending the world is bad actually? Even if you’re going to lose, better to live to fight another day than to sabotage the entire future over your need to maintain control. There is no world so dark where the most principled thing to do is end it all if you lose.
And so today I join with many others from around the world, to call upon our governments and leaders to dismantle their nuclear stockpiles and stand down from this near century long standoff. We are only 90 seconds from Midnight.
Demand for your governments to be brave, to be just, and to not settle for mutual annihilation over their risk of losing power. Demand nothing less than the total standdown of all nuclear weapons in global circulation. Demand a future not haunted by the spectre of nuclear annihilation. We must an end to the politics of fear, before fear puts an end to us.
Happy Petrov Day stardust, keep fighting the good fight.
