What, me worry?

The attacks on London impelled me to reflect on how I have always thought about terror. I've lived my entire life under the threat of nuclear attack, although, I did once learn we can protect ourselves by putting our arms over our head and hiding under a flimsy metal and wood desk. I believe I can trace my current bouts of insomnia back to long nights thinking that if I went to sleep I might never wake up. I was only seven years old during the Cuban missile crisis and an event like that can be pretty rough on your psyche. Add to that the fire and brimstone speeches every Sunday morning and I'm lucky I'm not more messed up than I am. Halcyon days indeed. Inauspicious days might be more like it. Playing Davy Crockett by day, thinking Nikita Khrushchev by night.

Nearly 16 years before I was born, Albert Einstein, at the urging of a few other wild-haired, big-brained types, sent a letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was August 2, 1939 and what he told the President of the United States was a little more than FDR could put his head around. Nazi scientists, he was told, were attempting to purify uranium-235. Roosevelt didn't have to ponder what that meant for long, Einstein came right out and told him that a powerful weapon made of this material could possibly destroy an entire port and a huge chunk of surrounding area with a single blast. That's pretty much all it took. In a strange bit of coincidence (or was it) Roosevelt authorized the start of the Manhattan Project on Dec. 6, 1941 . . . one day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Although Einstein and other scientists would later regret what they started, this was the beginning of what could be the end. We all know that six years and four days after Einstein's letter, one of these "powerful weapons" was dropped on Hiroshima and over 66,000 people were killed instantly . . . three days later, another was used on Nagasaki. Although these were the only times nuclear based bombs were used as weapons, that didn't stop the US and other nations from deciding the weapons needed to be even more powerful. Why stick with fission devices when a fission device could be used to trigger a fusion device and make a boom over one-hundred times more powerful than a combination of those two little duds that took Japan out of World War II? Yes, man is indeed a sick creature to think thoughts like that.

So we started making "H-Bombs" and the USSR started, and Great Britain, France and China started making the bomb, and the list kept growing. A club of monstrous proportions now existed. But the US and the Soviets were the real fanatics in the club. It wasn't enough to have enough weaponry to destroy the whole world, they had to have enough to destroy the whole world several times over. Between my 4th and 5th birthdays, the United States was making an average of twenty-eight hydrogen bombs . . . a day. We were putting them on rockets, we were putting them on super-sonic jets, and submarines. we started putting more than one bomb on each rocket . . . ooh, that's a good idea, lets put multiple war heads made of doomsday devices on single, sometimes they go off course, rockets. We are sometimes too smart for our own good.

Eventually cooler heads prevailed and we decided that maybe . . . just maybe we had participated in a little overkill. So we started the anti-proliferation days. Instead of making new bombs, we'd spend our money dismantling old ones. Counter-productive? Only by definition. In reality, arms reduction was the first real progress in nuclear weaponry since July 1945 when Oppenheimer and crew had their first big bang in the desert at Alamagordo, New Mexico. But sometimes, putting that genie back in the bottle can prove to be impossible. In the former Soviet Union, keeping an eye on nuclear bomb parts doesn't seem to be a high priority. Unfortunately, in this age of "I'll kill myself . . pick me, pick me" terrorism, being dilatory on nuke watch is a dangerous game. And it can be a little disheartening to hear some people in the government talk about the inevitability of a terrorist nuke or dirty bomb.

So, here I am . . . just a poor working class schmo stuck in small-town Indiana. Had my lot in life gone in the "right" direction, I would probably be living in New York, LA or in a Miami Beach complex. But for some reason, I don't feel so bad about my lot in life anymore. The odds of a full scale nuclear war have greatly diminished. I hear the doomsday clock has been set back to seven minutes as opposed to three minutes, which is where it sat during the early '60s. And living here in small-town Indiana probably has me shielded from being among the possible first victims of a nuclear terror attack. Joseph Addison said, "There is no defense against criticism except obscurity." I'd like to paraphrase . . . the best defense against terrorism is the obscurity of your location.