The movie Oppenheimer is a master piece of screen writing, directing, acting and production. It well deserves to be one of the summer’s blockbusters, but it also opens up a kind of closeted fear of doomsday scenarios. The fact is that most of us who are known as Baby Boomers were not even alive when the bomb was unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the existence of such a loomed large in our childhood psyches. 

While today’s children have fire drills, tornado drills and active shooter drills, we Boomers had bomb drills. When the signal came we were instructed by our teachers to duck under our desks and cover our heads with our arms. While that may sound ridiculous to the younger generation, the fear of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union was a very real specter that silently hovered over our daily lives. The fact that a tiny desk might actually save us in the event of a real attack on our country felt absurd even to those of use who respectfully practiced according to the commands of our teachers. Even as we obeyed knew that we were not really safe. 

Every Friday at noon the sound of an air raid horn boomed into the atmosphere reminding us that there were terrible dangers in the world that we hoped and prayed would never actually happen. Then when President Kennedy was President of the United States, we learned with all seriousness that the Soviet Union was attempting to install missiles in Cuba. For many days a disturbing shadow of terror gripped the nation as political heroes worked to keep us safe for at least one more moment. We escaped the worst back then, but somehow the terror of it all never completely left us. 

I remember laughing about Dr. Strangelove, a Cold War Era satirical movie that may have temporarily soothed our psyches, but deep down inside reminded us of the potential of world destruction that lingered over all of humankind. We understood the possibility, however remote, of a crazed leader setting a nuclear attack in motion. It was the dark threat that all of us knew, but attempted to push away from our consciousness.

I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. I understood even as a young person that our city is no doubt a likely target if any bad tyrant decided to use bombs. We have one of the busiest Ship Channels in the country. Our oil and gas production is important for the world. We are even home to NASA headquarters. As the fourth largest city in the United States we would potentially take one of the first hits. Such realization has always been sobering, even as the passing years helped us to more often than not forgot about the dangers that constantly hover in the universe.

When I became an adult I watched one of the early limited televisions series, The Day After. It depicted the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the United States through the eyes of a family in Kansas. It was horrifying in its depictions of what nuclear warfare can do. i remember thinking that if such a doomsday event were ever to occur I would want to die instantly rather than having to endure the slow death from radiation and the loss of loved ones and our entire way of life. 

In truth my mind has mostly sheltered me from thinking too much about the possibility of such an attack on our country. I have relied on the belief that nobody would ever want to trigger the chain reaction of destruction that would inevitably ensue if such an heinous event were ever to occur. Mostly I have believed that we are engaged in a mutual standoff in which no nation is willing to throw caution to the wind knowing that our bombs will react to their bombs without hesitation. The stalemate is a good thing but I shudder when I consider that it may not always hold.

The invention of weapons of mass destruction were bound to happen one way or another. Unleashing them for any reason will remain a topic of debate forevermore. We can only hope that the mutually enforced truce will remain steady and pray that no crazy authoritarian will ever dare to push the button that will forever change our planet. Even the man who lead the group that created the first atomic bomb understood the horror of what those scientists had unleashed on the order of the world. 

The Old Testament of the Bible tells us that in the beginning earth was a paradise where the first humans lived in harmony and peace. Adam and Eve had everything that they needed to be happy. The only thing that was taboo was to ingest the fruit from a particular tree. They opened the can of worms that haunt us all to this very day. Whether we view this story as a religious truth or a parable of human weakness, the moral is the same. We humans are capable of destruction.

We are all given a glorious opportunity to live in harmony but somehow we too often find ourselves wanting more than we need. Humans have to fight to control their jealous and angry instincts and somehow do not always behave in concert and compassion with one another. Thus dangers lurk around us with the granddaddy of them all being our capacity to create a means if of endangering everything and everyone that we know. Let us hope that caution will continue to prevail. Our capacity to harm has only grown with the introduction of hydrogen bombs more lethal than the first iterations of nuclear weapons. We must never again see the horrors of what Oppenheimer and his crew wrought.