The Evil Genie of Nuclear Proliferation
In the hope of saving the lives of our friends and neighbors we must now ask some questions that few have dared to ask. With the recent near declaration of war by a certain Middle Eastern country, it appears that the entire Middle East may soon be aflame. When the Americans first dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the nuclear genie was first released from his bottle, and no one could then say how much destruction this genie would wreak upon the human race, before (or if) the blessed day might come when the humans might ever be able to confine this genie within the the rule of law, reason, and sanity.
Already once in the 1960s, the genie came to within a hairs breath of the senseless murder and massacre of billions. (The Cuban Missile Crisis.) Yet mankind still slumbers in the blissful ignorance of the extreme peril that it has faced and will face in the presence of this fateful genie.
Had the tyrant Gaddafi opted to build a nuclear arsenal and succeeded, would the now free Libyans still have been able to celebrate their freedom? Had the Kim Regime in North Korea failed to build their own nuclear arsenal, would their regime still be in power today?
How many other dictators and statesmen in the world are astute enough to both ask and answer these same types of questions? When and where will the first foolish nuclear bomb have to wipe out an entire city or even a country before the nuclear genie might finally be properly confined? Or will mankind end up fighting it's World War IV with sticks and stones just as Albert Einstein has prophesied?
Undoubtedly the nuclear genie has not yet been properly contained. For however so long as the "nuclear option" is used by any one people to lord it over another people, we allow this genie to roam freely about in our still sad world, just beyond the edges of our awareness, stalking the entire human race, just as the leopard silently stalks the unknowing gazelle.
Just now the leopard must be rejoicing as its prey draws ever nearer to its reach. In the Middle East there is one country which taunts its neighbors proclaiming that only it has the "maturity" to wield the nuclear sword.
Why can the one country that dares to brandish its nuclear arms alone in its region not yet see how such taunts will always be an invitation for others to rise to, and eventually meet such a taunt? What will it take before this one country does see it? When will this one country learn that it is only by treating its neighbors with respect that it will finally gain the true respect that it deserves from its neighbors? The false sense of security that one country's "we have the biggest bombs" status seems to bring, is separated from the day that others in the region finally gain "the bomb" by a mere matter of months, years, or at most decades. The day that one of this country's neighbors finally gets "the bomb" as things stand now, is not a question of "if" but only of "when". Will this one country drag only itself to into the abbyss of nuclear annihilation, will it pull down its entire region, or will it also drag the rest of the world with it, drawing us all into the nightmare world prophesied by Albert Einstein? These are questions that demand answers.
Scott W. Perry
Secretary General: ISPNW
The International Society for the Prevention of Nuclear War asks these hard but essential questions. We feel that these questions need to be both asked and answered, and soon. If you might ask some of these same questions too, please read on...
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