Don’t Fear The Atom Bomb

We saw it happen in Vietnam. And then Afghanistan. And Chechnya. And Afghanistan again. And Georgia. Now Ukraine. I don’t fear the atom bomb. Truly. As long as I am in Kyiv or Krakow or Paris or London or Washington I will die instantly with the atom bomb. It is exact in stripping life from the earth. Count me in.

I do fear the fuel-air bombs. I talk about it with the regional defense officers. They’re young. They were still the hopes and dreams of their parents when the Chechens fought running in between endless columns of 40 tons of steel that rolled through Grozny. They do not remember when the Russians strapped weapons designed to tear apart metal fuselages miles away in the big open blue sky to their tanks. They don’t remember watching the lives torn to shreds by anti-aircraft rounds, bodies ripped apart and skipped across the concrete hell as the rounds kept firing. 

But all of this is nothing compared to the fuel-air bombs. 

It starts miles away. A rocket in a tube mounted on treads that waits for coordinates. Or it doesn’t. And it fires in a general direction. The launch is violent and bright and hot. What’s left on the ground is an anxious crew inside the launch vehicle. They cannot think about the death they have dealt. 

The rocket sails through the sky faster than the eye can track. One hundred feet above the ground in between two city buildings that may or may not be full of people but that doesn’t matter, the first blast goes off. In milliseconds a cloud of aerosolized ethylene oxide or propylene oxide or butane fills the air. Before the neurons in your brain can register what’s going on, a second blast. This is the big one. This is the one that kills the family running down the stairs to get to the basement and pray and pray and pray. This is the one that kills not with fire or heat. It kills with pressure. It displaces the weight of the atmosphere and gravity itself. The family that evacuated moments too late only registers the pain for a brief second, which is one second longer than the blinding heat of the atom bomb. The vacuum collapses their lungs and they breathlessly fall down the stairs that crumble around them tumbling down into nothingness with mouths open wondering what went wrong and what will become of us and even if the rescue crews can get to their bodies they will have suffocated on their own failed lungs and their faces and eyes will be covered in a layer of dust and ash that settles on their dry eyes like dew on the grass on the third of May. 

I do not fear the atom bomb. But these other horrors. They are already upon us.