I couldn’t help noticing how the aftermath photos of the fires in Sonoma and Napa looked like the aftermath photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These devastating fires happening in a paradisiacal part of California, which during my childhood was known for its lush greenness . A fire whose flames were fanned by 75 mph hour winds created by unusually hot air swirling around the regions more native coolness. Meanwhile the insanely stupid person who is the president looks to start a nuclear war with a country on life support, while taking “climate change” out of the EPA’s vocabulary and demanding that black men don’t protest police brutality before NFL games.
These images made me think that Kim Jong Un doesn’t have to be able to minituarize a nuclear weapon to mount atop an ICBM to reach our shores, because the nuclear explosion he wishes to release over California is already here. That’s how dumb he is, and how dumb Trump is. And just as George W. Bush found his shadow brother in angry rich kid Osama Bin Laden, stupid Donald Trump has found his in the North Korean leader, who continues to invest his countries resources in nuclear weapons, while his capitol city goes without electricity for half of most days because of the sanctions imposed for his nuclear pursuits.
But, I digress. In my previous essay, I posited that “Meditation is Psychedelics in slow motion.” In this one I will present the possibility that global warming is a nuclear armageddon in slow motion. Over seventy years ago, when nuclear fission was first achieved, it immediately was used for weaponization. The same mechanics that created the energy release of the Sun were duplicated in order to make bombs. Three years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reduced to ash and several hundred thousand people were killed, the first nuclear power plant went online. Unfortunately the real possibilities for humanity that fission made available was never fully realized for the good it could do. Imagine how different the world’s power grid would be if the resources that has gone into making nuclear weapons, had gone into making cleaner and safer forms of nuclear energy.
By the time of the first successes with nuclear fission, everything that had ever lived on earth had been living on nuclear power for billions of years. Man, thinking he had come so far, by splitting the atom, had reinvented the wheel, by reinventing the Sun. The growth of plants by photosynthesis and the animals that ate them and ate other animals on land in water were grown by the Sun. Almost everything we eat, or have ever eaten can be traced back to Sunlight, the fission occurring in the Sun. Our hydrocarbon energy systems can all be traced back to sunlight. Photosynthesis which gave live to so many plants and animals, in their deaths and decomposition returned their no longer animated by life carbon, to the ground. Billions of years of life and death, all dependent upon the Sun, seeped back into the earth. Plants, trees, grasses, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, dinosaurs, all seeped back into the soil over millions of years and degraded into oil. And it would have stayed there forever, if through man’s ingenuity, he hadn’t realized what a plentiful energy resource it was. Man no longer had to burn and relocate wood for energy. Energy became liquid and could be sent anywhere through pipelines and brought anywhere by ships. But what had been settled into the terra firma over billions of years was being released into the atmosphere as quickly as humans could burn it.
Which takes us to where we are today. With so much carbon having been released the planet has warmed to the point where firestorms that burn a hundred yards every three seconds are unleashed in places like Sonoma and Napa. It makes me wonder if the scientists on the Manhattan Project weren’t doing something other than what they thought they were doing in the late 1930’s and and early 1940’s. Perhaps without their knowledge, they were intuiting a symbolic expression of the slow motion Atom Bomb that is global warming. They were aware of the profundity of recreating the fission that creates Sunlight that gives life to all that has ever lived on Earth. As I stated in an earlier essay, Robert Oppenheimer who was the project coordinator of The Manhattan Project, uttered the famous words from the Bhaghavad Gita, “I am death, destroyer of worlds,” when he witnessed the first atom bomb detonated. But even though those bombs destroyed two Japanese cities, they were(thankfully) never used again in the seventy two years since. Thousands of weapons have been built, uncountable resources have been utilized in construction, development, housing, and transportation of them. The financial cost of the world’s nuclear arsenal is almost unquantifiable. While the United States rushed to make theirs, and Russia theirs, American Nuclear Bombers flew along the coasts of Russia. and Russian Bombers flew towards America, all the while more and more carbon was being released into the environment, and all those bombers really accomplished was burning more carbon.
Perhaps when Oppenheimer uttered those words, though he thought he was talking about placing atomic bombs into the worlds arsenals, on a deeper level he was speaking for the gathering storm that was being sensed in the furthest reaches of human awarenedd. It wasn’t the quick concentrated release of the mechanics of the Sun we had to fear, but the slow motion release of the Sun’s byproducts over several hundred years. I can only imagine what profundity Oppenheimer would have released seeing the world’s forests devastated by fire.. I’m sure it would rivalthe profundity he uttered in New Mexico, when an atomic bomb transformed a sandy desert to a sheet of glass.
The Bhaghavad Gita is a poem describing a battle that ends in death. This is life. Knowing this, knowing how this ends for everybody, and has ended for everybody, I suppose its message is to consider how we are conducting ourselves with knowledge of our ultimate fate. Perhaps if there is a blessing from global warming that is it. This process which has been hastened by our ignorance may ultimately be the thing that unites everyone as they see their connection to a tragedy. Over and over again, in hurricanes, and fires and floods, you see people stripped of a lifetime of belongings and identities, left only with the instinct to help other people. “I am death, the destroyer of worlds.”