Poetry Contest and Inspiration

We need to stop the hate before the hate stops us. The human race has gotten too good at killing each other. There have been at least six times in the Twentieth Century that over a million people have been massacred. The Turks killed a million Armenians. The Japanese killed millions in their rampage through the Orient. Joseph Stalin killed millions of his own people. The Chinese killed millions of their own people in their Maoist "Cultural Revolution". Adolph Hitler killed millions in his rampage. And Pol Pot killed a million of his own people in Cambodia. There is a famous quote by the mad Russian dictator Joseph Stalin: "One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic." I sometimes wonder if he intended any irony when he said that.
The massacres in the next century could be worse, not because of personal hatred, but because of impersonal hatred. A person now can kill millions of people simply by pushing a single button and sending a nuclear missile to strike a heavily populated city. That person will never see the suffering they caused and the people they killed. If a 500 kiloton nuclear warhead hit New York City, the fireball alone would be the size of Manhattan Island. The largest deliverable nuclear warheads weigh in at 25 megatons. That is fifty times more powerful than a 500 kiloton weapon. (Those numbers do not reflect the relative devastation these two warheads would inflict. The 25 megaton warhead would not kill fifty times more people, but it would kill a great many.) At the peak of the Cold War the U.S. and Russia had 55,000 nuclear warheads between them. Today there are 14,000 nuclear warheads in the world, which is an improvement, but the situation is still grim.
More and more countries are acquiring nuclear weapons. Pakistan, India, Israel, France, North Korea, England, China, the United States, and Russia are all the countries that have these weapons at their disposal. Other countries like South Korea, Germany, and Japan are giving serious thought to acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran is knocking on the door.
A person might think that most of those countries are far away. We will be able to shoot down their missiles with our own missiles before they can build missiles that can reach us. So if, say, India and Pakistan got into a nuclear war it wouldn't hurt us too badly. As tragic as it is, we could not do anything to stop it. Those events are beyond our control. Only a few dozen warheads about the size of the 15 kiloton Hiroshima bomb would be used in this exchange.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that even small nuclear warheads have vast destructive powers. The bomb that fell on Hiroshima was a 15 kiloton weapon. Today most nuclear missiles are much more powerful than that. The two types of warheads that are on the missiles on our Trident nuclear submarines have a 75 kiloton yield or 475 kiloton yield. A 475 kiloton nuclear warhead is over thirty times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. When they explode they toss so much dust and smoke into the atmosphere that it can change the climate of the earth. All this debris blocks out the sun. Even a relatively small nuclear exchange would block out enough sun to dramatically change the climate of the earth. So much of the productive land of the earth would be lost that there would be massive famine. Some experts believe that as many as two billion people would starve to death.
So the future of the earth is in danger. Given the examples from history our chances are slimmer than we might think. People will hate each other for any reason, and all too often they do not hesitate to hurt each other. We cannot take refuge in simplistic slogans to find our way through the modern perils for humanity. What is needed is resolve and understanding. We need to learn about why India and Pakistan are so at odds with each other. Our efforts to dissuade them from launching nuclear missiles will be more effective if we know the reasons behind their mutual antipathy. Much of the time we will be at an impasse, with both sides unwilling to yield. All we can do is work behind the scenes to stop a conflagration. There is a quote by the great Victor Frankl, a man who survived Auschwitz, that is appropriate here: "Since Auschwitz we know what humanity is capable of. Since Hiroshima we know what is at stake." .