The real and supposed amorality of nuclear weapons
Date de publication:
18/6/2011
And bring ye to the place where thou and Death
Shall dwell at ease, and up and down unseen
Wing silently the buxom air, embalmed
With odours; there ye shall be fed and filled
Immeasurably, all things shall be your prey.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, II, 840-844
The rescue squads had flocked to the levelled city a few hours after the attack. Their awareness of the tragedy numbed by the harrowing sight of the wanton destruction all around them, the men could not make out for a while of the strange, seemingly too high number of charred dolls dotting the streets in front of them. Why had been so many children running for their lives, clinching to their favourite toys only to eventually jettison them in the boiling mayhem they had been so desperately trying to escape? The eyes of the rescuers fell on one doll, then on a few, and then again on dozens of them, blackened cinders which appeared incongruously too many to make any sense, even amid that senseless devastation. Only then, all at once, did the dizzying depth of the horror finally set in. The children had not abandoned their toys. Those were not dolls. Those cinders were the children.
When burned, human bodies shrink. When burned completely, the bodies of adults shrink down to about the size of a medium ape; the bodies of children get shrunk down in proportion. This was not all that was awaiting the rescue squads, though: thousands more corpses, of children as well as of adults, were discovered in the city’s bomb shelters, cyanotic from suffocation. The violent firestorm, a man-mad phenomenon with no equal in Nature, had utterly deprived of oxygen many areas of the city, and even the few lucky enough to escape the fire could not breath. Others had burned to death out in the streets, trapped by the melting asphalt up to their knees until the flames had reached them. During the following days, thousands of bodies, many with their limbs fused to the remains of the torso by the intense heat, were carried away in carts looking grotesquely too small below the barely balancing piles of bodies.