Once upon a time, long ago in another universe, the end of the world was left in the hands of the gods, not human beings. Today, however, humanity, in its curious ingenuity, has managed to come up with two ways of destroying itself, as well as the very habitat that welcomed and nourished it all these eons. Those were, of course, the moments when the primordial power of the split atom was first released directly on the human populations (and cityscapes) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was, in the phrase of the era, “the unthinkable” and, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon reminds us today, those of us growing up in the Cold War years couldn’t stop thinking the unthinkable. These would cumulatively warm the planet in ways guaranteed to devastate humanity ― not in an instant but over hundreds of years in what can only be imagined as a slow-motion Armageddon.

Source: Huffington Post October 26, 2017 17:26 UTC