I’ve just finished listening to Mr. Graff’s book. Since it is an oral history, the varied collection of voices in the audio version makes it particularly vivd to listen to.

I was born exactly five months (to the day) before the Enola Gay opened her bomb bay doors over Hiroshima, and really did change the world forever, which makes me a plank owner in the first generation in history to grow up under the mushroom cloud.

The first bit of news from outside my local life I recall was the announcement that Russia had detonated an atomic device. Even at that young age, based I assume on conversations I’d overheard, I knew something fundamental had altered.

I was 13 when President Eisenhower sent Marines into Lebanon. I was spending a month at my grandparent’s house outside Essex, Ct when I heard about it on the radio. It was an absolutely gorgeous summer day, but when I heard the announcer say something to the effect that the Russian reaction might with force, all of a sudden the day turned icy, and I spent the next hour wandering about on the lawn utterly convinced that I would see Russian bombers coming over trees to the west of us. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so scared.

At 13, of course,I had no idea what was really going on or what Russia might actually do, but the climate of the Cold War (all that talk of backyard shelters and the ‘under-the-desk drills at school - which fooled none of us) had prepared us for something unimaginable..It would still be a year before Pat Frank’s Alas Babylon (one of the earliest post nuclear war novels) came out, but I was an imaginative kid, and I didn’t need much stimulus.

Then, in October of 1962, we came face to face with that 13 day terror of waiting for resolution or Armageddon, during much of which I became convinced I would not see eighteen. My state of mind was not made lighter by the fact that by then I’d read several of that first generation - the Frank book, Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow, Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7, and the granddaddy of the genre, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach.

Today, of course, what we could do to ourselves makes the possible results of a nuclear exchange in 1962 pale in comparison.

Mr Graff’s point that the immediate toll of toll Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs did not at all equal what LeMay’s firebombing campaign had wrought, but as terrible as those raids were, they belonged to an four thousand year old era of human warfare that August 6th made largely irrelevant.

The increasing saber rattling going on today along with the potential proliferation of members in the nuclear club is a blatant insanity, not only because the level of destruction that is now possible is unimaginable, but now the time during which any nuclear armed state might have to react to a threat can be measure in minutes. No human being, no matte how experienced could be expected to make a rational decision about nuclear conflict in that amount of time. And that does not cover the incalculable risk of some battle field commander with tactical nuclear weapons at his command having to decide to use them - let alone the kind of computer error so well portrayed in Fail Safe or the single finger punch of the terrified ensign in The Bedford Incident - instances of both having already happened.

We’ve been playing this game for over four millennia, but if we do it again with nuclear weapons, the result would justify Einstein’s famous quote in which he noted that he wasn’t sure what weapons would be used in WWIII, but those in WWIV would be sticks and stones, if indeed any of us were left in any state to attempt it.

Homo sapiens indeed!