As a former educator and writer on international relations, and especially on nuclear issues, my students often tried to inveigle from me my own position on the worst of all weapons. I never succumbed.

 

Oppenheimer

 

Listen:

the distant siren

entices, fades;

Horizons clatter in fusillades,

 

cracking barrages warn the Furies

to grasp the running

menace

of desire in fisted rage,

and count the tincture of their days.

 

Since fear (as well you know)

is a Janus-headed creature,

its eyes on acknowledged past

and charging future. Either

 

pained and low, or wildly terrified,

each grips the other like hands

in supplication, or surprise,

 

and awaits Zarathustra's bolt

(or Nietzsche's ghost)

fresh from its tellurian vault as,

 

all around, the war–smoke swirled

to insinuate the blank'ed host,

as the Stentor hurled:

“I am become Death,

Shatterer of Worlds”.

 

Christopher Hubbard. Perth. 1995.