Abstract
Your first thought upon awakening be: “Atom.” For you should not begin your day with the illusion that what surrounds you is a stable world. Already tomorrow it can be “something that only has been”: for we, you, and I and our fellow men are “more mortal” and “more temporal” than all who, until yesterday, had been considered mortal.... For if the mankind of to-day is killed, then that which has been dies with it; and the mankind to come too.... The door in front of us bears the inscription: “Nothing will have been” and from within: “Time was an episode.”
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References
Burning Conscience. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962, p. 11. For a thoroughly documented and convincing refutation, as given in Burning Conscience, of Claude Eatherly’s guilt and expiation for the crime of having dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, see William Bradford Huie, The Hiroshima Pilot. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964.
Wright Morris, Lone Ceremony in Tree. New York: Atheneum, 1960, p. 32.
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power. New York: The Viking Press, 1962, p. 468.
See José Ferrater Mora, Man at the Crossroads. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.
Karl Jaspers, The Future of Mankind. Translated by E. B. Ashton. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961, p. 4.
Max Lerner ends his detailed analysis of the world political situation on a note of courageous but ambiguous hope. “Of one thing I am certain. At some point man will fashion something like the collective policing agency, with a monopoly of the more lethal weapons, which I have described as crucial for survival. There is only one question: Will it be before, or will it be after, the great ‘Death-happening’ of an overkill war?” Max Lerner, The Age of Overkill. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962, p. 308.
“Every really great drama expresses... amid the apparently inescapable, mutual destruction of men, an affirmation of life. It is a glorification of human greatness.” Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin Press, 1962, p. 122.
This is amply confirmed by the contribution of scientists to the volume edited by Morton Grodzins and Eugene Rabinowitch, The Atomic Age. New York and London: Basic Books, Inc., 1953. See also J. Bronowski, Science and Human Values. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1965.
C. P. Snow, The New Men. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954, p. 176.
See Glynne Wickham, Drama in a World of Science. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.
J. Bronowski, The Face of Violence. London: Turnstile Press, 1954, p. 55.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, “Problems of the Theatre,” in Robert W. Corrigan and James L. Rosenberg (eds.), The Context and Craft of Drama. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1964, p. 265.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Physicists. Translated by James Kirkup. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1962, pp. 80–81.
Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1959, p. 26.
Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Fail-Safe. New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1962, p. 7.
Denis de Rougemont, Man’s Western Quest. Translated by Montgomery Belgion. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957, p. 145.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, II, p. 443.
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1972). The Atomic Holocaust. In: Literature and Society. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4851-3_14
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