On the Brink

Then, on August 6, 1945, an American aircraft dropped an atomic bomb...on the city of Hiroshima.

--A History of the Modern World, 8th ed.

Pakistan responded to India's nuclear tests on Thursday with underground nuclear tests of its own.

--The New York Times, May 29, 1998

Today, nuclear warfare threatens the Indian subcontinent. Had Harry Truman imagined this circumstance? At the time he made the fateful but valiant decision to nuke Japan, President Truman was controlling what he hoped to be the denouement of a most horrendous global conflict. Though he was initiating the nuclear age, he could not possibly have forecast the dissemination of nuclear know-how to countries which at the time were still under the domain of the late British Empire. Even the Soviets were still in the dark as to the workings of America's newest weapon.

It is easy to look back and see the spread of nuclear technology across the globe. A history book can contextualize the dropping of the bomb in this respect, helpfully inserting a "then" before the action as it tells the story of World War II in a grander portrait of the past 1,500 years. The use of such a qualifier helps to connote a progression of events--one that seemingly had to be. And even though we are wise to the fact that contingencies speak to the contrary, it is nonetheless undeniable that we are where we are now because of where we were then.

But "then" one is never certain of what will happen next. While the history books tell linear stories, the reality of time is more akin to the Choose Your Own Adventure series in which the author never knows where his or her narrative venture is leading. The author-actor is him- or herself similarly limited by time and place. In The 18th Brumaire, Marx teaches, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."

Such an insight transcends Marx's narrow material dialecticism and speaks to the tangibility of building (and razing) of historical projects. That is, we quite literally walk on top of the past as we cast off our presents onto the giant heap. The Indian-Pakistani rivalry, which harkens back to the 1947 partition creating the two nations and to the historic Hindu-Muslim animosity, is now being grafted onto the setting of a nuclear planet. The weapons of war have changed even as the cultural animosity remains the same.

As we sit here in Commencement robes, with the Indians and Pakistanis arming nuclear missiles to be aimed at each other, we should think of both the ordinariness and extraordinariness of it all. The ordinariness is a matter of a process through which nuclearity is widespread. That is, nuclear weapons are objects of both commerce and commonplace dialogue in our advanced technological world. And it is only a matter of time before nuclear capability becomes universal.

The extraordinariness, which is significant here, is the fact that India and Pakistan possess nuclear capability and may wage war once again over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Just one month ago, the United States government, apparently, and the world in general were oblivious to the readiness of these countries to exercise their weapons of mass destruction. The moral of the story is that we do not know what awaits us tomorrow, just as we did not foresee the heightened nuclear tensions of today.

Nuclear war is but a scarier version of everyday reality in its potential for disruption, eruption, combustion and conflagration. The flow of daily events has the capacity to change the world--for better or worse--to a substantially different and often unrecognizable place. The worlds that we encounter in five, 10, 25, 50 years will hopefully be changed for the better, though history warns us otherwise.

In any case, we are uncertain of what we will face in the decades to come. Whatever will be will be, and while working for the good in our personal endeavors, we must also maintain wide, vigilant eyes to the passage of time, and the creation of worlds which are beyond our comprehension at this particular historical moment.

Joshua A. Kaufman '98, a social studies concentrator in Dunster House, was editorial chair of The Crimson in 1997.