The Doomsday Bomb Poem by Paul Hartal

The Manhattan Project sounded
like an innocuous venture,
but in fact it was the code name
for the top secret development
of the first atomic bombs during World War II
at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

In August 1945 American B-29 bombers
dropped atomic bombs in Japan
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiping out
most of these cities and killing
more than a hundred thousand people.

Physicists like Fermi,
Oppenheimer and Einstein
saw the dropping of the nuclear bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
as acts of necessary evil.
They believed the blasts
would shorten the war and save lives
by making an American invasion unnecessary.

The design of weapons of mass destruction
involves existential moral scruples
and fundamental ethical dilemmas.
However, scientists such as von Neumann
and Teller, held the view
that the pursuit of truth
knows no boundaries and it rescinds
moral or ethical considerations.
This authoritative vision
of the relentless march
of scientific research extends also
to the military project of developing
extremely powerful weapons
of mass destruction
that could blow the world to bits.

Now, the main reason that so far
this sort of ultimate doomsday bomb
does not exist is not because
of the lack of will to develop it
but because such a weapon at present
appears to be a technical impossibility.
This is the good news.
Unfortunately, the bed news is
that we already have enough nuclear bombs
to destroy all life on Planet Earth
many times over.