Shock and Awe

We may never know just how shocked and awed the Iraqi regime was the first night we bombed Baghdad. It's pretty clear, though, that most everyone else was, a whole lot. My own experience of shock and awe was not over the number of nightly sorties we launched, or over the variety of bombs and missiles we put into each of them. Nor was it over the total amount of damage we inflicted. What quickly became overwhelming to me was our capacity for precision targeting of the destruction we can do, whenever and for whatever reason we choose to do it.

To be sure, there are a lot of positives about the capacity to fine tune our acts of aggression and our defensive responses to others'. One is that its exercise can help us to keep harm inflicted upon innocent people to a minimum. Another is that it can help us to think longer and harder about how we respond to perceived threats to our security, instead of acting indiscriminately, from some combination of fear and rage, before doing much thinking at all.

With all due respect to accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative, however, especially in a time of war, the downsides of the capacity to inflict harm in precisely calibrated doses are popping up all over the place. Exercising it has already moved the taking down of a nation's center of order and governance from the category of a reprehensible strategy of terrorists to that of an obligatory strategy of duly constituted, sovereign states. It has already diminished the will and patience of our own leaders to continue seeking nonviolent alternatives to disarming Iraq, and probably other rogue regimes as well. The capacity is like the capacity to relish liquor, sex, and drugs too much. Exercising the capacity to savor power, coercion, and control too much can put at risk other peoples' health as well as our own.

On July 26, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated near Alamogordo, New Mexico, under the direction of the world renowned physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer. At the detritus with which the explosion filled the sky, Oppenheimer impulsively chanted some terrifying words from the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds." The context of this passage, as Oppenheimer knew only too well, has made its words profoundly disturbing across hundreds of generations: Prince Arjuna's chariot driver is revealing himself as God. For Christians, it should be supremely ironic that the name of the Alamogordo test site was Trinity.

The Nuclear Age that officially began on that day seduces us with the promise of enhancing human well-being everywhere by the peaceful uses of previously unimagined power, and at the same time horrifies us with vivid reminders that this same power can extinguish all life on our planet. What we have had most especially to fear is the ever-present possibility that once released, nuclear weapons would follow a trajectory of death on their own, freed from the hands and the buttons that sent them on their way. In such a scenario, there will be no victors, only a holocaust --- or Armageddon, perhaps --- of carnage and death, of destruction remedied at best only with the passage of time measured geologically.

Before the first week of the War on Iraq was over, our world's situation may have been changed permanently. Certainly it was changed dramatically. Along with a Doomsday scenario that can still be set into motion anytime by crazed world leaders with too easy access to red phones, codes, and mindlessly obedient intermediaries, we now have pressing up against us an armamentarium of devices by which we can impose our will on others selectively, but no less decisively, for purposes readily obscured in the language of double-speak and double-dealing ("national interest," perhaps?), but always for our own self-aggrandizement.

Hopefully, we can bring an end to this present war without having to confront something that is really scary: our "smart" bombs may turn out to be smarter than we are. If this proves so, then we will have to learn to be more fearful of ourselves than we have ever had to be of our weapons. In this light, it may be more important than we have yet imagined to take a second look at a disturbing text from our own scriptures: "When the Lord saw how great was the wickedness of human beings on earth, and how their every thought and inclination were always wicked, he bitterly regretted that he had made mankind on earth."

Robert Oppenheimer felt greater shock and awe in the presence of the Bhagavad-Gita than he did when he observed the world's first nuclear explosion. Genesis 6:5,6 just might be enough to do it for us.