‘There arose out of the pit the smoke of a great furnace’

Muchas veces por ignorancia lisa y llana y otras por candidez, mucha gente sostiene que el peligro que representa para el mundo que un régimen como el norcoreano o el de Irán dispongan de armas de destrucción masiva está siendo exagerado. Mucha gente sostiene además que en realidad no hay diferencia entre un Israel o una India nuclear y Corea del Norte e Irán.

Personalmente creo que nos estamos autoengañando y entramos en un juego muy peligroso. Paradójicamente, el hecho de que no se haya producido (todavía) otro gran atentado al estilo 11 de septiembre o peor, mediante el uso de alguna arma de destrucción masiva ha hecho que gran parte del público tienda a minimizar la amenaza.

No se pierdan la pesadilla nuclear de Paul Johnson, el historiador inglés, que describe un ataque nuclear en Londres, en una columna de 2002. Creo que pone las cosas en perspectiva. Si bien es cierto que para muchos analistas, expertos y público en general el riesgo de un ataque de este tipo es prácticamente cero, creo que lamentablemente bastaría con que se produzca uno solo para que nos demos cuenta (demasiado tarde) del horror (visto en LGF):

The sound of the explosion was so loud, so prolonged and so unusual that I knew at once I was listening to a historic singularity. Indeed, it may not have been an explosion: more a catastrophic global event. Was it the end of the world? As the initial noise fell in volume, though it did not cease, a pentecostal wind swept over my house in Notting Hill. It faces north into the street, and the air current came from the south, as I could see from the trees bending over in our south-facing garden. I was sitting in my library, in my habitual chair near the French windows, and was astonished to see fallen leaves plastered on to them and held there by the fierce wind. Then I felt movement. It was not like an earthquake, which I had experienced in South America. In such tremors parts of the earth's crust crack and move in relation to each other, to produce disorientation and dizziness. It was, rather, as if the entire earth moved, as a unit, but out of its regular axis.

Despite the feeling of movement, I went to the bottom of the stairs and began to climb them, up to the top floor, where a glass door in my bathroom leads out to a flat roof. It was midday, but I became uneasily conscious that I was ascending not into light but into darkness. There was no disturbance inside the house and the roof door opened easily. But once I stepped outside I knew I was in a different world, and that the constants of the old, familiar one had changed utterly. The noise continued but spasmodically, ranging in its decibels and nature in an erratic and unpredictable fashion. It was now, audibly, the noise of destruction on an immense scale. The wind, too, came in gusts. I feared the wind. I was beginning to fear everything. The light, or rather the comparative absence of light, was sinister. To the north, the sky was blue, yet there was no daylight. The light was thickening. When I glanced south, into central London, I saw why, and I began to get, for the first time, an inkling of what was taking place.

The whole of the southern view was occupied by a dense, swirling, expanding and ascending column of smoke. It was many miles wide and already tens of thousands of feet high. Though five miles distant at its nearest (I guessed), it was moving with great speed, not so much horizontally as vertically. It was punching a colossal hole in the sky, filling it, then finding fresh energy to punch another, so that at intervals the column was encircled by giant haloes, stretching out vast distances into the stratosphere. I could not see the top of the central column. It was covered by one of these haloes, which was now stretching into the northern portion of the sky, so producing that progressive light reduction I had already noticed. I call the column smoke, and some of it was smoke — the result of a giant conflagration — but most of it was dense, throbbing, twisting cloud, white and grey vapour, of the kind emitted by the steam-engines of my childhood but on an unimaginable scale. How had so much water — or whatever it once was — been turned so swiftly into trillions of square yards of foggy miasma, still piling itself up at high speed into the stratosphere and beyond? What incalculable force had done this monstrous thing?