Young People Ask . . .

Will I Die in a Fireball?

IN 1945 thousands of young people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, died by atomic bomb blasts. The horror of such devastation​—unforgotten in the decades that followed—​is back. And this time it disturbs the thoughts of many young people. Still, you can sympathize with the sixth-grade California girl who concluded: “If a nuclear war broke out, everything I have lived for would be washed away like sand on a coastline. All my dreams about college, a career and life would be gone.”

Could It Happen? Will It?

Nuclear war. Its prospect seems real enough lately to hang in the consciousness of young people. As far back as 1978 it showed up in a sampling of 434 American students. Seventy percent believed that the United States could not survive a nuclear attack. A 1982 “fear survey” by Read (a magazine for schoolchildren) got thousands of responses. Boys rated “a nuclear war” their greatest fear; girls rated it second, next only to “my parents’ dying.” The teenager was thus not joking when he protested to his friend’s mother, the wife of the governor of Colorado, “Why should I bother to get good grades? The world’s going to blow up anyway.”

It is, for sure, no fun at all to weigh the chances of the world’s blowing up. For example, on November 20, 1983, the film The Day After was shown in the United States. Graphically portraying mass deaths and vaporizations, the movie seemed to reinforce the horror of nuclear war in the minds of many. Since the world is so endangered, you might find yourself wondering if all adult goals and ideals are unrealistic. Two Harvard psychiatrists fear that many adolescents may conclude just that. “In such a world,” Drs. William Beardslee and John Mack reported in 1982, “planning seems pointless, and ordinary values and ideals appear naive.”

Some values must be off target for the world to have come this close to disaster. But, conceding the experts’ failure in international politics, does this mean you have no future? Or has Mother’s advice to do your homework, eat properly and brush your teeth become pointless? Not at all.

Only Two Alternatives?

Often you hear the nuclear threat presented as having only two alternatives: Either man solves the problem of disarmament or he destroys the earth. And yet, it is hard to believe that man will soon disarm, somehow overcoming his greed and aggressiveness.

The Bible, however, shows what the two alternatives omit. No, human leaders do not have all the answers. “It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.” (Jeremiah 10:23) But to admit human incompetence is not to doom our earth to radioactive ruin. Why not?

Because the earth will remain forever with human inhabitants upon it. It will survive the onslaughts of human abuse and even attain a balanced ecology.a Central to this prospect is God’s promise to “bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”​—Revelation 11:18.

Actually, the Bible even foresaw that man would reach today’s crisis. It advises its readers to take note when they see “anguish of nations, not knowing the way out . . . while men become faint out of fear.”​—Luke 21:25, 26.

Evidently, then, instead of fearing the nuclear threat, we can learn from it. Learn what? That we need God and his Kingdom: “As these things start to occur, raise yourselves erect and lift your heads up, because your deliverance is getting near. . . . When you see these things occurring, know that the kingdom of God is near.”​—Luke 21:28, 31.

Does it make sense that man would suddenly need help beyond his own ability? The ‘dean of American behavioral psychologists,’ B. F. Skinner, senses man’s helplessness. In a scholarly essay in Science (July 31, 1981), he wrote: “Our species now appears to be threatened. Must we wait for [evolutionary] selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust?” He later explained to The New York Times, “I’m very pessimistic. We’re not going to solve our problems, really.”

Facing Reality

Of course it is alarming to see adult society, seemingly on a collision course, headed for a nuclear holocaust. ‘How can they go on with life as usual,’ you may ask, ‘as though there is no danger?’ Yale psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton calls it “psychic shut-down,” or “psychic numbing,” when adults block out all thought of destruction. Drs. Beardslee and Mack, however, claim that youths seldom learn to dismiss the matter that completely. This leaves them facing reality but does nothing for their peace of mind.

Must you numb your mind, denying unpleasant facts, to go about daily life? Not according to Jesus Christ. Comparing our times to Noah’s, he advised us to ‘take note’ of world conditions. “For as they were in those days before the flood, eating and drinking, men marrying and women being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark; and they took no note until the flood came and swept them all away, so the presence of the Son of man will be.”​—Matthew 24:38, 39.

In 1945 young Tsutomu Miura put this advice to the test.

‘It Happened to My Family’

Tsutomu was 11 years old when the fireball destroyed Hiroshima. His father was in that city at the time, but he survived as if by a miracle. How happy Tsutomu was to hear the news that his father was still alive! But many youths in Japan were understandably horrified by this event. Psychiatrist Lifton later found even among Hiroshima survivors “a pervasive tendency toward sluggish despair​—a more or less permanent form of psychic numbing.” A 1982 report by the American Psychiatric Association adds, “There is a devastating, profound, life-long psychological impact of being the target of an atomic bomb.”

With disaster striking so close to home, it would have been easy for Tsutomu to succumb to feelings of fear.

But Tsutomu, with the help of his parents, did not retreat in numb despair. He ‘took note’ of what happened. When he grew up he became, like his parents, a full-time minister of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

What meaning does Tsutomu attach to what happened in 1945? “Those ‘electric bombs,’ as we first knew them, closed World War II. But they only worsened a critical era that began with World War I. I tell sincere young people, ‘Keep your mind open and look into authentic Bible prophecy. Then you will appreciate from this present awful time that true lasting peace by God’s Kingdom is near.’”

Will these terrible weapons destroy our globe? Tsutomu enjoys showing from the Bible, in scriptures such as Ecclesiastes 1:4, Psalm 46:8, 9 and Daniel 2:44, that this threat will never be realized.

Does Tsutomu feel he will never personally die in a nuclear fireball? No, he does not speculate on this. But in his words: “The best way to live is with everlasting life in view. Then plan for the future and set real goals. I find that the Bible’s hope of a resurrection gives you confidence​—the perfect answer to the fear of early death and so-called natural death.”

Clearly, then, nuclear developments are a sign that we need godly wisdom, not selfishness. Like Tsutomu, you can counteract fear with knowledge and love. Today, when “me first” attitudes keep nations toe to toe in the nuclear arms race, Biblical values look better than ever.

[Footnotes]

[Box on page 22]

THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR WAR

“Nuclear war is the most important crisis that has ever faced humanity and the hardest to examine steadily and seriously. Contemplating it disturbs serenity and complacency in a way that most of us would prefer to avoid . . . It also forces us to become more sensitive to the increasing extent to which our young children and adolescents perceive the threat of nuclear extermination as part of their lives and how these young people who see themselves as having an endangered future retreat into the present.”​—Lester Grinspoon, M.D., in American Journal of Psychiatry, October 1982.