Dark Sun
How I learned to start worrying and hate the bomb...
I was still a child during the Cold War 1950's. But I have vivid memories of being taught about the "A-Bomb" and crawling under my desk at school during the "Bomb Drills".
With all the craziness and chaos unleashed in the world today and given that we are still awash in nuclear weapons... Oh, I do worry some that younger generations may have lost the visceral fear that comes from understanding the devastating destruction these weapons can bring.
On the latest album by the band, Three for Silver, they remind us with a powerful song, "Dark Sun". Their dark lyrics are all drawn from their hobby: Nuclear Physics. Uhm. They serve to remind why we must think of the unthinkable. In this Patreon post they take a deep dive into the lyrics that blend Art and Science:
Dark Sun Lyrics: Deep Dive by Three for Silver - Patreon
I will italicize and bold the lyrics and write the annotations in unaltered font. Overall, the song is a product of a couple years' worth of reading about nuclear history, engineering, weapons, and the splash over amount of WW2 and Cold War which that subject leads to.
Most obviously, we have to bring up "Dark Sun" by Richard Rhodes, which is where I got the title. It is partly about the post-WW2 development of hydrogen weapons, but just as much about the spycraft of the early Cold War and how information bled between the USA and the USSR. Though the lyrics are far more inspired by his seminal "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" which is the end-all-be-all book upon the subject, one of the greatest books of all time, and maybe my favorite non-fiction book, period. Though a lot of lyrics leach from a variety of sources... as you'll see...
LET'S TAKE A CLOSER LOOK
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dark sun setting on the town tonight
tell me it'll be alright
The primary metaphor and framing of the song, the "dark sun" being a nuclear explosion occurring over a city. Which, incidentally, such weapons do ideally detonate well above the ground. In continuing the sun metaphor, I suppose the verb "setting" is also helpful as it implies something ending.
roll me in the waves so bright
it sounds POETIC, which is nice, but why go out of the way to bring up the brightness? Well, the first and fastest thing a nuclear explosion generates is a truly incomprehensible amount of electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum. The sheer amount of visible light generated, even by a comparatively tiny explosion like Trinity (the first nuclear explosion), is something we simply can't relate to with any day-to-day experience. It is true to say that it was the brighter than the sun, but what would that feel like? What would that experientially mean? Hopefully none of us ever get to find out. There is an oft repeated inaccuracy that the reflection of Trinity's light off the moon was brighter than the moonshine of the sun. This is wildly untrue (as was proven in crushing detail here), but it gives you a sense of the kind of examples people reached for to describe the sheer amount of light.
purple threads weaving through the clouds
after the literally-impossible-to-behold fireball rises, creating the infamous "mushroom cloud", it is easy to just imagine an angry storm cloud of black/grey/white. However! It is often reported by eyewitnesses that in the first tens of second there can be an immense blue/purple/green fluorescence that dissipates into ghostly tendrils of color around the cloud.
slow ache moaning through the ground
seismic activity generated by the detonation
counting all the stars in my eyes
till they fade away
A nice turn of phrase that implies you are lying there dazed, waiting for something to pass. Though it must be devoutly wished that if one were to be close enough to a nuclear explosion to be "dazed" by it, that the concussed counting of internal stars is the worst that one would experience.
can't grow a tree of fire
and forget about the roots of ash
I'm far from the first to metaphorically compare a mushroom cloud to a tree made of fire. The implication being that you can't create such a thing and safely ignore it's consequences.
can't build a new messiah
and expect us not to worship at the critical mass
Wordplay, baby! Critical mass.... critical mass. Do you get it? DO YOU GET IT?!? Though the line is not just about the wordplay. The point is that you can't create something of such history altering dimension and expect everyone to not become obsessed with it.
cant squeeze blood from a stone
but you can squeeze fire from metal
Well, the first part is one of those classic idioms that is also literally true. My favorite! Poetry need not apply! The second part has at least two meanings for me. One, the sense of sparks being "squeezed" from metal via flint. Two, uranium/plutonium/thorium (you have options) being compressed to generate a nuclear explosion. Fission based nuclear explosions are primarily based around the swift compression of multiple subcritical components into one hypercritical mass.
strip the hex for what you need
I take great pride in the cryptic inscrutability of this line. I hope this line causes people's imaginations to go off in some spooky magic voodoo direction, but it is significantly less sexy than that. "Hex" refers to uranium hexafluoride, the primary compound used in the gaseous diffusion method of enriching uranium.
Digression the First: the overwhelming majority of natural uranium is Uranium-238 (U-238). It is not fissile (cannot sustain a chain reaction) under any likely conditions. Thus, it is not useful for a generating an extremely rapid nuclear chain reaction (which a nuclear explosion is just a hyper rapid version of that). Uranium-235 (U-235), in contrast, is highly fissile, and thus highly useful generating chain reactions. However! U-235 is only present in something like .72% of natural uranium, and the only difference between 235 and 238 is a measly three neutrons. Question: how do you separate out the microscopic amount of useful wheat from the vast amount chaff when the wheat only differs by a few subatomic particles?!? Answer: WITH GREAT PAINSTAKING EFFORT, involving, among other things, the largest building ever constructed by humans (circa 1940s).
Digression the Second: So, in the gaseous diffusion method, you compound uranium with fluoride to turn it into a room temperature gas, i.e. uranium hexafluoride. Long story short, you run this gas through an unbelievable number of tubes, and within each tube there is a bisection of metal sheet with unbelievably tiny holes. Do this enough times and you will strip the uranium hexafluoride of the ever-so-slightly-smaller U-235. Does this work well? No! Does this work efficiently? No!!! Does it technically kind of work? Yes.
FUN FACT: Lest you think I am just being spooky by calling uranium hexafluoride "hex". That is was it was referred to by the people at Oak Ridge and others involved with the compound. That's where I got the idea. I didn't have to think of anything!
To return to the lyrics, we are stripping the uranium hexafluoride of the precious fissile U-235. Boy howdy! If the seven words of those lyrics had been composed of U-235 we could've kicked off a hypercritical chain reaction due to the amount of information compression going on!
we got heavy water on the kettle
If this first verse is referring to the things we might need to build our "tree of fire" then this line is broadly related, but mostly just me having some fun. Heavy water refers to an H20 molecule in which all the Hs are deuterium. It is an exceptionally good neutron moderator. What's that? Go read about it! Heavy water is not not related to nuclear weapons, but it also wouldn't be found in a nuclear weapon (I don't think? Maybe some weirdo early version of a hydrogen bomb? though the very first hydrogen bomb just used deuterium). Heavy water is great for generating chain reactions with poorly enriched uranium. There is also no reason to boil it, and you definitely wouldn't want to do so on a kettle. You'll actually die in a real weird way if you drink enough heavy water. Look it up! However, altogether, the line does sound fun and evocative and like we are both about to do some work and have the materials ready to do said work.
if we cannot reach the stars
we'll grow them here on earth and leave them here to rot
Oh, this line, it makes me sad. All this imagery of comparing the fireball of a nuclear explosion to a star is really not inappropriate. A star is the only reasonable thing to compare those fireballs to in terms of heat, luminosity, and radiation. As we've already said, even the tiny Trinity shot was, for one tiny moment, brighter and hotter than our own sun. So from one metaphorical star, let's turn our attention upward to the real ones.
We briefly, and for the dumbest reasons, became obsessed with reaching outward to the cosmos, but we've slowed, stopped, and in some cases regressed. Consider that in 2023 the US spent about 830 billion dollars on the it's military. Consider that the total amount of money the US has collectively given to NASA since its creation is about 650 billion dollars. So, with only one year's worth of the US military budget we could give NASA significantly more money than it is has collectively been given since 1958. What could be accomplished with just one year's worth of the military's budget?
Are nuclear weapons worth it? That is a much more annoyingly complicated question than you might like to think, but the sheer financial drain is easier to argue against. Just some off the cuff numbers here, but the US has easily spent more than 11 TRILLION dollars on nuclear weapons development since the 1940s. The USSR did it's level best to keep pace with that, and there is some interesting research to suggest that the sustained hyper-fixated overspending played a significant role in the Soviet collapse.
11 trillion dollars. Neither myself nor you can effectively imagine 11 trillion anything. What might even a quarter of that money been spent on? Could it have been safely spent on anything else? Disturbing questions.
We circle back to the lyrics. If we cannot reach the stars, if we refuse to reach out, we will take some cold comfort in growing our own "stars" here on earth, ones that will rot i.e. destroy / corrupt / annihilate.
if we do not want to stop
we'd better go ahead and take it to the end
Just some good old fashioned good time nihilism that maybe we'd all feel better if the nuclear Sword of Damocles just dropped on all of our heads already, and we didn't have to live in eternal anxiety.
i been scraping shadows off the sidewalk
lord knows they'll go to keep me hidden anywhere that i want
Now the song turns from the building of the weapon to the use and aftermath of the weapon. Why would one consider "scraping shadows off the sidewalk". Well, and this one lots of you are already familiar with, those couple of times we detonate such devices on humans, quite a few "interesting" (heavy working quotations there) phenomenon were recorded. Many of you have probably heard of this one: the shadows of people and objects left etched on surfaces in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Again we return to the sheer unfathomable luminosity of a nuclear explosion. If you found yourself just close enough to be bombarded by that, but just far enough away that most structures weren't destroyed by the shock wave, you may have gotten your form immortalized.
Let us say it is a fine August morning. You are sitting on the concrete steps of the downtown bank waiting for it to open. You hear the distant whine of some planes overheard, but probably don't give it too much thought. It isn't enough to be a squadron of bombers, and besides, they typically do that at night. Maybe you look up, maybe you notice something falling, but probably not. Either way that is the last thing you see, as you are the then flash-cooked by the extreme light and heat of the nuclear detonation (straight up vaporization sadly being unattainable even under these extreme conditions). You are dead. However! Your body has absorbed the radiation that would otherwise have scoured the cement underneath you. Thus, the human shadow etched in stone.
I could not but macabrely help myself to imagine that some fiend could go around collecting these for some nefarious occult purpose.
hey doctor doctor i cant speak for to tell
this is just fun to sing, but just means I can't find my voice to tell you of the horrible things I've witnessed
how i saw those girls drowning in their wishing wells
I'm authentically ashamed of myself for writing this line, given it's horrible source. It comes from an account within Hiroshima by John Hersey, and let me tell you, if you want to have a real. bad. time. go read that book! It consists almost entirely of first hand accounts of survivors after the immediate effects of the bomb. I know I generally adopt a devil-may-care kind of tone when I write here, but I will endeavor to just state this directly, given that it is where the lyrics came from, and this is an allegedly fun Lyrics Deep Dive.
As it goes, immediately after the bomb detonates a relatively unharmed survivor is staggering around in shock. This person sees a few people with such profound and totalizing burns all over their bodies that only from the few melted scraps of fabric is our survivor able to recognize them as schoolgirls. They shuffle stumble forward, still technically alive, skin sloughing off, in shock, and likely (blessedly) insensate. These walking dead would become a ubiquity in survivor accounts. Our survivor watches one reach a well and dunk her head into it, presumably in some desperate hope of relief. The girl is either unable to right herself, or dies in that moment, but either way her head does not reemerge from the water. This apparently not being sufficiently cruel for the universe, our survivor then watches the other girls succumb to the same fate.
For the record, I kind of hate myself for transmuting that into a song lyric.
now i see the city's sunrise in the night
that dark sun blooming just right
Imagery to evoke the detonation occurring at night as a kind of evil reverse sunrise
but still you tell me its just civilization dawning
and i best stay calm, oh yea I'd better run along
Perverting the idiomatic "dawn of civilization", the dawn is now the nuclear sunrise, the true culmination of this path we've been on for about 9,000 years.
because there's nothing but wrong with every right hand gone
Honestly, can't quite remember what the fuck I was thinking here. Somebody about everyone being gone > every right person being gone (as in morally right) > every right hand being gone > only wrong is left, if every right is gone. If somebody knows how to write symbolic logic, I presume we could abstract this line in a sexy way.
ere never meant to keep
what does it mean?
I'll leave it to you!
I've got to retain some secrets, after all
Anyway, if you found this fascinating, and would like to do some of your own reading of the books that inspired "Dark Sun", here are some recommendations:
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
- Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes
- The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians edited by Cynthia Kelly
- Hiroshima by John Hersey
- Atomic Awakening by James Mahaffey
and many more!!!
____________________________________________________________________________________
Lyrics Deep Dive #3: Dark Sun
I will italicize and bold the lyrics and write the annotations in unaltered font. Overall, the song is a product of a couple years' worth of reading about nuclear history, engineering, weapons, and the splash over amount of WW2 and Cold War which that subject leads to.
Most obviously, we have to bring up "Dark Sun" by Richard Rhodes, which is where I got the title. It is partly about the post-WW2 development of hydrogen weapons, but just as much about the spycraft of the early Cold War and how information bled between the USA and the USSR. Though the lyrics are far more inspired by his seminal "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" which is the end-all-be-all book upon the subject, one of the greatest books of all time, and maybe my favorite non-fiction book, period. Though a lot of lyrics leach from a variety of sources... as you'll see...
LET'S TAKE A CLOSER LOOK
----------------------------------
"dark sun setting on the town tonight
tell me it'll be alright"
The primary metaphor and framing of the song, the "dark sun" being a nuclear explosion occurring over a city. Which, incidentally, such weapons do ideally detonate well above the ground. In continuing the sun metaphor, I suppose the verb "setting" is also helpful as it implies something ending.
"roll me in the waves so bright"
it sounds POETIC, which is nice, but why go out of the way to bring up the brightness? Well, the first and fastest thing a nuclear explosion generates is a truly incomprehensible amount of electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum. The sheer amount of visible light generated, even by a comparatively tiny explosion like Trinity (the first nuclear explosion), is something we simply can't relate to with any day-to-day experience. It is true to say that it was the brighter than the sun, but what would that feel like?
What would that experientially mean? Hopefully none of us ever get to find out. There is an oft repeated inaccuracy that the reflection of Trinity's light off the moon was brighter than the moonshine of the sun. This is wildly untrue (as was proven in crushing detail here), but it gives you a sense of the kind of examples people reached for to describe the sheer amount of light.
purple threads weaving through the clouds after the literally-impossible-to-behold fireball rises, creating the infamous "mushroom cloud", it is easy to just imagine an angry storm cloud of black/grey/white. However! It is often reported by eyewitnesses that in the first tens of second there can be an immense blue/purple/green fluorescence that dissipates into ghostly tendrils of color around the cloud.
"slow ache moaning through the ground
seismic activity generated by the detonation
counting all the stars in my eyes
till they fade away"
A nice turn of phrase that implies you are lying there dazed, waiting for something to pass. Though it must be devoutly wished that if one were to be close enough to a nuclear explosion to be "dazed" by it, that the concussed counting of internal stars is the worst that one would experience.
"can't grow a tree of fire
and forget about the roots of ash"
I'm far from the first to metaphorically compare a mushroom cloud to a tree made of fire. The implication being that you can't create such a thing and safely ignore it's consequences.
can't build a new messiah and expect us not to worship at the critical mass.
Wordplay, baby! Critical mass.... critical mass. Do you get it? DO YOU GET IT?!? Though the line is not just about the wordplay. The point is that you can't create something of such history altering dimension and expect everyone to not become obsessed with it.
"cant squeeze blood from a stone
but you can squeeze fire from metal"
Well, the first part is one of those classic idioms that is also literally true. My favorite! Poetry need not apply! The second part has at least two meanings for me. One, the sense of sparks being "squeezed" from metal via flint. Two, uranium/plutonium/thorium (you have options) being compressed to generate a nuclear explosion. Fission based nuclear explosions are primarily based around the swift compression of multiple subcritical components into one hypercritical mass.
"strip the hex for what you need"
I take great pride in the cryptic inscrutability of this line. I hope this line causes people's imaginations to go off in some spooky magic voodoo direction, but it is significantly less sexy than that. "Hex" refers to uranium hexafluoride, the primary compound used in the gaseous diffusion method of enriching uranium.
Digression the First: the overwhelming majority of natural uranium is Uranium-238 (U-238). It is not fissile (cannot sustain a chain reaction) under any likely conditions. Thus, it is not useful for a generating an extremely rapid nuclear chain reaction (which a nuclear explosion is just a hyper rapid version of that). Uranium-235 (U-235), in contrast, is highly fissile, and thus highly useful generating chain reactions. However! U-235 is only present in something like .72% of natural uranium, and the only difference between 235 and 238 is a measly three neutrons. Question: how do you separate out the microscopic amount of useful wheat from the vast amount chaff when the wheat only differs by a few subatomic particles?!? Answer: WITH GREAT PAINSTAKING EFFORT, involving, among other things, the largest building ever constructed by humans (circa 1940s).
Digression the Second: So, in the gaseous diffusion method, you compound uranium with fluoride to turn it into a room temperature gas, i.e. uranium hexafluoride. Long story short, you run this gas through an unbelievable number of tubes, and within each tube there is a bisection of metal sheet with unbelievably tiny holes. Do this enough times and you will strip the uranium hexafluoride of the ever-so-slightly-smaller U-235. Does this work well? No! Does this work efficiently? No!!! Does it technically kind of work? Yes.
FUN FACT: Lest you think I am just being spooky by calling uranium hexafluoride "hex". That is was it was referred to by the people at Oak Ridge and others involved with the compound. That's where I got the idea. I didn't have to think of anything!
To return to the lyrics, we are stripping the uranium hexafluoride of the precious fissile U-235. Boy howdy! If the seven words of those lyrics had been composed of U-235 we could've kicked off a hypercritical chain reaction due to the amount of information compression going on!
"we got heavy water on the kettle"
If this first verse is referring to the things we might need to build our "tree of fire" then this line is broadly related, but mostly just me having some fun. Heavy water refers to an H20 molecule in which all the Hs are deuterium. It is an exceptionally good neutron moderator. What's that? Go read about it! Heavy water is not, not related to nuclear weapons, but it also wouldn't be found in a nuclear weapon (I don't think? Maybe some weirdo early version of a hydrogen bomb? though the very first hydrogen bomb just used deuterium). Heavy water is great for generating chain reactions with poorly enriched uranium. There is also no reason to boil it, and you definitely wouldn't want to do so on a kettle. You'll actually die in a real weird way if you drink enough heavy water. Look it up! However, altogether, the line does sound fun and evocative and like we are both about to do some work and have the materials ready to do said work.
"if we cannot reach the stars
we'll grow them here on earth and leave them here to rot"
Oh, this line, it makes me sad. All this imagery of comparing the fireball of a nuclear explosion to a star is really not inappropriate. A star is the only reasonable thing to compare those fireballs to in terms of heat, luminosity, and radiation. As we've already said, even the tiny Trinity shot was, for one tiny moment, brighter and hotter than our own sun. So, from one metaphorical star, let's turn our attention upward to the real ones.
We briefly, and for the dumbest reasons, became obsessed with reaching outward to the cosmos, but we've slowed, stopped, and in some cases regressed. Consider that in 2023 the US spent about 830 billion dollars on the it's military. Consider that the total amount of money the US has collectively given to NASA since its creation is about 650 billion dollars. So, with only one year's worth of the US military budget we could give NASA significantly more money than it is has collectively been given since 1958. What could be accomplished with just one year's worth of the military's budget?
Are nuclear weapons worth it? That is a much more annoyingly complicated question than you might like to think, but the sheer financial drain is easier to argue against. Just some off the cuff numbers here, but the US has easily spent more than 11 TRILLION dollars on nuclear weapons development since the 1940s. The USSR did it's level best to keep pace with that, and there is some interesting research to suggest that the sustained hyper-fixated overspending played a significant role in the Soviet collapse.
11 trillion dollars. Neither myself, nor you can effectively imagine 11 trillion anything. What might even a quarter of that money been spent on? Could it have been safely spent on anything else? Disturbing questions.
We circle back to the lyrics. If we cannot reach the stars, if we refuse to reach out, we will take some cold comfort in growing our own "stars" here on earth, ones that will rot i.e. destroy / corrupt / annihilate.
"if we do not want to stop
we'd better go ahead and take it to the end"
Just some good old fashioned good time nihilism that maybe we'd all feel better if the nuclear Sword of Damocles just dropped on all of our heads already, and we didn't have to live in eternal anxiety.
"I been scraping shadows off the sidewalk"
lord knows they'll go to keep me hidden anywhere that i want
Now the song turns from the building of the weapon to the use and aftermath of the weapon. Why would one consider "scraping shadows off the sidewalk". Well, and this one lots of you are already familiar with, those couple of times we detonate such devices on humans, quite a few "interesting" (heavy working quotations there) phenomenon were recorded. Many of you have probably heard of this one: the shadows of people and objects left etched on surfaces in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Again we return to the sheer unfathomable luminosity of a nuclear explosion. If you found yourself just close enough to be bombarded by that, but just far enough away that most structures weren't destroyed by the shock wave, you may have gotten your form immortalized.
Let us say it is a fine August morning. You are sitting on the concrete steps of the downtown bank waiting for it to open. You hear the distant whine of some planes overheard, but probably don't give it too much thought. It isn't enough to be a squadron of bombers, and besides, they typically do that at night. Maybe you look up, maybe you notice something falling, but probably not. Either way that is the last thing you see, as you are the then flash-cooked by the extreme light and heat of the nuclear detonation (straight up vaporization sadly being unattainable even under these extreme conditions). You are dead. However! Your body has absorbed the radiation that would otherwise have scoured the cement underneath you. Thus, the human shadow etched in stone.
I could not but macabrely help myself to imagine that some fiend could go around collecting these for some nefarious occult purpose.
"hey doctor doctor i cant speak for to tell"
this is just fun to sing, but just means I can't find my voice to tell you of the horrible things I've witnessed
"how i saw those girls drowning in their wishing wells"
I'm authentically ashamed of myself for writing this line, given it's horrible source. It comes from an account within Hiroshima by John Hersey, and let me tell you, if you want to have a real. bad. time. go read that book! It consists almost entirely of first hand accounts of survivors after the immediate effects of the bomb. I know I generally adopt a devil-may-care kind of tone when I write here, but I will endeavor to just state this directly, given that it is where the lyrics came from, and this is an allegedly fun Lyrics Deep Dive.
As it goes, immediately after the bomb detonates a relatively unharmed survivor is staggering around in shock.
This person sees a few people with such profound and totalizing burns all over their bodies that only from the few melted scraps of fabric is our survivor able to recognize them as schoolgirls. They shuffle stumble forward, still technically alive, skin sloughing off, in shock, and likely (blessedly) insensate. These walking dead would become a ubiquity in survivor accounts.
Our survivor watches one reach a well and dunk her head into it, presumably in some desperate hope of relief. The girl is either unable to right herself, or dies in that moment, but either way her head does not reemerge from the water. This apparently not being sufficiently cruel for the universe, our survivor then watches the other girls succumb to the same fate. For the record, I kind of hate myself for transmuting that into a song lyric.
"now i see the city's sunrise in the night
that dark sun blooming just right"
Imagery to evoke the detonation occurring at night as a kind of evil reverse sunrise
"but still you tell me its just civilization dawning and i best stay calm, oh yea I'd better run along"
Perverting the idiomatic "dawn of civilization", the dawn is now the nuclear sunrise, the true culmination of this path we've been on for about 9,000 years.
"because there's nothing but wrong with every right hand gone"
Honestly, can't quite remember what the fuck I was thinking here. Somebody about everyone being gone > every right person being gone (as in morally right) > every right hand being gone > only wrong is left, if every right is gone. If somebody knows how to write symbolic logic, I presume we could abstract this line in a sexy way.
----------------------------------
Welp, sorry about that world! What a fucking bummer of a song...
But hey, how about an EXTRA SPECIAL BONUS ROUND of lyrics I did not use!
These were supposed to go in the second verse, but they got cut due to dragging it on too long. There were suppose to come right after the "wishing well" line and right before the "but now I see the city's sunrise" line:
"every chunk of coal is a crystal ball that tells the future perfectly
look close and see that we should be asleep with only dreams of all the things we were never meant to keep"
What does it mean?
I'll leave it to you!
I've got to retain some secrets, after all
Anyway, if you found this fascinating, and would like to do some of your own reading of the books that inspired "Dark Sun", here are some recommendations:
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
- Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes
- The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians edited by Cynthia Kelly
- Hiroshima by John Hersey
- Atomic Awakening by James Mahaffey
and many more!!!
It’s surreal that for my entire life, the world’s countries have had nuclear guns trained on each other’s heads nonstop.