Can't duck nuke threat, but we're getting war covered

Many suburbanites grew up in the "duck and cover" days when a cartoon turtle named Bert starred in a civil defense film that taught school kids to duck under their desks for cover as soon as they saw the flash from an atomic bomb. We chuckle watching it, but the fear was real then.

The nuclear bomb was invented here in Chicago and used by the United States against Japan at the end of World War II. The anti-bomb movement was started here in Chicago about that same time by many of the same scientists who invented the bomb.

"We are drifting toward a catastrophe beyond comparison," President Barack Obama said during this week's international nuclear summit, paraphrasing the same alarm sounded by Albert Einstein in 1946. Our greatest fear is that a nuclear weapon could end up in the hands of al-Qaida or some other rouge group intent on spewing terror and death.

Not to diminish that damage of a single nuclear bomb, but suburban kids who practiced "duck and cover" in the 1950s and '60s were scared of an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

"The chances of a nuclear war have gone down since the end of the Cold War, but the chance of some terrorist group getting a nuclear bomb has gone up," says John Isaacs, executive director of the Council for a Livable World. "I don't consider that a comforting situation-but I'll take that over the risk of nuclear annihilation."

That sentiment is echoed by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the magazine founded in Chicago in 1945 by the inventors of the atomic bomb. This January, the group moved its Doomsday Clock, which estimates how close we are to a catastrophe, back 1 minute - from 5 minutes to midnight to a more comfortable 6 minutes to midnight.

"I would have put it back farther," says Isaacs, who notes the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists also takes into consideration the dangers posed by climate change.

Physicist Leo Szilard, one of the inventors of the nuclear bomb, founded the Council for a Livable World in 1962. Originally dubbed the Council to Abolish War, the first 12 committee members included Jack Mabley, the legendary Chicago columnist who was a wise sage and dear friend at the Daily Herald from 1988 until his death in 2006. Jack often publicized the need for sanity in our nuclear arms race.

"The normally publicity-hating scientists have deserted the peace of their laboratories and classrooms to stump the country, testify in Congress, write books and promote reams of publicity in a frantic effort to arouse Americans to the danger," Jack wrote in 1947 in the Chicago Daily News.

The specter of nuclear war was so dire in 1953 that the Doomsday Clock jumped from 3 minutes before midnight to an all-time scariest of only 2 minutes until midnight.

"Only a few more swings of the pendulum, and, from Moscow to Chicago, atomic explosions will strike midnight for Western civilization," the magazine concluded then.

With the Cold War over, President George H.W. Bush led the push to reduce the world's nuclear weapons, and lessen the chance of an accidental attack. The Doomsday Clock was set back in 1991 to the all-time, most-reassuring setting of 17 minutes until midnight. President Obama is pushing that same agenda of nuclear reduction and the safeguarding of the plutonium and highly enriched uranium needed to make bombs.

Not only do Russia and the United States have enough nuclear weapons to devastate the world, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea also are believed to have nukes. And U.S. and Russia now are cooperating in efforts to stop Iran from creating a nuclear weapon. Forty-seven nations were part of the nuclear summit.

The world remains a scary place. If people can smuggle tons of drugs across our borders, "maybe one of those bales of marijuana could contain a nuclear weapon," Isaacs ponders. "If a terrorist explodes a nuclear bomb in Chicago, where do we retaliate?"

But the world is different and wars are different from when the nuclear bomb was unleashed. So is the newfound global cooperation that promises to reduce the risk of a nuclear attack. The call for sanity and peace remains the same as it was in the aftermath of World War II, and leaders aren't ducking the challenge.

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