“Many years ago, Peter Sellers starred in what many regard as his greatest movie, the black comedy “Dr Strangelove”. It was a spoof – a scary one – about a nuclear conflagration triggered by a nutter in the U.S. military who managed to bypass all security to launch a nuclear attack on Russia. The plan was thwarted but…and this was the horrific storyline …one plane was not recalled in time and proceeded to target. Dr Strangelove warned that the dropping of a single nuclear weapon on the USSR would trigger a “Doomsday Machine” which would destroy the entire planet.
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| John Menadue - Pearla and Irritations. |
That movie scared me almost as much as the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 when, as schoolboys, we stood outside Jack Thunders confectionery shop in Rathmines in Dublin waiting in a state of butt- clenching anxiety for sight of missile trails moving in both directions overhead proclaiming that World War 3 had broken out and that we were now ‘toast’.
Our sense of being toast has returned with a vengeance in the last decade with the sickening realisation that we are wrecking – and have wrecked – our planet. There are countless example of how we did it – the reduction and elimination of rainforests, species and habitat, the pollution of rivers and seas (illustrated eloquently in Liz Bonnin’s “Drowning in Plastic” screened recently on BBC), the loss of arctic ice, and now, as though fulfilling ancient prophecy, fires of biblical intensity in Australia which, at time of writing, show no indication of abating or being extinguished
Read the story from John Menadue - Pearls and Irritations by Nicholas Kearns - “Bushfires. If this is the future we have no future.”
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