There's a very simple reason for focusing on the nuclear issue. Many, many issues are of supreme importance in one way or another, but if we blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, no other issue is really going to matter. Quite possibly there would be no other human beings left to be concerned about anything else.
After all those years of doing remote detonations, where we just push a button and something explodes, to actually see a nice big fat line of black smoke heading toward something that will blow up is very satisfying.
The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither.
We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.
The history of the past is a mere puppet-show. A little man comes out and blows a little trumpet, and goes in again. You look for something new, and lo! another little man comes out, and blows another little trumpet, and goes in again. And it is all over.
But as the unthought-on accident is guilty To what we wildly do, so we profess Ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies Of every wind that blows.
The terrorists believe that free societies are essentially corrupt and decadent and, with a few hard blows, they can force us to retreat. They are mistaken.
O hark,O hear! how thin and clear And thinner, clearer, farther going! O sweet and far from cliff and scar The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying: Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
They do not abuse the king that flatter him. For flattery is the bellows blows up sin; The thing the which is flattered, but a spark To which that blast gives heat and stronger glowing.