I’ve posted several post-apocalyptic narratives trying to describe what it might be like after a total nuclear exchange between the countries that possess nuclear weapons, but I think they all fall far short of a real world after such an event. I’m sure if something like that could actually be put into words there’d be a lot more people in the streets, but such is the state of the world, it looks like folks would just rather not think about something like that – even if a great verbal portrait could be composed. If we had to wake up to what might be left of our existence, I’m sure we’d think about what we might do to help stop the nuclear war threat. Stories like this or this ought to get people’s attention, but I just watched this Hiroshima – the unknown images on You Tube, and it grabbed me by the heart.

Maybe everyone should take an hour out of their lives and watch it. Folkpotpourri has done more posts than just the ones linked above, but none of them come close to effectively conveying the horror of surviving a nuclear explosion than that documentary with its eyewitness testimony of what those people went through. It’s just a glimpse of what the whole world will inevitably endure if there’s a nuclear war. We’ve heard of the tribulation prophesied in the Bible, it’s going to be a horror, and I couldn’t imagine a human being in a worse situation than to be a survivor of a worldwide cataclysm left over after such a thing.

There would be rampant, fatal cases of radiation sickness – every survivor would have to undergo some level of it. Imagine how helpless you’d be watching someone you love dying a horrible death and not being able to do anything. There’d more than likely be no hospitals, and if there were a few, they wouldn’t have any power. Who’s to say how many, if any, doctors would survive? Your automobile probably wouldn’t run, and if you were to find one that did, how long do you think you’d last out on whatever road that might still be drivable with hundreds, maybe thousands of desperate survivors trying to get to help themselves? You can figure they’d all be armed and looking for transportation.

The Hiroshima survivors, real human beings just like you and me, underwent a horror that no human being should ever be forced to endure. Imagine being in near darkness following some morbid procession of people, most of whom have been horribly burned, their skin hanging off, each one looking to someone, anyone, who might be able to help them. They ambled around what was left of the streets, not knowing where they were going, not caring, not even thinking, just taking that next breath. All of them in shock, intense pain, and unimaginable sorrow, having lost loved ones, pets, and homes.

Will Harry Truman’s fate be an eternity wandering among such a tragedy, forever to hear the screams of children and elderly men and women in horrible pain? Will Colonel Tibbits be watching from the window of the Enola Gay, the bomber that he named after his mother and from which he dropped the bomb? He said he didn’t regret dropping the bomb afterwards when he was still alive, I wonder if he regrets it now. I wonder what his mother thinks of what he did. I think of his airplane, forever stranded on land in an ocean of tormented people, bodies disfigured and screaming in pain – a runway from which he will never again take off as he looks out at the ghastly sight.

Sadly, we live in a world governed by men who have no regard for the desolation a nuclear war they would unleash on the world. They only think as far as the plush bunker they intend to get into and ride it out. Do they intend to spend the rest of their natural lives in some hole in the ground, never to see sunlight or rivers or mountains again? Or do they think they will someday emerge into some garden of Eden at last completely devoid of those horrid poor people? Some folks have enough God-given foresight to know that ain’t how it’s going to be, but let them dream. If the nuclear weapons start going off, the most fortunate folks will be the ones at ground zero – it will be swift and painless – they (we) will be vaporized quickly – some scientists say before a person’s nervous system has time to send pain signals to the brain. The amount horror a person will undergo will increase in proportion to his distance from the explosion, with those farthest from ground zero being the ones who will suffer longest. As of the time of making the documentary mentioned, some of the Hiroshima survivors were still alive.

Upon emerging into the world from their caves, they will undoubtedly be met with a horrible landscape of total destruction strewn about with human bones, skulls, and other remains. There may be animals, wild animals and many once tame, but by then gone feral and looking for food. There won’t be any construction crews and bulldozers to rebuild the world – they will all have been destroyed. Any survivor coming up out of a bunker will be faced with going back down into their dark hole to finish their miserable lives, or the even bleaker prospect of trying to survive up on the surface among the bones and ghosts of their fellow humans. I really think however, that by that time God will have stepped in and taken control, rewarding His servants and doing justice on His enemies.

Get right and stay right with Jesus Christ to ensure your eternal reward. It’s the only way out of this. There are men in the world in service to a master who would like nothing better than world-wide death and destruction, and they are capable of doing it.

MK