By Mike Ferner

In the “old days” of the U.S. peace movement, when many people focused on the threat of a global nuclear “exchange” an organization called Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) postulated what would happen if a major American city was actually blasted by an atomic bomb.

The doctors described utterly horrific scenarios extending far beyond the numbers of dead and severely wounded. In plain words they described what the few survivors would experience: a landscape that not only had sustained unimaginable casualties, but which had also suffered the destruction of its transportation and health care infrastructure. No ambulances would arrive with lights and sirens to whisk away the suffering. Doctors, nurses, blood plasma, pain killers, antibiotics, bandages – all would be destroyed along with the hospitals and highways.

As difficult as it was to picture such a reality, the hardest thing to imagine was that in a nuclear war there would be no “outside” from where help will come. When every major city suffers the same fate as yours, no one “out there” can help you. “Out there” is all gone. Instantly, in city after city, life becomes a contaminated, pre-industrial struggle for survival.