” On Tuesday morning, a piece was torn out of our world. A patch of blue sky that should not have been there opened up in the New York skyline.” Jonathan Schell, author of The Fate of the Earth, has continued long after it has become unfashionable to stare unflinchingly at the prospects for the use of weapons of mass destruction. “Among the small number who have been concerned with nuclear arms in recent years, it has been commonly said that the world would not return its attention to this danger until a nuclear weapon was again set off somewhere in the world. Then, the tiny club said to itself, the world would reawaken to its danger.” Like myself, he has found that Tuesday’s events bore much similarity in detail if not in scope to the recurrent nightmare of nuclear destruction dreamed by those who worry about it. Will it awaken us? Los Angeles Times [via Common Dreams] [I found it courageous, and nonetheless abit too brutalizing for right now, for him to suggest that, as bad as Tuesday’s loss of ‘two buildings’ and the accompanying lives were, we consider the possibility of losing ‘all of Manhattan’.]