08 August 2011

A sink that drains goodness

To my annual "Hiroshima Day" post on the 6th, Dr C made a comment which deserved to be a post in its own right. I wish that I had said “Nuclear weapons are a sink that drains goodness out of those who have them.”

He also quoted aptly from Auden's "Epitaph to a tyrant" (1940):

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Nice one, Doc.

Dr C also refers to an editorial in Science last year. To save blog readers the necessity for looking it up, the full text is available here (you will need to sign in to read it – if you don't already have a subscription to the site, just ask: it's free).

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