Doomsday Clock

My mother left the USSR for the United States just before the Soviet Union fell.

My paternal grandfather, in the early years of the Cold War, designed missile propulsion systems for a U.S. defense contractor.

Growing up, I lived in the shadow of annihilation. He told me often to be aware of the fact that humanity could destroy itself at any moment.

Last summer, I packed up my pets and spent a week at my grandfather’s house, preparing his meals and helping him walk.

He had fractured his hip and, not long after receiving a replacement, contracted COVID-19.

From that point forward, his condition declined—slowly at first, then with accelerating inevitability.

He had made healthy choices throughout most of his life.

Maybe more more exercise and fewer TV dinners toward the end would have helped.

Watching him weaken was painful, but I am grateful for the time we shared at the end.

He died just a few weeks later.

I spent months in the denial stage of grief.

Now, I'm reading the novel he spent twenty years writing—a haunting meditation on the threat of nuclear war, composed in the voice of a man who had spent years of his life building what he feared most.

Once you get into it, it's quite a page turner.

The book is about people building warheads, an extra-marital affair, and an unsolved murder.

We're closer than ever to nuclear annihilation, according to the Doomsday Clock website.

Humanity's doomed.

Delay the dawn—stay the atom’s wrath.