I was on a bus, as were many of my comrades. The bus was huge and packed full but not uncomfortably so. After all, our leaders were humane and modern. Boxcars crammed to the point that occupants suffocated were a thing of the distant past. Other buses like ours were going to and fro throughout the city outside our windows.

A nuclear bomb dropped to earth on the horizon within the view of our windows. The occupants of the bus, including myself, stared in shock but complete silence. It was not necessarily surprising that our country would be at war. Cut off from the activities of our leaders as we were, we knew their proclivities. Nonetheless, we were still caught off guard at the magnitude and the abruptness. Knowledge and belief are often separate. We watched in awe and resignation as the mushroom cloud formed.

I was struck by a deep, bone-deep, sense of doom. It arrested my senses and held me in a vice-like grip from movement of any kind. That was not surpris…