On February 14, 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 took a picture of planet Earth in space. The image inspired Carl Sagan’s book (May 1996), Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’, every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
“Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds... There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
The closest we came to destroying this tiny dot was 62 years ago when the Soviet Union began to secretly install nuclear missiles in Cuba able to hit US cities to deter an American invasion of Cuba. The confrontation that followed brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war before an agreement was reached to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba and American missiles from Turkiye. War was averted because the leaders of the two superpowers knew that a nuclear war is a global catastrophe where all would be losers.
“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness” (US president John F. Kennedy 1961).
“Of course, I was scared. It would have been insane not to be scared. I was frightened about what could happen to my country and all the countries that would be devastated by a nuclear war. If being frightened meant that I helped avert such insanity, then I’m glad I was frightened. One of the problems in the world today is that not enough people are sufficiently frightened by danger of nuclear war” (USSR chairperson Nikita Khrushchev, December 1962).
United enemies
In Common Dreams (May 29, 2024) Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs writes: “Talk of nuclear war is currently everywhere. Leaders of NATO countries call for Russia’s defeat and even dismemberment, while telling us not to worry about Russia’s 6,000 nuclear warheads. Ukraine uses NATO-supplied missiles to knock out parts of Russia’s nuclear attack warning system inside Russia.
In 1963, war was averted because the leaders of the two superpowers knew that a nuclear war is a global catastrophe where all would be losers
“Russia, in the meantime, engages in nuclear drills near its border with Ukraine. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg give the green light to Ukraine to use NATO weapons to hit Russian territory as an increasingly desperate and extremist Ukrainian regime sees fit.
“These leaders neglect at our greatest peril the most basic lesson of the nuclear confrontation between the US and Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as told by president John F. Kennedy, one of the few American presidents in the nuclear age to take our survival seriously. In the aftermath of the crisis, Kennedy told us and his successors:
“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy – or of a collective death-wish for the world.”
In 1947, the Chicago atomic scientists who helped produce the atomic bombs that the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki set up the Doomsday Clock “intended to reflect basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age...”
Destruction will occur unless someone takes action to stop it. Global catastrophe is represented by midnight on the Doomsday Clock. How close the world is to one represented by a certain number of minutes or seconds to midnight because of nuclear warfare, climate change and artificial intelligence.
The clock’s original setting in 1947 was seven minutes to midnight. It has since been set backward eight times and forward 17 times. The farthest time from midnight was 17 minutes in 1991, and the nearest is 90 seconds, set in January 2023.
Thomas Schutte calls his sculptures ‘United enemies’. He puts together two pairs of men, who hate each other and want to get rid of each other but cannot as they are bound to one another with rope. They have to find ways of living together, even against their will.
Schutte makes us feel that, whether we like it or not, all people and states on this tiny dot are bound together with one rope. Whenever we are hating and hurting others, we are also hurting ourselves.
Yet, we are still not ready to admit that like Schutte’s ‘United enemies’ we are bound to each other. However much we want to kill each other we have to find ways of living together if we are to save humanity on our planet.
Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.