Ashis Nandy, the radical sociologist of our times says "Nuclearism is the most depraved, shameless and costly pornography of our times."

Brian Isley in his book, "Fathering the Unthinkable" opines that nuclearism necessarily goes with strong masculinity strivings.
Carol Cohn goes one step further and endorses the view that the entire culture of nuclear weaponry is infiltrated by hard, masculine imageries and those participating in that culture usually suffer from deep fears of emasculation or impotency.

The so-called masculine drive is characterised by a deep feeling of insecurity. Be it between the erstwhile Soviet Union and United States. Or more contemporarily between India and Pakistan.
The conscious attempts to reduce nuclear weapons throughout the world has now fallen on the broad shoulders of the rest of the nations. Barring a few socialist countries, a state-sponsored peace march is a wishful thinking. What however, has now got government sponsorship, is the pro-nuke villains of 21st century.

As a mockery to democratic values, manufactured opinion polls conducted by newspapers, magazines and websites penetrate into your psyche as to what is desirable in the country. For example, following India's recent trysts with nuclear explosions, opinion polls invariably showed more than 88% of people endorsing their country's stance.

In a country, where at least half its populace are deprived of two meals a day, to assume that opinion polls on Internet and English newsprints reflect the country's standpoint, is black humour.
If similar so-called opinion-polls reflect will of people elsewhere, it's a macabre joke on the 'freedom to think' of most of human beings on earth.

One, most people do not vote for opinion polls, simply because they do not meet the standard requirements (a telephone set for newspaper poll and a PC for Internet polls). Second and graver side of the fact is that most tend to believe by reading or browsing that the poll results are actually consciously being supported by them, although they have not voted. This is a psychological phenomenon which presupposes that most will go on the road most others have taken. Environment influences you more than your conscience does. After all, acceptance of majority's (who CAN express themselves) views are taken to be in the right direction. It becomes agreeable next and finally, one tends to opine the same as the so-called majority.

In other words, this is called propaganda.

Today, most of humankind exists with propaganda, not on an independent line of thinking. For arguments, tussles of words are proving costly in a 'busy' world devoid of 'free time' to 'philosophise'.
That is the irony of our times. Thinking process has been reduced to an extravagant exercise. Only the technologically innovative have space to conquer in world. The poets, lovers and birdwatchers are dead.

That is why the entire country glorifies 'scientists' who mis-utilise their potentials to produce nuclear bombs. Country's highest civilian awards are bestowed upon them. In every households, the so-called scientists are revered and emulated.

The modern-age scientists are great believers of Gods. The Bharat Ratna bachelor scientist has confessed of his great religious beliefs. Most irrationalities of the world are greatly infused in them.
Spirit of science was to eliminate irrationality, to go by proving hypothesis right and until proved, not to take it into consideration. Pray god and make bombs. Join MNCs and create life-saving drugs that only the privileged few can afford to purchase. The current mantra in science is defying its own formulae.

The pretension of respecting the so-called scientists of this age must end. The deep fears of emasculation or impotency must be taken cognisance of. And the psychology must change so as to address issues, not glorify individuals and countries.

'Mine is bigger than yours' applies to both religion and the size of the bomb. Such mindless competition must end and the people responsible be taken to task. No matter if they call themselves scientists, great guards of male bastion or simply the pro-nukes.
For actually they are psychopaths. Sample this. The great big scientists who work on computers and internet (devised first to ensure Pentagon safety) do it on a universally same trend, barring countries.

Robert Jungk's work on the nuclear state shows that secrecy, security, surveillance, and police state methods invariably accompany the nuclear establishments in every country. Remember the secret journey of the scientists at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in India who were consistently devising formulae to wipe out the mankind, after bagging awards and rewards. (After all, nuclear bombs have only one utility value: Destruction of life).

Nuclearism is framed by the genocidal mentality. Robert J. Lifton and Eric Markusen in their book, "Genocidal Mentality" have made a comparative study of the psychology of mass murderers in Nazi Germany, in Hiroshima, Nagashaki and among the ideologues of nuclearism today and found remarkable continuities.

In the genocidal person, there is, first of all, a state of mind called "psychic numbing" - a "diminished capacity or inclination to feel, and a general sense of meaninglessness". One so numbs one's sensitivities that normal emotions and moral considerations cannot penetrate one any more.

Numbing "closes off" a person and leads to a "constriction of self-process". To him or her, the death or the possibility of the death of millions begins to look like an abstract, bureaucratic detail, involving the calculation of military gains or losses, geopolitics or mere statistics.

Such numbing can be considered to be the final culmination of separation of affect and cognition - that is, feeling and thinking - which the European Enlightenment sanctioned and celebrated as the first step towards greater objectivity and scientific rationality.
The genocidal mentality also tends to create an area protected from public responsibility or democratic accountability. Usually such responsibility is avoided by re-conceptualising oneself as only a cog in the wheel, advancing one's own bureaucratic or scientific career like everybody else, by taking and obeying orders from superior authorities faithfully, mechanically and without thinking about the moral implications of the orders. The Nazi war criminals tried at Nuremberg at the end of WWII all ventured the defence that they were under orders to kill innocent people, including women, children and elderly, and could do nothing about it.

The other way of avoiding responsibility is to remove it from individuals and vest it in institutions and aggregates. As if institutions were brainy creatures seeking no man to run them! After a while, terms like the military-industrial complex, fascism, imperialism, American hegemony become ways of freeing the actual, real life, persons from their culpability for recommending, ordering or committing such mass murders.

In acute cases, genocidal mentality turns into Necrophilia, a clinical state in which the patient is in love with death. Indeed, he or she wants to sleep with death. In Saadat Hassan Manto's "Cold Meat" or Eric Fromm's "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness", one can find instances where an 'ordinary' murderer and rapist while trying to satiate his sexual greed during a communal conflict, confronts his own with necrophilia and is devastated by that.

Nuclearism introduces other psychopathologies too. For instance, it seeps into public consciousness, creates a new awareness of the transience of life. It forces people to live with a constant fear that, one day, a sudden war or accident might kill not only them, but also their children and grandchildren and everybody they love.

This awareness gradually creates a sense of hollowness of life. For many, life becomes denuded of substantive meaning. It begins to brutalise ordinary people and vitiates everyday life.

Even children begin to live in what they consider a world without a future. But they are unable to express their fear and anxieties directly, because in a nuclearised society, the fear of nuclear death is made to look like an abnormal psychoneurotic state.

Many neurotics and psychotics at first look like charming eccentrics. After all, the Nazi killers, too were loving fathers, connoisseurs of good music and honest citizens.

The emptiness that creeps into them after the realisation of the unthinkable accompanies a power to inflict death on millions, and living in fantasy that their power cannot kill them.

The unthinkable is that a nuclear war or few confrontations like the Bay of Pigs incident can actually lead to destruction of world. And even if that is the case, the powerful's fantasy stays that he controls others' deaths, and subsequently his own secure life.

All fantasies must end. Irrationalities must be overcome with a truly scientific approach involving cause-and-effect relationship.

Let us recover from psychic numbings. And wake upto rational thinkings. Protesting against nuclearism is nothing stupid. That is the least we can do to call ourselves human beings.

Saswat Pattanayak. 2002