Maria Schottenius: It is not the climate that will make the end of us, it is nuclear weapons

My mother spoke when I was little, if Nevil Shutes ”On the beach” from 1958. The novel is about a nuclear war that already has wiped out all human life in the northern hemisphere and are now waiting for the people of Australia that the radioactive substances will also be disseminated there, and surely destroy all life. I think the mother was afraid seriously. With two small children, who would grow up in a world where the bomb was. It was not clear that you could count with a future.

the Bomb was the great threat and fear for those who were young in the 50's. They remembered Hiroshima, and that life could be wiped out in an instant. ”If atomkriget will” was a reality and there were many more or less zany advice on how it would do if the air would be filled with kärnvapenavfall. (You could, for example, quickly get indoors and carefully brush off the dust, got the kids learn.)

the Author penned about a dystopian future in which humans gained the technical tools she could not master. Harry Martinsons diktepos ”Aniara” from 1956 became a classic radioteaterföreställning. And in 1959 came the opera with music by Karl-Birger Blomdahl and libretto by Erik Lindegren. ”Aniara” put himself in the soul of a whole generation.

Now is ”Harry” back, this time on the big screen and the old space ship has created great medieintresse. I don't think it is a coincidence.

also back. Before, it was between the united states and the Soviet union where the leaders with your finger on the shutter button created the balance of terror.

Even then arose comments of Stanley Kubrick's ”Dr. Strangelove” with the magnificent Peter Sellers. It came in 1964 after the cuban missile crisis in 1962, when a nuclear war was near.

it is Now a cold war between three major powers: the US, Russia and China, in an economic and policy tug of war where the dissolved kärnvapenavtalet is a pawn in the deadly game where Europe can become the actual venue.

Daniel Ellsberg, who, by leaking the pentagon papers helped to end the Vietnam war and unseat president Nixon, was just over a week ago in Stockholm to receive the Olof palme prize. You might have seen and heard him at Skavlan.

The legendary visselblåsaren (central figure in the film ”The Post”) came last year with his book ”The Doomsday Machine” about the nuclear threat. When Ellsberg worked at the us administration, which said he had total insight into how the americans during the 60's not only the thought of nuclear weapons as deterrence, but was fully prepared to use them. He counted to and with how many millions of people who would be killed in the Soviet union and the imputed cold with the risk of also Finland and Sweden would be swept away in a atommolnet. Ellsberg has been fighting against nuclear weapons since then. The pentagon papers came between them, but both before and after he has been engaged opponent.

this robust 87-year-old at one point during his visit and asked how he looked at Sweden's possibilities to act. The answer came instantly: ”absolutely Go not in Nato. Those who belong to Nato can not do anything, they are tied. Use your position to fight against nuclear weapons! Signing the UN kärnvapenförbud!”

the nuclear issue has always created divisions. In Sweden stands the battle to sign on the agreement on the kärnvapenförbud even within the government. Defense minister Peter Hultqvist against the minister for foreign affairs Margot Wallström.

In the mid 1900-century, drove Herbert Proponents of Today's News and the young liberals, as Per Ahlmark, loudly, that Sweden should have nuclear weapons. The journalist Barbro Alving, Bang, took the conflict with the Proponents and had to go from DN.

the other Day I heard one of Sweden's most prominent physicists and environmental scientists quoted. ”It is not the climate that will make the end of us. It is nuclear weapons.” Mother's fear of the bomb was completely relevant.