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All in all, a minimum of 700,000 lucky souls die in the first moments, more than all the combatants killed on both sides of the American Civil War, the costliest in U.S. history. I say lucky, because nearly twice that number are desperately injured, but all the hospitals are destroyed—as are the ambulances, paramedics to drive them, and roads to drive them on. Hundreds of thousands more die from burns as firestorms spring up everywhere, and the firefighters are already dead. Many who survive being burned die of asphyxiation as all the oxygen is consumed. Radiation, a patient killer, will claim its share as well over the coming weeks and years: for decades, the death toll will be recorded in pencil, not ink. And the psychological and spiritual impact is unimaginable. We will never be over this. Never.

That's what I saw each day from the dock, in physical terms. Spiritually speaking, though I didn't know it yet, what I saw was Satan laughing fit to burst.

Wrestling daily with omnicide takes its toll. As the summer wore on, I became darker, quieter, and rapidly spoiled for polite company. New friends would ask about my job, turn gray as I spilled tale upon tale of nuclear horrors, and never invite me out again. After I finally got an apartment, during my morning drive I'd see animated bones in the place of fellow commuters, school buses full of tiny, chattering skeletons. Going to bed at night, I'd wonder if there'd be a dawn to see. I'd wonder if that half-hour countdown had started. I'd wonder if we had any time left at all.

But by the time September rolled around, I had started to employ the inhuman lingo of the nuclear policy wonk. Jargon and numerals sterilize and insulate: I could dip my fingers into nuclear weapon statistics without touching the horror they represented. In order to go to work every morning, I began to occupy an imaginary world where nuclear weapons seemed reasonable, comprehensible, and tolerable. I stopped having visions during my lunch breaks. Saving the world started to become bearable—all the more so as I slipped into the welcome distraction of 14-hour workdays during the ramp-up to a major international conference hosted by my employer.

The conference featured scores of speakers at various venues over several days, with staff spread thin between them. On the second night, I was the sole staffer on hand to oversee a panel at a satellite location that included Patch Adams, the eccentric physician-activist. During his remarks, he unexpectedly asked the crowd what they would personally be willing to do to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Would this group of aging, northern Californian ex-hippies get naked and march in the street, he asked?

I froze in the middle of my restless prowling at the back of the auditorium, paralyzed with a sort of detached terror.

It was like the audience members had been waiting decades for just such an invitation. Moments later, I stood ashen in the doorway, unable to stem the flood of nudes streaming to my right and left. And 10 minutes later, fully garbed in a clothing-strewn lobby, I watched hundreds of baby boomers chanting, "Nudes not Nukes!" outside the building, directly opposite City Hall.

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April 2008, Vol. 52, No. 4