When the Mushroom Cloud Rose Again
I spent most of my teenage years in the 1980s, the tail end of the Cold War. In those years I had many nightmares about World War III: I saw a mushroom cloud and tried to seek shelter from it in almost every of those dreams.
Almost.
The last time I saw the cloud appear and felt the impulse to hide behind something (such as the knee-high concrete edge of the sandbox at a nearby school where I was playing -- bunkers are made of concrete, so in my mind this offered solid protection) I realized that I was dreaming, straightened my back and just looked at it. Appreciating its horrifying beauty.
For about two decades after, I did not have this particular nightmare anymore. In the past ten years I had it two or three times again. The last one last night.
I looked out the window of my childhood home and saw the stem of a mushroom cloud rising in our front garden. It was only as thick as the trunk of an old tree. When the top of the mushroom forms right above you, you’re lucky: you are vaporized instantly and never know what hit you.
But in my dream, I wasn’t so fortunate. My insides grew hot and I thought so this is what it feels like to be microwaved alive. I ran upstairs and found my wife on our bed with her laptop, furiously hitting the Enter key to send one last email to her mother. I grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward... safety?
We ran outside, no longer in my childhood village but in a vast city that felt both familiar and alien. It had a Parisian vibe, though there were no landmarks. I barely speak enough French to order a croissant, so maybe this was my subconscious’s way of saying we were alone. No one would help us -- it's every man for himself during World War III.
Our escape led us through an underground train station only a little bigger than a hallway. We had to surface briefly and saw more mushroom clouds blooming above the city. Resuming our escape, we crawled into a hidden passage behind a closet panel, moving on our hands and knees through a narrow tunnel.
This is when I woke up on the couch of our living room; my wife had gone to bed the evening before and left me sleeping on the couch. Lying on my side and becoming increasingly aware of my surroundings, I felt our youngest cat nestled in the warmth of my bent legs as she often does when I take a nap. As I got up to pee, I tried not to disturb her -- this tiny creature, trusting me enough to sleep through an imagined apocalypse. When I got back and lay down again, she quickly found a spot between my legs, using me as her personal radiator.
Still drowsy and somewhat in a nuclear war mindset, I was startled when the living room suddenly lit up. Fortunately, this was not the flash of a nuclear blast, but the headlights of a car driving towards our house. Our next door neighbor is a day laborer and he's often picked up by someone very early in the morning, usually around 4am.
As I tried to fall back asleep, I pondered the unfairness of it all. The fate of over 8 billion people lies in the hands of a few old men.
An enormously well-fed man who is the Supreme Leader of a small country of starving people. The second man is someone who may very well be the richest man on Earth... far richer still than Elon Musk... because he basically controls everything his huge country has to offer. The third is someone who still has to show the first sign that he cares about anything other than his ego. The fourth old man is enigmatic to people in the Western world and it may be this unfamiliarity that makes him come across as the epitome of sanity and poise compared to the other three [1].
Only one of these men was democratically elected by reasonable standards, but even he got fewer than 32% of the eligible votes. The people who voted for him represent a mere 0.94% of the world's population. With that, the number of people who influenced the current balance of power in the world is larger than the aforementioned "few old men", but still disturbingly small.
If four people can end human civilization, it seems reasonable that more than just a tiny fraction of humanity should have a say in who those people are.
Footnote
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/15/china/americans-opinion-china-pew-survey-intl-hnk