ABSTRACT
The nuclear bomb threatens life in its entirety. This means we must find a standpoint that grants the bomb the widest possible horizon within which alone it can unfold its full essence. For whatever has the power to put our world as a whole at stake must be a kind of equivalent of this world in a nutshell and as such be thoroughly interwoven with and deeply rooted in the history and reality of our Western world at large. The nuclear bomb in its phenomenology is so immense and so inhuman that, although a man-made object, it nevertheless extends far beyond the merely human into the dimension of the ontological and theological, into the dimension of Being and of the gods. Only on this plane can we hope to do some justice to its dreadfulness. The nuclear bomb is so frighteningly real that it simply forces consciousness to recognize it as an undeniable truth—ugly, depraved, deadly, but still truth.
