Salvatore Quasimodo Quotes
At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds.
Quasimodo, Salvatore. "The Poet and the Politician." Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, edited by Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, 1969.
Bethe and other European refugees joined American and British scientists at Los Alamos, NM, for the development of the atomic bomb.
Canada had the same absurd civil defense propaganda in the Cold War as the U. S. did. Both governments wanted to persuade their publics that a nuclear attack was survivable.
3 days later, President Truman, announced that the Russians had successfully developed an atomic weapon. This quotation gives us another example where the Central Intelligence Agency failed to predict and/or warn America about a crucial event. Others included the North Korean invasion of South Korea, the Arab Spring, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Booklet told people that even under an atomic attack there would be many survivors and it was everyone’s job to increase the number of survivors by taking precautions like building fallout shelters and maintaining a supply of food and water at home and ducking under desks and tables if there was an atomic attack. The implication was that despite the great firepower of the then Hydrogen Bombs there would be great survivability. The suggestions for protection ranged from minimal likely effect to absurd. The Publication also bore the imprimatur of the Executive Office of the President for credibility and many people believed it.
The alternative deterrent was to maintain an army of over 2 million men overseas in both Europe and Asia, and the cost was much greater than the then perceived cost of nuclear weapons. At the time no one figured the cost of coping with the radioactive material and waste as well as the cleanup of nuclear bomb factories like Hanford. These costs were still not known byt the 21st century.
This is a very important quotation. It is often cited by preventive war hawks to show that deterrence might not be a sufficient inhibitor against an extreme ideological enemy. In this case it was political philosophy that would make the enemy willing to have the majority of its population die to reach the ideological objective. More fearful is the prospect of the Theocracy of Iran where the leaders may believe that nuclear jihad is a commandment of God. More critical is the Islamic theology which says that if most of the Iranian Muslim population die in a nuclear war that they start all those people will be martyrs and immediately go to God’s Paradise. Thus, even the dead Muslims are not victims and the nonbelievers should be killed. For extremely fanatical Muslims nuclear war can be a logical and holy course of action.
Salvatore Quasimodo was an Italian poet and translator. In 1959, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times". Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, he was one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century.
