The 16,000 Apocalypses Sleeping in the World

August 7, 2025.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing.
Eighty years have passed since that catastrophe.
Three generations have come and gone, and the memories are slowly beginning to lose their voice.
The sound of the bell rings quietly, the wind says nothing,
a day to simply carve "never again" into our hearts.

And today.
The world begins to move again.
Even the day after the prayers, all desires, conflicts, and impulses
come crashing back into our daily lives.

Even so, I will not forget what was in that silence.

Sleeping in the world are16,000 apocalypses.
They are seeds meant to return cities, nations, and civilizations to nothingness the moment a "what if" occurs.

Of those, thousands are in a state of immediate launch readiness even at this very moment.
The reality that humanity has quietly hidden the power to destroy itself behind the scenes of everyday life.

That is why the voices crying out to "abolish nuclear weapons" are precious.
I do not deny that prayer.
But I do not believe that peace can be maintained by that alone.

The world surrounding nuclear weapons does not move by faith.
What moves it is cold calculation and the terror of mutual opposition.

Ironically, it is precisely because each side knows the other cannot "use" them
that nations still avoid the worst kind of war.

Nuclear deterrence is not justice.
It is not an ideal.
But in reality, it isthe only functioning mechanism for a balance of peace.

It is easy to put a lid on the reality we do not want to see and simply shout "get rid of them."
I will not do that.

I look at the numbers.
I face the figures behind the silence and their meaning.
Not through fear, but through understanding.
Not through prayer, but through thought.

Wishes only become power when they walk alongside intelligence.

—Ayaki Izumo