Somehow we think too much about the atomic bomb. "How are we to live in the atomic age?" I am tempted to respond: "Perhaps like you would have lived in the 16th century, when the plague was almost an annual visitor to London, or when you lived in the times of the Vikings, when raiders from Scandinavia could land any night and cut your throat, or as you already live today in an age of cancer, syphilis, polio, air raids, train accidents, or car crashes."
In other words, let us not exaggerate regarding the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam: you and all those you love were doomed to death long before the invention of the atomic bomb; and a fair percentage of us would have had to die in an unpleasant way anyway. Compared to our ancestors, we have one great advantage - and that is anesthetics. We still have them. It is ridiculous to lament that scientists [with the invention of the bomb] have added one more possibility of painful and premature death to a world that is already teeming with such possibilities, and in which death is certainly not an optionality, but a certainty.
First of all, we should gather ourselves: if we are to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, then - when it comes - may it find us doing reasonable and human things: praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing children, playing tennis, chatting with friends over a beer, throwing darts - but let us not huddle together like frightened sheep with our minds full of thoughts of bombs. Yes, bombs can destroy our bodies (microbes can do that too), but it is not necessary for them to dominate our minds.
(Clive Staples Lewis /1898–1963/, On Living in an Atomic Age,
Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, 1948)
