The fires of Los Alamos blow through the mind as a blatant warning, but who heeds it? The evacuated residents of the high desert town are in anguish, and their losses evoke genuine sympathy. The purpose of this reflection is not to add to their suffering, but to see it as pointing to something larger.
It is impossible to hear of the 260 homes destroyed in the Los Alamos fires without thinking of the more than 70,000 buildings that were incinerated at Hiroshima. ''The sky was red with flames,'' a survivor wrote, as author Richard Rhodes reports. ''It was burning as if scorching heaven.''
As residents of Los Alamos return to their ravaged streets this week, that other scene must impose itself on the stunned imagination: ''Nothing remained except a few buildings of reinforced concrete,'' another Hiroshima survivor later wrote. ''For acres and acres the city was like a desert, except for scattered piles of brick and roof tile.''
From one point of view, there is no comparing the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with their hundreds of thousands dead, to the accidental New Mexico fire that destroyed only property, but perhaps the point of comparison is not the disparate outcomes of the two kinds of fire, but the role that human hubris apparently played in both of them.
In each case, highly trained and otherwise competent people took actions that they assumed they could control - even when there were good reasons to worry that disastrous consequences might follow. US Park Service workers set their ''controlled fire,'' and now an investigation will determine if they did so carelessly. Scientists of the Manhattan Project set the ''controlled fire'' of the nuclear arms race, and even if the worst did not happen in 1945 - the igniting, say, of the atmosphere itself - they already sensed how they would be remembered in history.
''If atomic bombs are to be added as a new weapon to the arsenal of a warring world,'' Robert J. Oppenheimer predicted, ''or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the name(s) of Los Alamos.''
Last week a raging fire approached the looming complex of nuclear weapons labs and factories and storage facilities for the most dangerous material on earth. As set-jawed officials faced cameras to say all was safe, as such officials have been saying for two generations, the world watching on television could be forgiven a sense of deja vu. The words ''Los Alamos'' and ''safe'' do not belong in the same sentence. And sadly for the families whose homes were destroyed, a fire at Los Alamos can only evoke the apocalyptic fire we ordinarily refuse to think of. Oppenheimer's prediction got it exactly backwards. Humankind has found it possible not to curse Los Alamos, which is why we only wish its burned-out workers well. But, in truth, Los Alamos, precisely in the tasks those men and women continue to perform, curses humankind.
Nuclear weapons and the unending project of their manufacture are more evil now than they were in 1945, or even in 1975 - because in the absence of Hitler and of the Cold War, there is no remotely acceptable justification for this enterprise. It is not just that the United States government should have found a way to shut it down by now, but also that the scientists and engineers and other workers who maintain the Los Alamos death factory should by now have individually resigned from doing so.
Whatever it is to the Park Service, to America's nuclear establishment ''controlled burning'' is a useful but entirely fanciful myth, and President Clinton seems to be as much at its mercy as President Truman was. If Clinton decides this summer to go forward with the national missile defense program, he will have brought to flame again the embers of the nuclear arms race. History will curse him. World leaders warn him of this with the apparent futility of ignored meteorologists. You don't need a weatherman, we used to sing with Dylan, to know which way the wind is blowing. But Los Alamos suggests we do. Could we take its fires as a last warning of how easily the wind can turn, of how quickly nuclear fire can outrun the human capacity to anticipate consequences?
At the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, the human race was given a reprieve, a chance to relive the lost opportunity of 1945. Then, among that first generation of atomic scientists, there were those who wanted to continue bomb manufacture, but there were also scientists who proposed, in the words of one, as Rhodes reports, ''that Los Alamos should become a monument, a ghost laboratory, and that all work on the military use of atomic energy should cease.''
The fires of Los Alamos pale beside the fires of what awaits us if we refuse this opportunity again. Before we rebuild it to what it was, can't we heed this warning, building from these ashes a monument to what never should have been?
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
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