In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – creators of the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic device indicating just how close mankind is to the brink of destruction – moved the clock's second hand one step closer to midnight for the second year in a row, from two-and-a-half minutes to two, citing among many reasons that, quote: "Hyperbolic rhetoric and provocative actions by both sides (meaning the US and North Korea) have increased the possibility of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation."

Before now, it had been a long time since "accident or miscalculation" have brought us to the brink of Armageddon. Events like the Cuban Missile Crisis are a distant memory for most, along with the fear and paranoia that gripped the nation when it was discovered that the Soviet Union had been covertly building nuclear missile bases off our eastern shore.

But that fateful October in 1962 was barely two decades distant from the only examples in living memory of how atomic weapons could destroy entire civilizations: their use in Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. That display of unbridled power still loomed large in the American consciousness, especially since the bombs that had been built in the intervening years had become infinitely more powerful.

But before that, before the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis and the rise of thermonuclear power, the United States realized the awesome, life-altering potential of the weapons in its possession and said to the world, "never again."

In 1946, Bernard Baruch, an adviser to the White House during World War Two, was appointed as the US representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. Shortly after that appointment, he delivered an impassioned speech to the commission that came to be known as the Baruch Plan, wherein the US agreed to hand over its entire nuclear arsenal to an international governing body on the condition that the nations of the world pledge not to use nuclear energy to produce weapons of any kind.

The proposal was shot down by the Soviet Union, who felt understandably threatened by America's nuclear hegemony, but the questions Baruch raises in his speech, questions regarding whether mankind can successfully evolve to a point where we can be responsible for wielding such powerful and dangerous weapons, have never been more relevant.

What you're about to hear is an abridged version of that speech, as read by my friend and colleague "Mighty" Mike McGee, San Jose's poet laureate of 2018 and an internationally-renowned spoken word performer. Afterwards, Mike and I talk about the impact of nuclear war on the public imagination, and whether the renewed fervor surrounding the use of nuclear weapons can make a difference in pulling mankind back from the brink of destruction.