The bomb next door
Travers, Edwin Xavier
vote the funds necessary for its implementation. Failure to ratify the treaty underscores that those who represent us still give assent to the concept of nuclear deterrence. They have not...
...Happily, the Israelis had their rescue team in place within three hours and were largely responsible for the early recovery of many of the Kenyans trapped in the Unfundi building...
...Although this warning was later reversed, editorials in the Kenyan papers made little effort to mask the anger of the Kenyan people...
...Are we doomed to it, Lord," asks the author in the foreword, "chained to the pendulum of our mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing...
...Within minutes local TV was announcing that a bomb had also just gone off at the American embassy in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania...
...Edwin Xavier Travers THE BOMB NEXT DOOR On the scene in Nairobi El y wife and I had never heard a bomb go off before...
...Given the logistical difficulties, it took awhile for the Americans to get rescue teams to Nairobi...
...Unfortunately, the United States response to the bombing was less than edifying...
...After the Flame Deluge in Miller's story, the world is left a barren desert where barbarians and monstrosities roam...
...They have not forsworn first use, and do not seem to have the will to move toward the elimination of nuclear weapons...
...It was impossible to understand how twisted minds could think that killing hundreds of A f r i c a n s - - a n d blinding hundreds more with flying glass--was a way to damage or get even with the United States...
...It would also be a sound political gesture...
...We turned on the radio and tuned into KBS, the Kenyan Commonweal 9 October9,1998 Broadcasting System...
...Strategic Command, and General Andrew Goodpaster, for the abolition of nuclear weapons...
...India's test was motivated in part by our failure to reduce our weapons significantly...
...That was a scant five-minute walk from our hotel...
...It would seem that the only sensible answer to that cry is to respond now to the 1996 call of an international group of generals and admirals, including General Lee Butler, former head of the U.S...
...Miller calls his book "a cry for sanity in our silent night of madness...
...Distracted, we have let time slip by, but with our full attention and that of other nations we have to believe that nuclear abolition can be achieved...
...We can insist on the dismantling of existing weapons...
...Commonweal | 0 October 9, 1998...
...The casualties were high because the parking lot of the Unfundi Co-operative was crowded with the matatus, or small buses, that bring thousands of people into Nairobi for work each day...
...Whereas the U.S.'s pledge of $2 million to whomever gives information leading to the arrest of those behind the twin bombings in Tanzania and Nairobi is commendable, more needs to be done by Washington to show that it shares the grief of Kenya and Tanzania...
...Having been in Dares Salaam just two years before, we had no trouble envisioning the scene there...
...Paper--even reams of computer paper--and other debris filled the air...
...Shattered glass was everywhere...
...Instead of antiseptic ambulances, with IVs for the critically wounded, victims were transported in ancient taxis, stagecoach buses, the local bus service, in crowded matatus, and private cars...
...And that civilization again begins to repeat the development of nuclear weapons...
...But we did feel the pressure from the blast, and knew that we were at least tangentially involved in something very different and very big...
...The State Department's warning to Americans not to travel to Kenya, though understandable, effectively aborted almost all tourism, Kenya's most profitable business...
...What Merton adverts to is the universal failure of imagination--the apparent inability to conceive of what "the great festival of destruction" would mean...
...In a prophetic best seller of the fifties, Walter Miller's Canticle of Leibowitz--a book worth revisiting now-it is called the Flame Deluge...
...All nations should move in concert toward the same goal...
...Despite the pleading of the Kenyans for monetary assistance to help those who lost loved ones, there seems to be no great urgency on the part of the United States to offer, let alone give, assistance...
...Nor, to be sure, did the Kenyans mask their anger toward Arab countries...
...Exploding the bomb on the street resulted in the deaths of at least 250 people, almost all of them Kenyans...
...We could see people running in one direction, then sharply turning and running in another, in crazy-quilt patterns...
...Not a person or moving car could be seen...
...Cars came to a stop and drivers jumped out, trying to comprehend what had happened...
...So lying in bed at the Stanley Hotel in downtown Nairobi on the morning of August 7, completely exhausted from our eight-hour Paris-Nairobi trip, we were not quite sure what we heard...
...It is first, and foremost, our moral obligation...
...Kenyans were offended when the American ambassador characterized as "looters" the Kenyans who tried to save lives immediately after the blast...
...As dust began to drift earthward from the bomb site, the sky over downtown Nairobi became very dark...
...It is vital that we address this our most serious problem without delay...
...They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command...
...As has been widely reported, because of the vigilance of the security g u a r d s at the American embassy in Nairobi, the terrorists were forced to detonate the bomb in an alley between the embassy and the Unfundi Cooperative Building...
...The above is enough to call to mind and affirm Thomas Merton's prediction (quoted in the August-September Catholic Worker): "It is the sane ones, the welladapted ones, who can, without qualms and without nausea, aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared....The sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons for firing the shot...
...We can work for a concerted international inspection program...
...The East Africa Standard expressed what seemed to be the common thought of the Kenyan people when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Nairobi, almost two weeks after the blast...
...And because of their sanity, they will have no qualms at all when the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake...
...Their goal had been to set off the massive explosive in the embassy's underground parking lot, as was done in the World Trade Center bombing in New York...
...Americans are used to ambulances and fire departments from many communities responding when disasters like fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes strike...
...The end of the cold war makes it possible...
...It is hard to describe the chaos that engulfs a city poorly equipped to respond to such a catastrophic emergency...
...Edwin Xavier Travers, a retired school teacher, lives in Clarksville, Maryland...
...Remember the stirring words of that December 5 statement: "We have been presented with a challenge of the highest possible historical importance: the creation of a nudear-weapon-free world...
...At the city's two hospitals, Kenyatta National and Nairobi, desperate attempts were made to save the injured, attempts made even more frustrating by the lack of equipment and lack of experience with such disasters...
...Bruce Martin Russell, author of the hopeful article, "We Can End the Arms Race," in the same issue of the Catholic Worker, assures us that "in a world of spreading transparency no country could expect to produce...such weapons" against such a program...
...Only after thirty-two generations does a kind of civilization emerge...
...The United States, it seems to me, owes some material assistance to the victims of these bombings...
...They were innocent bystanders...
...Soon, however, plywood sheets were being used to board up blown-out windows in the Ambassador Hotel, adjacent to the embassy, and other buildings in the area...
...By the afternoon, you could walk in downtown Nairobi, though the embassy area was restricted...
...Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall...
...The first reports said that a bomb had gone off in the American embassy, located at the intersection of Moi and Haile Selassie, the Fifth Avenue and Broadway of downtown Nairobi...
...The members of the group came from the declared nuclearweapons countries---China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States--from the emergent nuclear countries--India, Israel, and Pakistan-and the major non-nuclear powers-Germany and Japan...
...And then rather suddenly the city streets, generally filled with teeming crowds at 10:45 in the morning, became deserted...
...It was obvious that something terrible had happened...
...Our worries were confirmed when we looked out the window of our third-floor room...
...Things are different in Kenya...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 17
