In the dawn of the nuclear age, Albert Einstein was asked what he thought about nuclear war, to which he is said to have responded, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Stones, attached to sticks (or spears), are how Stone Age people fought wars. The Stone Age—that vast prehistoric period that lasted for several million years, during which humans used stones to make tools—ended some 12,000 years ago, right around the time that hunter-gatherers are understood to have built Göbekli Tepe.
Albert Einstein feared nuclear weapons could, and might, put an end to the advanced civilization that mankind had spent the last 12,000 years creating. Einstein feared that humans could become hunter-gatherers again, all because of a terrible weapon civilized humans had created to use in wars against their fellow so-called civilized humans.
The story you have just read imagines exactly this. A story where 12,000 years of civilization in the making gets reduced to rubble in mere minutes and hours. This is the reality of nuclear war. For as long as nuclear war exists as a possibility, it threatens mankind with Apocalypse. The survival of the human species hangs in the balance.
In the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear exchange, survivors of nuclear war and nuclear winter would find themselves in a savage world entirely unrecognizable to anyone alive today, Carl Sagan forewarned. That, save a few tribes in the Amazon or military-trained preppers, almost no one living today has actual hunter-gatherer survival skills. That after a nuclear war, even the heartiest of survivors would have great difficulty navigating a world poisoned by radiation, malnourished and disease-ridden, while living mostly underground, riding out the cold and the dark. “The population size of Homo sapiens conceivably could be reduced to prehistoric levels or below,” Sagan wrote.
Small groups of people would interbreed to survive, producing offspring genetically compromised, some blind. Everything collectively learned by all of us, and all that has been passed down to us by our ancestors, would become myth.
With time, after a nuclear war, all present-day knowledge will be gone. Including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group.
It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all. All along.