"Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

The damaged No 1, 3, and 4 reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japan.

Photograph: DigitalGlobe/AP

Regarding the nuclear disaster in Japan, the atomic genii is out of the bottle and all the test-ban treaties and all the reviews of nuclear plant integrity in the world will not put it back in. The terms "safety standards," "back-up systems," "redundancy," and "safe levels" mean little under the bright light of nuclear fission. Those words are merely oxymoronic, or more accurately, moronic.

Remember J. Robert Oppenheimer's words from the Bhagavad Gita, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."