The rainy season in the Philippines is a liquid time and in my fluidmemory I swim to and from school through walls of falling water andvast brown puddles. It is, as well, the season of toads. The firsttorrents of July soften up the summer-parched rice paddies behind ourhouse releasing from hardened clay burrows legions of bumpy, hopping,amphibians. In our garden, they would assemble at sundown in stonysilence like so many freshly unearthed terra-cotta warriors.

For the most part my brothers and I left them alone. On the occasional evening, a toad would hop through the open front door and across the living room prompting my mother to bark orders from the kitchen. It was my job to direct the lost soul back to the garden. Annoyed by the chore, I would grab the little minion, toss him out the window and quickly resumeconstruction on my Lego city.

My toad indifference ended with a bang the year I turned 13. The Christmas before, my elder brother and I received a chemistry set and a step-down transformer as gifts from our parents. Enthralled, we electrocuted, ignited, and chemically scorched ourselves and each other every day after school. Finally, in March, our mother tired of dealing with our medical emergencies and called us downstairs to issue an ultimatum. "Find new test subjects," she said, �"or I will confiscate your equipment." We trudged back up to our shared room and sat on our beds in silence.

Eventually I stood up and began harvesting the lizards off the bedroom walls. The Geckos shivered and wiggled convincingly enough with our electronic and chemical probing to satisfy whatever curiosity impelled us. But by July we began to see the finger-sized Geckoes for the little fry that theywere, and we wanted to affect larger game. So we collected toads.

We corralled the wart-hardened beasts into a cage and one-by-one zappedthem with 12, then 24 volts. Then 110, then 220. We sliced open theirstiffened, white bellies and inspected our handiwork. Others weforce-fed sodium chloride, then potassium nitrate and when that didnothing, we shoved lit firecrackers down their unwilling mouths andwatched them hop around the yard until they exploded.

I sometimes wonder where I found such unkindness and fascination with suffering. Perhaps it came pre-programmed–my original sin. Maybe I learned it by example; from Sid Antonio at school, who played cat baseball and tried with his fists to make me cry; or from the Japanese soldiers during the war who by shoving a garden hose down our grandfather’s throat bloated himlike a water balloon then jumped up and down on his tummy to watch himretch. How much bile, I wonder, can the human animal hold?

Later, when the toads tried to escape through the bars of their cage, we skinned their little toad knees and forced them to kneel on rock salt like theJapanese did to that same grandfather. And when we developed a bettergrasp of gunpowder with our chemistry set, we built bombs that wedetonated in the toad-packed cage. Afterwards I surveyed the damage,tallying the dead and wounded. "Ten fatalities, all within a foot ofground zero," I reported to my brother. "We could up the kill ratioif we included shrapnel," I suggested, picking up a burnt, disfigured survivor. It was 1984 and kill ratios were all the rage on the TV news, but after I said it, I immediately wished I hadn’t. Shrapnel sounded malicious, somehow–like it meant to maim someone. I avoided my brother’s gaze, looking at my hands and the dying spark of amphibian life I held in them. A milky white liquid was leaking from the toad’s eyes.

We stayed up late that night, talking. Lying in our beds, we blabbed excitedly about all the neat stuff in the world–rockets and computers and TNT and dynamite and a place he knew where they sold it by the stick. But we never went there. Dynamite wasn’t a toy and was only fun to talk about. In my daydreams, the long red cylinders were always detonated by a man in a wide-brimmed hat and a poker face pushing down on a T-shaped plunger set on a rectangular box with wires running out of it. I never wanted to be that man. What if I accidentally blew someone to smithereens? "Ten fatalities, sir," I would have to report. "All people."

One big gray chunk of Uranium-235 was the fish’s head and a smallerone, the tail. Stick the two lumps together, the text explained, andthe atoms simply went to work overtime, suddenly releasing copiousamounts of energy. Kablooie. I thought it strange and frightening that11 kilograms of anything could explode without provocation. All of asudden the world became a dangerous place. I had always pictured atombombs as impossibly complicated devices full of wires, blinking lights,and pulsing lasers. Now, nuclear scenarios whizzed around in my head.

What if I was walking in a field and kicked a rock and it hit a boulderand it turns out they were both Uranium? Bang. I might accidentallyvaporize a small city. Worse yet, I could picture myself on a lousyday–when I was in a particularly foul mood–assembling a thermonucleardevice in my room and disintegrating the house and all of our neighborsout of spite. I gently closed the book and tiptoed to my room.

The next summer I spent walking around Japan. My parents thought that traveling up and down that country on the bullet train was a good way to get me out of my room. And so I found myself one afternoon in the station ofyet another small Japanese city, looking for a place to spend thenight. I wandered around town and into a small museum. And inside, itdawned on me. I was in Hiroshima. In the A-bomb museum.

I’d been trudging back and forth over ground zero all afternoon. I pressedinward. As a child, I had always been curious what a person withoutskin looked like. In dark corridors of that museum I got my first awfulglimpse, and my second, and my third. Pictures of survivors of theblast lined the walls. In my mind I could smell their seared,half-decaying flesh. Survivors. What did they have left but pain? Imarveled at the cruelty people inflict on each other. On the same wall,that familiar gray fish-diagram from the pages of my encyclopedia, onlybigger. "Atomic bomb, schematic." Beneath it lay a life-sizedreplica of "Little Boy" the shiny metal man-sized canister ofexploding Uranium.

I scrutinized pictures and diagrams of theconcentric circles of destruction wrought by Little Boy and thought ofmy chemistry-set bombs and my toads. I thought of shrapnel and the menwho made this new weapon. I imagined the pilots in wide-brimmed hatsand poker faces flying their plane away after dropping their payload."60,000 fatalities sir, all within a one-and-a-half mile radius ofground zero," they would report. "All people."

On the same wall, a report from J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists urging U.S. president Harry Truman to drop the atom bomb. "We see no acceptable alternative to direct military use," they concluded. These were brilliant men. What exactly did they see? Did they see the screaming skinless children? The radiation-mutated babies? Maybe theysaw gagging, skinless, salted grandfathers, garden hoses down theirthroats, Japanese soldiers in boots standing on their stomachs andthought, "it’s us or them." I remember a story:

A German physicist named Heisenberg–smart as Einstein,if not more–responds to a letter from Hitler. "Nuclear bomb?" hewrites, "Impossible. No such thing is possible." Satisfied, Hitlerfocuses German scientific research elsewhere and loses the nuclearrace. Of course Heisenberg was lying, the story goes. He knew it couldbe done, but for personal, perhaps moral reasons, he chose to not letit happen. "Don’t bother putting shrapnel in that bomb. It won’tkill any more toads."

What did he see? Japanese kids swimming toschool through torrents of falling fire? This vaporized city? I look ata photograph on the museum wall. A half-burned baby crying beside itsdead mother. Did Oppenheimer burn lizards as a child? I wonder. DidHeisenberg ever electrocute a toad? Maybe he did. And afterwards,perhaps he looked into its eyes and saw its tears.

In September of1996, 140 United Nations, including the United States, signed a treatyprohibiting all nuclear explosions on the planet. The Critical Test BanTreaty (CTBT) will go into force after it has been ratified in 44requisite countries. The intent of the treaty is to stop nucleartesting thereby curbing the future development of nuclear weapons. In1997 the U.S. began deploying a new version of an older nuclear bomb.The re-designed B61 bomb drills deep into the earth before exploding ina blast whose shockwaves can pulverize underground structures such asbomb shelters. The B61-11 was secretly developed using computersimulations rather than nuclear test blasts, circumventing the CTBT.More nuclear weapons continue to be designed in this way.