Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real. Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem "Darkness"

I had a dream, which was not all a dream. / The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars / Did wander darkling in the eternal space, / Rayless, and pathless; and the icy Earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; / Morn came and went — and came, and brought no day,... / All earth was but one thought — and that was Death…