“137” is a philosophical account of the end of the world via nuclear annihilation. It portrays the carelessness with which mankind seems to treat conflict in the era of mutually assured destruction and yet another nail in the coffin of the narrator’s religious faith – the very idea that a benevolent creator deity would purposefully give humanity the ability to destroy itself so completely.

Despondency ensues, as god doesn’t seem to care about the moral ramifications of the conflict or its insane justifications; only that death is assured and that humans should simply “learn to love the bomb”, a phrase deriving from the subtitle of director Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 anti-nuclear war film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

The title refers to the radioactive isotope Caesium-137, of which there was no trace in the Earth’s atmosphere or in nature before the first nuclear detonation. Ever since the introduction of nuclear weapons and reactors, trace amounts of the isotope have rapidly spread across the planet.