In "Advice to a Prophet" Wilbur suggests that the most potent argument against nuclear weapons is that their use would put an end to this dialogue between persons and the world. Of more concern to us than the prospect of physical loss is the prospect of losing meaning from the lives of individuals and from the whole human family:

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The prophet wants to tell what is obvious, that nuclear war would destroy the planet; and Wilbur urges that he shock us into an awareness of the enormity of our potential loss. But, he says, the rhetoric of "weapons, their force and range, / The long numbers that rocket the mind" will not convince "Our slow unreckoning hearts." Neither will "talk of the death of the race," for it too is beyond comprehension. So Wilbur proposes that the prophet "speak of the world’s own change," to speak of familiar incidents of loss within the natural realm. Though the heart is "slow and unreckoning," it knows how to grieve. The human heart will know the pang of loss that comes when a familiar shape disappears in the clouds or when leaves change from vital green to deathly black due to an overnight frost. The losses from nuclear annihilation are these losses that we know so well made "perfect," total and final. Then the poet tells the prophet why the prospect of these losses touches us so deeply. He says just as the natural world cannot be itself without our projections of meaning; so, too, we ourselves are inexplicable without a world to provide apt metaphors for "all we mean and wish to mean." We are homo loquens and our language, the essence of our being, depends on the "live tongue" of nature. The prophet must remind us, in other words, that the self and nature are radically interdependent.