Einstein's Monsters (2 page)

In the discursive sphere there are several ways of writing badly about nuclear weapons. Some people, you finally conclude, just don’t get it. They just don’t get it. They are published versions of those bus-stop raconteurs who claim that nuclear war won’t be “that bad,” especially if they can make it down to their aunt’s cottage in Dorset (or, better still, if they are already in their aunt’s cottage at the time). They do not see the way nuclear weapons put everything into italic capitals. Failing to get the point about nuclear weapons is like failing to get the point about human life. This, in fact, is the basis of our difficulty.

It is gratifying in a way that all military-industrial writing about nuclear “options” should be instantly denatured by the nature of the weapons it describes, as if language itself were refusing to cooperate with such notions. (In this sense language is a lot more fastidious than reality, which has doggedly accepted the antireality of the nuclear age.) In the can-do world of nuclear “conflict management,” we hear talk of
retaliating first;
in this world, deaths in the lower tens of millions are called
acceptable;
in this world, hostile, provocative, destabilizing nuclear weapons are aimed at nuclear weapons
(counterforce)
, while peaceful, defensive, security-conscious nuclear weapons (there they languish, adorably pouting) are aimed at cities
(countervalue).
In this world, opponents of the current reality are known as
cranks.
“Deceptive basing modes,” “dense pack groupings,” “baseline terminal defense,” “the Football” (i.e., the Button), acronyms like BAMBI, SAINTS, PALS, and AWDREY (Atomic Weapons Detection, Recognition, and Estimation of Yield), “the Jedi concept” (near-lightspeed plasma weapons), “Star Wars” itself: these locutions take you out onto the sports field—or back to the nursery.

In fact there is a resilient theme of infantilism throughout the history of nuclear management. Trinity, the first bomb (nicknamed the Gadget), was winched up into position on a contraption known as “the cradle”; during the countdown the Los Alamos radio station broadcast a lullaby, Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings”; scientists speculated whether the Gadget was going to be a “girl” (i.e., a dud) or a “boy” (i.e., a device that might obliterate New Mexico). The Hiroshima bomb was called Little Boy. “It’s a boy!” pronounced Edward Teller, the “father” of the H-bomb, when “Mike” (“my baby”) was detonated over Bikini Atoll in 1952.… It is ironic, because
they
are the little boys;
we
are the little boys. And the irony has since redoubled. By threatening extinction, the ultimate antipersonnel device is in essence an antibaby device. One is not referring here to the babies who will die but to the babies who will never be born, those that are queueing up in spectral relays until the end of time.

I first became interested in nuclear weapons during the summer of 1984. Well, I say I “became” interested, but really I was interested all along. Everyone is interested in nuclear weapons, even those people who affirm and actually believe that they never give the question a moment’s thought. We are all interested parties. Is it possible never to think about nuclear weapons? If you give no thought to nuclear weapons, if you give no thought to the most momentous development in the history of the species, then what
are
you giving them? In that case the process, the seepage, is perhaps preconceptual, physiological, glandular. The man with the cocked gun in his mouth may boast that he never thinks about the cocked gun. But he tastes it, all the time.

My interest in nuclear weapons was the result of a coincidence. The two elements were impending fatherhood and a tardy reading of Jonathan Schell’s classic, awakening study,
The Fate of the Earth.
It woke
me
up. Until then, it seems, I had been out cold. I hadn’t really thought about nuclear weapons. I had just been tasting them. Now at last I knew what was making me feel so sick.

How do things go when morality bottoms out at the top? Our leaders maintain the means to perform the unthinkable. They contemplate the unthinkable, on our behalf. We hope, modestly enough, to get through life without being murdered; rather more confidently, we hope to get through life without murdering anybody ourselves. Nuclear weapons take such matters out of our hands: we may die, and die with butcher’s aprons around our waists. I believe that many of the deformations and perversities of the modern setting are related to—and are certainly dwarfed by—this massive preemption. Our moral contracts are inevitably weakened, and in unpredictable ways. After all, what
acte gratuit
, what vulgar outrage or moronic barbarity can compare with the black dream of nuclear exchange?

Against the hyperinflation of death that has cheapened all life, it is salutary to return to the physics, to remind ourselves about nuclear
scale.
The amount of mass expended in the razing of Hiroshima was about a thirtieth of an ounce—no heavier than a centime. In accordance with Einstein’s equation, a single gram assumed the properties of 12,500 tons of TNT (together with certain properties of its own). This is Jonathan Schell:

 … the energy yielded by application of the universal physics of the twentieth century exceeds the energy yielded by that of the terrestrial, or planetary, physics of the nineteenth century as the cosmos exceeds the earth. Yet it was within the earth’s comparatively tiny, frail ecosphere that mankind released the newly tapped cosmic energy.

Let us ignore, for a moment, the gigaton gigantism of present-day arsenals and reflect on what a single megaton could do: it could visit Hiroshima-scale destruction on every state capital in America, with about thirty bombs to spare. The Soviet arsenal alone could kill approximately twenty-two billion people—or it could if there were twenty-two billion people around to kill. But there are only four billion people around to kill. And still we pursue the dynamic rationale of the missile gap. There is no
gap.
We live in a Manhattan of missiles. Rather, there is no room. We are full up.

Meanwhile the debate goes on. And what kind of debate is it? What is its tone? If we look at the controversy over the Strategic Defense Initiative we find that this, for instance, is Ronald Reagan’s tone: “[SDI] isn’t about fear, it’s about hope, and in that struggle, if you will pardon my stealing a film line, the Force is with us.” No, we will not pardon his stealing a film line. And the Force is not with us. The Force is against us. In such terms, at any rate (terms that aspire to an infinite frivolity), President Reagan entrained “an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history,” but which also, he allowed, involved “risks.” Unfortunately the risk is that of
ending
the course of human history. “God will not forgive us if we fail,” Brezhnev told Carter at the pre-Afghanistan summit. Carter liked the phrase and used it himself, with one politic emendation. “History,” he said, “will not forgive us if we fail.” Actually Brezhnev was nearer the mark. In the event of “failure,” God might just make it, whereas history would not.

Three books on SDI—three quickies on the end of time—have recently landed on my desk, two pro and one anti.
How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete
is by Robert Jas trow, the man who jumped into newsprint the day after the space-shuttle disaster with the comment, “It’s almost fishy.” First, Jastrow makes it clear how much he hopes that World War III can, if possible, be avoided, how much he would regret and deplore such an eventuality (the tone is the familiar one of hurried moral gentrification, as if this were all a wearisome matter of etiquette and appearances); he then addresses himself to the main business of the book, a stirred account of “The Battle.” Here in the midst of the technophiliac space-opera we glimpse the president coolly “ordering” this and “deciding” that, coolly erecting his untried “peace shield” as hemispherical butchery looms in the skies above. In fact the president, if he has not been vaporized by a suitcase bomb in the Russian embassy, will be understandably immersed in his own nervous breakdown, along with every other actor in this psychotic fantasy. For Jastrow, the unthinkable is thinkable. He is wrong, and in this respect he is also, I contend, subhuman, like all the nuclear-war fighters, like all the “prevailers.” The unthinkable is unthinkable; the unthinkable is not thinkable, not by human beings, because the eventuality it posits is one in which all human contexts would have already vanished. SDI can never be tested, and neither can the actors. How they would respond at such a time is anyone’s guess. But they would no longer be human beings. In a sense, nobody would be. That status does not exist on the other side of the firebreak.

Solly Zuckerman has suggested that the Allies’ complaisance on SDI, lukewarm and hangdog though it was, could not have survived a reading of Jastrow. Probably the same could not be said for Alun Chalfont, whose
Star Wars: Suicide or Survival?
welcomes SDI in the baritone of gruff realism. True, the Initiative will entail “high risk”; true, the Initiative “calls for an entirely new approach to the doctrines underlying arms control policies”; true, the Initiative will cost a trillion dollars. But it’s worth it. Highly risky, entirely revolutionary, and incredibly expensive, it’s worth it—because of the Gap. The Soviets will soon be doing it, or have started doing it, or (he sometimes seems to suggest) have already done it. So we’d better do it too.… Interestingly, what exercises Lord Chalfont is not the existence of nuclear weapons, an existence which, he says, cannot be “repealed.”
^*
What exercises Lord Chalfont is the existence of their opponents. Now here is something we
can
get rid of. Civility, in any case, absents itself from his prose whenever the subject of peace—or “peace”—is wearily introduced. “Immediately the peace industry begins its predictable uproar … a coalition of misguided idealists, with a sprinkling of useful idiots and Soviet agents (conscious and unconscious).” Annoyed by references to the war “industry,” he nonetheless accords industrial status to the peace movement. Why? Where are the factory townships of peace? Where are its trillion-dollar budgets? At one point Chalfont discusses American plans

for the deployment of enhanced radiation warheads in Europe … there is, at once, an uproar against the “neutron bomb”—described by the mentally enfeebled as a capitalist weapon, designed to kill people but preserve property.

Chalfont isn’t happy with the phrase “capitalist weapon,” and one concurs. But how happy is he with “enhanced radiation warheads”? How happy is he with “enhanced”?

E. P. Thompson is unfortunately not much nearer to finding the voice of appropriate and reliable suasion. He has made great sacrifices for the cause he leads; he is brilliant, he is charismatic, he is inspiring; but he is not reliable. In
Star Wars
, as elsewhere, Professor Thompson shows himself to be the fit exponent of the nuclear High Style. He is witty and grand, writing with the best kind of regulated hatred. How devastating he is, for example, on the SDI public-relations effort. From the confidential literature:

Innumberable opportunities for highly visible “cause” activism could be opened up … interest to Catholics also.… Such a ratification effort would permit the White House to look good in confronting powerful anti-BMD domestic critics … addresses “Eurostrategic” issues, which are big today … play freely on high-road ethical themes (by far the best mobilizational approach) …

Thompson is devastating about SDI; his case is well-nigh complete. But he will devastate nobody—indeed, he may even subvert the converted—because he has no respect for tone.

His tone is lax, impatient, often desperately uncertain; it is excitedly alarmist; it takes pleasure in stupidity. His anti-Americanism (“the US of A is inherently moral,” “President of Planet Earth,” “I want you Commies to come out with your hands up”) is as dated and grueling, and as much a matter of stock response, as the counterprejudices of Lord Chalfont. Thompson also makes jokes. He likes this joke so well that he cracks it twice:

Already, the soon-to-be President warned, the window [of vulnerability] might be so wide open that “the Russians could just take us with a phone call.” “Hallo! Mr. Reagan, is zat you? Tovarich Brezhnev here. Come on out with your hands up, or I put zis Bomb through the window!”

Everything in you recoils from this. You sit back and rub your eyes, wondering how much damage it has done. For in the nuclear debate, as in no other, the penalty for such lapses is incalculable. Human beings are unanimous about nuclear weapons; human institutions are not. Our hopes lie in a gradual symbiosis. We must find the language of unanimity.

I argue with my father about nuclear weapons. In this debate, we are all arguing with our fathers. They emplaced or maintained the status quo. They got it hugely wrong. They failed to see the nature of what they were dealing with—the nature of the weapons—and now they are trapped in the new reality, trapped in the great mistake. Perhaps there will be no hope until they are gone. Out on the fringes there are people who believe that we ought to start killing certain of our fathers, before they kill us. This reminds me of the noble syllogism (adduced by Schell) of Failed Deterrence: “He, thinking I was about to kill him in self-defense, was about to kill me in self-defense. So I killed him in self-defense.” Yes, and then he killed me in retaliation, from the grave. Our inherited reality is infinitely humiliating. We must try to do a little better.

My father regards nuclear weapons as an unbudgeable given. They will always be necessary because the Soviets will always have them and the Soviets will always want to enslave the West. Arms agreements are no good because the Soviets will always cheat. Unilateral disarmament equals surrender. And anyway, it isn’t a case of “red or dead.” The communist world is itself nuclear-armed and deeply divided: so it’s a case of “red
and
dead.”