A Blast from the Past
A few weeks back, someone asked if Putin’s nuclear threats over Ukraine scare me. No, I said, it feels like a throwback. I grew up in the Cold War 1950s, hid under school desks in bomb drills. One National Civil Defense Day, my younger sister, sick at home and watching on TV, hid under her favorite blanket, made by my mother and printed with tiny black-and-white pandas. Later, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, I walked down a high school corridor, lights dimmed, but still just bright enough to glint a little off the buffed linoleum floor. And I wondered, could we actually be closing in on the end of the human story. Now you see us, now you don’t? And how crazy was that? Pile up enough such incidents and the only viable option is to stop worrying and just live.
Lessons Unlearned
I emphasize human and physical memory details as anchors. The idea we might have to worry about “the bomb” again feels like something from another, more primitive, age. And it is. I’m exasperated. Not this again! Haven’t we learned anything? Could it be we never “got over” the shocking flash that dropped us unawares into the nuclear age? No one likes to think about what happened to the people under the mushroom clouds. But even back then it was known hiding under desks wouldn’t protect from fallout, burns, radiation sickness. And then there were the attempts to dial back and normalize. Yes, it’s a weapon we mostly don’t ever want to use. But it can also be a source of unlimited power, all the power we’ll ever need. What good news! As if we’d found the alchemists’ philosopher’s stone. As my dad used to say, everything has its plusses and minuses.
Science, Sin, and Secrecy
The 1981 documentary Day After Trinity featured interviews with scientists on the team that developed the bomb. They worried the first test might catch the whole atmosphere on fire. And they went ahead anyway. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who ran the team, famously said, “Science has known sin.” Knowledge may be power but knowing “too much” can be dangerous. Oppenheimer tried to restrain nuclear fervor, but had his security clearance yanked, based on suspicions he was too left leaning, maybe even a covert Communist, and therefore a security risk. He died in his mid-50s and looks haunted in last photos. Andrei Sakharov, a leader in developing the USSR’s thermonuclear bomb, lived longer and turned dissident and activist for disarmament. Awarded the Nobel Prize, but not allowed to travel to collect it, he spent his final years under virtual house arrest.
Political Opportunism and Layers of Punishment
In this country, after the scientists came politicians, who knew much less but applied a boosterish zeal to the US having a power the rest of the world didn’t. Then the USSR set off its own bomb, which prompted a search for people to blame and punish. Who gave them our secrets? Were we harboring subversives? And the times became hugely punishing—House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC), Army-McCarthy hearings, blacklists, loyalty oaths. Too young to be aware, but I did once see Senator McCarthy on TV. We didn’t yet have one and I’d stopped next door to walk to school with the McCarthy girls (no relation). And there he was, arm in a sling. I only put his identity together later and realized the arm was the result of hepatitis, due to his alcoholism, which caused liver cirrhosis and eventually killed him at age 48. So political opportunism is only the most visible of multiple layers. It’s important to remember that in these days of internet trolling.
Kubrick’s Satirical Reflection
Stanley Kubrick caught the spirit of the age when he attached a subtitle to his film Dr. Strangelove (1964). How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb captures paranoia, hysteria, anxiety and surreal yet weirdly optimistic qualities of those times, when love was often in short supply. Not surprising, when you consider we’d recently come through the biggest war ever, then learned of the horrific holocaust genocide that brutalized and then murdered millions just for being who they were, and of this brand-new technology, capable of destroying everything. It was as if the world had been torn off its axis. But people didn’t talk much about trauma back then. Perhaps Slim Pickens enacted a weird kind of self-destructive love at the end of Kubrick’s film, when he leapt onto the warhead just as it was released from the bomb bay, wrapped himself around it and rode it down toward earth.
From MAD to Putin’s Taboos
Eventually, after the raw wore off, the world calmed down some and went back to old geopolitical “balance of power” and “spheres of influence.” And the confrontation devolved into the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) policy, recognizing that full-scale use of nuclear weapons by the opposing sides would cause complete annihilation of both. And how crazy is that? But it allowed us to walk along the edge and make do the best we can, to live. Now, Putin has reintroduced what had been treated as taboo. A New York Times story described a new generation of nukes that is “smaller, less destructive, and less unthinkable.” And Russian troops are trained to transition from conventional to nuclear, to regain the upper hand when they may be losing. Now, that does scare me. Cross a taboo once and it’s too easy to do it again. We are human, prone to losing humility, to overreaching. Oppenheimer, at that first test, quoted the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Let’s hope we can find another way yet again before this goes too far.