Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Again.
“You destroy me. You are good for me.” —Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Nukes are back. Big time.
For almost two decades, AI and the rise of the machines managed to do something that would have been unthinkable in the 1980s when I was a teenager: crowd out thermonuclear weapons for first place in the contest for ending humanity. Even if it was coldly calculating computers euthanizing humanity in movies like War Games and The Terminator during the 1980s, it was the spectacular stage-presence of atomic power that garbed the Grim Reaper of our civilization back then. In terms of brute force destruction, there is still nothing that comes close to nukes.
Russia’s relatively predictable invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has probably been the primary, though certainly not the only, factor in reviving atomic fears after many years on the back-burner of popular imagination. Putin’s imperial ambitions have brought nuclear saber-rattling and terms such as “nuclear blackmail” back in vogue. North Korea postures its growing arsenal like a body-builder on a competition stage. China aggressively super-sizes its ICBM force. Iran is ready to go nuclear pretty much whenever it wants.
Judging from the podcast circuit and scholarly journals, nuclear Armageddon is reemerging as something about which to obsess. Recently, New York Times Pulitzer finalist and author Annie Jacobsen has been making the rounds on venues as varied as the Joe Rogan Show and Lex Fridman, describing the micro-mechanics of how a major atomic war would play out. For those of you inclined towards the quantitative, the number is 72. 72 is precisely how many minutes Jacobsen alleges it would take for the world to end, from the moment the U.S. president receives notification of a potentially hostile launch. Does this help focus your attention on why it really, really matters whom we elect as the next commander-in-chief? Me too. To be clear, 72 minutes is not the time it would take for the first missiles to strike…that could be as few as 15 depending on the type and location of launch. Widespread death and Satanic mayhem, a teaser if you will, will occur before most people even know it is happening. 72 minutes is the stop-clock for truly global game-over.
It was in the last few summers however, that a must-listen series of interviews was released on Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast (see episode #330: “The Doomsday Machine” and #210: “The Logic of Doomsday”). In the most recent, provoked by the release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Sam interviews a prominent expert on nuclear proliferation and war, Carl Robichaud, former lead grant-raiser at what for some decades was the world’s largest philanthropic fund dedicated to nuclear security. The interview is a masterclass in the history of nuclear weapons and their use, strategy, proliferation, near-disasters, and the seemingly intractable practical and moral conundrums they present. Sam Harris observes: “It’s like we were convinced 75 years ago to rig all of our houses and buildings to explode, and then we just got distracted by other things…and most of us live each day totally unaware that the status quo is as precarious as it in fact is.”
M.A.D., or mutually assured destruction from any actor’s decision for first-use of nuclear weapons, is the absurd yet seemingly inescapable principle that has arguably guaranteed the longest, most peaceful era in recorded human history (see Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now!). But it is also fatally based on the assumption that state actors will act “rationally” (what could possibly go wrong?). As several near-misses demonstrate, we have dodged numerous near-catastrophes based simply on faulty evidence. The culprits have included aggressive formations of politically non-aligned swans mistaken as missiles by radar, marauding black bears, and faulty computer chips. This is the stuff of dark comedy. You don’t even need to inject a proverbial mad mullah or fanatic terrorist into the equation for things to go very bad, very quickly. And, of course, the radioactive icing on the cake is that once nuclear weapons are launched, they can’t be whistled back home.
Even a limited, “local” nuclear war would be no cricket match. Think of the global fallout, real and metaphorical, of an India versus Pakistan exchange (as former Defense Secretary William Perry does in another Sam Interview and in his chilling video “Bill Perry’s South Asia Nuclear Nightmare”). Even far from the target zones, the impact on the global climate, food supply, and economy strain imagination. Not to mention the millions instantly killed. And mark the alarming deterioration lately of the “no first use doctrine.” No one’s even playing by the old “I won’t, if you want” rule anymore, as Russia’s Putin and a recent Pakistani prime minister have both abandoned, at least rhetorically, the no-first-use doctrine.
Have we just grown too used to living with nuclear weapons? And is it possible, or even desirable, to rekindle the nuclear anxieties that my teenage cohort took for granted in the 1980s? Today’s teens have already been labeled the “Anxious Generation.” The kids are not alright, so why freak them out even more?
All of this creepy chatter, so familiar, causes me to reflect on my own nuclear timeline. The one that bizarrely tracks key early periods of my life. While I’m not nearly old enough to have experienced the easily mocked “Duck and Cover!” videos and songs of my parents’ generation, my own micro-trauma was real enough. At 13, I had the unusual double-curse of being genuinely curious about geopolitics and steeped in the religious eschatology of the Southern Baptist Church.
Prepping
One evening in 1983, like President Ronald Reagan and more than 100 million other Americans, I huddled in front of the family television to watch “The Day After,” a fictionalized drama about a “limited” nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well. Though its scenes are quite sanitized compared to contemporary movie graphics, they were horrifying at the time. The film’s impact was such that it strongly influenced Reagan’s transformation from “Nuke-em Dukem” to a utopian champion of disarmament only three years later, once suggesting to a gape-mouthed Mikhail Gorbachev that their two countries get rid of all their nuclear toys. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. If you happen to be a masochist like me who enjoys end-of-the-world and dystopian films, check out the Day After’s U.K.-Australian, low-budget counterpart which came out a year later. Threads is an even more dismal and hope-suffocating viewing. It’s basically the more realistic prequel to Mad Max with starvation, radiation poisoning, murder and rape.
“The Day After” freaked a lot of people out, including me. So much so, that I obsessively studied and planned for possible nuclear war the next two years. It probably didn’t help that this was the most socially awkward, nerdy and lonely period of my life. I pored over classic textbooks on nuclear strategy and war. I learned the blast radiuses of nuclear missiles based on their megatonnage and measured with my school compass in what circle-of-Hell awfulness my house located me from downtown Dallas. On one occasion, my father discovered, and furiously, that I had accumulated over 30 carefully sanitized 2-liter soda bottles filled with water. They were stocked and stashed in my bedroom closet and under my bed. You know, in case shit got real. Needless to say, I wasn”t inviting 6th grade chicks over to check out my water hoard between exchanging friendship beads and games of spin-the-bottle. I was a “prepper” before prepping was cool.
A year later, dateline of George Orwell’s pseudo-prophetic 1984, another movie came out that provided a less fatalistic outlet for youthful nightmare scenarios. It was pure Ronald Reagan material. Red Dawn. Brimming with Brat Pack or Brat Pack-adjacent young actors and Lee Greenwood patriotism, the film provided a post-nuclear scenario where one could imagine a more proactive, even positive, Day After. Again, the theme was a “limited” nuclear war. Teenagers leading the hometown resistance to Soviet occupation. Freedom fighters in letter jackets.
A buddy’s father was always taking us along to gun shows that year, and we would slyly choose what weapons and resources we would choose to supply our own “Wolverines” survivalist cell. There were stalls that specialized in such fantasies. Todd and I debated where we should shelter once the conflagration had passed, oblivious to the fact that all transportation might be defunct. My grandparent’s Oklahoma farm, which had plenty of acreage, a storm cellar, and a large garden? Suddenly, the farming that had bored me or chored me to death during my summer stays there inspired my fervent interest. My grandmother’s face wrinkled with suspicion at my sudden curiosity about vegetable canning and pickling. Or maybe Jemez Springs, New Mexico, with its rugged mountains and canyons, and where my parents had once owned a tiny cabin, another idyllic childhood retreat? My father had worked as a lumberjack in those forests in his teens and early 20s, and we had indigenous friends there. Forget the fact that the Los Alamos National Laboratory was barely 39 miles northeast of Jemez Springs, an obvious ground zero in any mass nuclear strike. Ridiculously less realistic than The Day After and other post-apocalyptic cinema, Red Dawn promised something the other similar films did not: Agency. Heroism, hope, and young love after the Russians dropped the bomb.
The End is Near (but Jesus Loves You)
But before the policy wonk side of nuclear Armageddon seduced me, I had already been properly prepped by Hal Lindsey. Anyone who grew up among Southern Baptists in the 1980s knows whom and what I’m talking about: The Late, Great Planet Earth. I don’t wish to be unjustly reductionist about this magisterial work, complete with charts and graphs, but it essentially predicted that the Cold War chickens were coming home to roost sometime before (when else?) Christmas 1988. Nuclear war is coming, and if you haven’t already, should accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior. Pascal’s Wager presents itself in the starkest terms. It was a bestseller with over 35 million copies and counting years after its grisly deadline elapsed. Having spent several summers of my life in a small, country church and reading the Bible when sermons were boring, I had already been primed for this apocalyptic frenzy by the Book of Revelations. Insider tip: Any Christian who tells you that the Book of Revelations isn’t the most interesting book in the Bible is lying. It’s totally metal. While the Song of Solomon is poetic… “thy neck is like an ivory tower, about which are hung the shields of a thousand potentates”… no one wants to make a movie out of it. Unless, some weirdly Christian version of 50 Shades of Grey. The Book of Revelations, which bequeathed us the word and notion of “Armageddon” as apocalypse, was ready-made for both movies and the nuclear age.
Growing up with evangelical Christianity that decade was simply the best fluffing for Judgment Day fireworks, and the nuclear arms race was Viagra. For an impressionable mind, it merged two great disaster narratives, each rendering the other more believable. I learned the entire lexicon of evangelical eschatology. The difference between premillennial dispensationalism and amillennialism. Practically speaking, whether you want to be driving a car, or not, when the Rapture occurs. I knew all that shit before Kurt Cameron and the “Left Behind” series made it cool. I had the requisite theology and messianic conditioning. My copy of Late Great Planet Earth was as well-thumbed and creased as a Playboy Magazine lifted by an 11 year-old from his father’s stash. I could quote numbers if you asked me about Soviet nuclear delivery systems, their payloads (a wonderfully awful word, “payload”), and which part of the Triad they belonged to. I could have basically understood what Henry Kissinger was talking about in a National Security Council meeting at age 13. Blame my late start to getting girls on this fact.
Not So Quiet on the Eastern Front
In 1984, at age 14, I spent my summer living with a family in (then) West Germany. On the front lines of World War III! My anxiety fed upon the proximity. Reagan’s deployment of Pershing IRBMs (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles) to West Germany the year before had provoked what many historians consider the highest level of nuclear tensions since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Massive peace movement/disarmament protests blossomed across Europe. Visions of Red Dawn danced in my head. While trying to learn the language during the day, at nights I would design plans for a bomb shelter on graph paper. How I was going to get the money to build it, or the parental buy-in, failed to factor in. It is difficult, in retrospect, to gauge how much of my hyperactivity over nuclear doom was primal fear versus morbid fascination. At age 11, I had discovered Dungeons & Dragons, like all cool kids in 5th-6th grade, and fortified by Hal Lindsey and Red Dawn, my imagination didn’t need much teasing to take flight.
But something else happened that summer in Germany. When not bunker planning and fawning over cast-away Bundeswehr uniform jackets and tank-tops worn by cool village teens, I was growing up. A living character from Nena’s 99 Luftballons video. The son of my host family, Frank, was 16. We spent the weekends riding around on motorcycles, drinking beer around bonfires, roasting juicy, fat brats, and climbing trees to pick the succulent black cherries from local orchards. I crashed someone’s motorcycle while learning to ride. I remember once pulling a half-chewed berry from my mouth and finding it pre-habited by maggots. Not long after I left Germany, Frank died in a motorcycle accident. Also, that summer, I lost my virginity.
The discovery of sex that summer marked a strange rite of passage, the physical event itself being a messy, haphazard and typically sweet-and-sour teen affair. The insecurities of post-puberty jostling and thronging along with thoughts of imminent incineration. Nuclear fear and sexual desire are weirdly intertwined in my adolescence.
In case you don’t remember your history, we (the U.S.A.) “won” the Cold War. Some mark the official date by the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989 or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but why quibble. When the Berlin Wall fell, or rather was joyously and forcibly deconstructed by Germans on both sides of the wall, the symbolism was universal. My father, a wedding photographer and photography teacher, flew over to document the unfolding scenes. In the summer of 1989 I flew back to Germany once again, this time to Berlin, to stay with a young East German man my father had met at the Wall. For two weeks we prowled the abandoned buildings of the city’s east side where illegal Bohemian bars and clubs were springing up like mushrooms in the post-Industrial wasteland. It was heady stuff. No nuclear fears this time. The party was great. Two years later, the Soviet Union, that “Evil Empire” faced down by Ronnie Reagan, imploded. Conveniently, the coincidence of the end of the Cold War with my graduation from high school was a graduation gift from the Universe to me.
Nuclear Agony and Ecstasy
The difference between how I felt between 1984 and 1992 is striking.
When the early 1990s found me a college freshman, no one really worried about nukes anymore. Well, no one except those in policy circles devoted to the question of what to do with all of these leftover nuclear arsenals. And what about all of these unemployed nuclear scientists and poorly secured fissile materials? We trusted the experts to dust up the detritus. In the 1960s, Tom Lehrer had written and performed a still-hilarious piano song about nuclear proliferation. This issue would soon return with a vengeance, providing the (erroneous) primary justification for the second American invasion of Iraq. Welcome soon to the Club, North Korea and Pakistan!
But at the time, most people sighed in collective relief that we had just dodged the greatest existential bullet of all time after decades of suspense. Ukraine became the first, and probably most regretful, country to ever voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons. It was time to spend that Peace Dividend. The future was so bright, we had to wear shades. But not because of a bomb flash like the ones that blinded thousands instantly at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I had studied at universities in the Peoples’ Republic of China and Soviet Union, respectively, in 1986 and 1987. Totalitarian countries didn’t seem that scary anymore, if you didn’t live there. In Kiev, Ukraine, at age 16, I fell in love for probably the first time. A dusky 21 year old college student named Lisa rocked my teenage world, bending me backwards in a creaky Soviet hotel elevator and kissing the breath out of me, a role reversal with her as Rhett Butler and me as Scarlett. You know it was true love, because I later risked my freedom and youth to rot away in a Soviet Gulag by smuggling bartered Soviet military uniforms out of the country for her. That is also why, to this day, I bleed blue and yellow.
Upon graduation, having incessantly pestered all my classmates about China’s pro-democracy movement, my high school class mockingly voted me “Most Likely to Lead the Democratic Chinese Revolution” after the tragic Tiananmen Square massacre. I wore the t-shirt they gave me, bearing the iconic photo of that lone student standing in front of the tank, for years. Democracy on the march; the setbacks were sure to be only temporary. And democracies don’t go to war with one another.* My junior year in college, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, I spent a summer in St. Petersburg, now the Russian Republic, giving university lectures on American politics and culture. We loved the Russians and the Russians loved us. The Cold War, Communism, nuclear annihilation? These were now the stuff of oddly nostalgic romance. We toasted each other gratuitously, and it’s possible I hugged more Russians in sauced revelries that summer than I hugged all other people combined the decade after. Flirting with young mafia princelings and ex-KGB agents seemed innocent enough, and was relatively safe, then. In 1992, Russia was also undergoing a sexual revolution, young singles released from the state puritanism of the Soviet era. Free love was in the air. That year it was good to be young…and American…or Russian…under St. Petersburg’s storied White Nights. One morning we rented a boat, stocked it with 2 dollar bottles of decent Georgian champagne, to cruise up and down the Neva River until we said “stop.” I don’t remember ever uttering the safe word, but we wound up, me and a half dozen Russians on the floor of my borrowed flat, the old phonograph playing the Beatles “Taste of Honey” album on repeat. We had arranged it so we formed a circle with our heads all pointing to the center of the circle. No one wanted to move. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. When I started graduate school in political science in 1998, the Cold War was truly dead and buried. Francis Fukuyama had declared the “End of History” and the atomic dragons of my youth had retired to mostly subconscious caves.
But even during the golden 1990s, my nuclear dreams never completely subsided. As an over-awed college freshman I watched Hiroshima, Mon Amour. This odd French New Wave film, interlaced with evocative scenes and references to Hiroshima, charmed me in a way I couldn’t articulate. My greatest undergraduate professor, a British Navy veteran and crypto-Marxist, took me on a winding journey in a series of interdisciplinary classes. They enabled me to critically re-visit the Cold War and all of its monsters, not only the ones on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In his classes we encountered more dystopian and post-nuclear artistic imaginings, such as Dr. Strangelove, Ridley Walker and The Handmaid’s Tale. One non-fiction book, Nuclear Fear, traced the complex love-hate relationship between modern society with regards to the atom as a source of energy and doom. In The Crisis of Our Time, David King posited human society returning to a neo-Medieval decentralization as a survival strategy against the power of nuclear weapons. This stuff still got me hot and bothered.
And sex. Sex and its cherished, mythical cousin, love, seemed to suffuse everything I read or watched. Looking back, was there a curious synergy at play between my engrossment in nuclear literature and the pursuit of getting laid? Did it somehow super-charge urgency to this timeless pursuit? If the world might end tomorrow, then love and do what you will. All this musing about nuclear pasts and nuclear futures, survival of civilization and the species. Did we pursue the call of Eros in awkward dorm room bunk beds and back seats of cars, under flimsy mountain tents, and skinny-dipping in lakes, just a little more ardently? We were at play in the fields of the Lord, but was there still fear of the Doomsday Clock still ticking out there, somewhere?
I’m well-acquainted with the historical timeline of millennial, end-of-times prophets, their movements, their cyclical nature, and how they inevitably disappoint, at great cost to those who wager their faith on them. The gurus who think they can beat the existential stock market over time. The end is always near, literally, for all of us. Which is why it’s so easy to telegraph this doom onto the human story. But, what if this time it’s true?
The Fermi Paradox is a useful guidepost here. If the universe is so vast that, statistically, alien life must be out there (you know it is), then why haven’t we made “first contact”? Where are the aliens on the White House lawn? And will it be Trump or Kamala who greets them? One painfully relevant hypothesis is that our stellar kin were there, and will be again, in a sort of universal eternal recurrence. But any civilization sufficiently advanced in technology could not master the self-destructive output of its own intelligence. In other words, the Final (and organic) Solution to any advanced, “intelligent” species is the same. Self-annihilation. For us it might take the shape of a mushroom cloud, or rather, a planetary garden of thermonuclear mycelia. But doom may ride four different horses in other universes or multiverses.
What worries me more than the sheer destructive energy of nuclear arsenals, and the historical amnesia that makes us discount their menace, is that their threat is inextricably intertwined with our own biological and cultural limitations. This is particularly true with the modes and misuse of our communication technologies. The Gutenberg press revolutionized and weaponized society. Sure, there were eventually a lot of positives, but in the short run the printing press unleashed one of the most violent multi-decades in European history. Ask the ghosts of one-third of the Germans who died in the Thirty Years War. And those combatants only had halberds and muskets with which to butcher one another. Yes, it worked out in the end…. Social media reflects this dilemma. In the short run, contrary to the divinations of the techno-optimists who once hailed the arrival of a libertarian utopia and the downfall of tyrants, the smartphone plus social media have amplified, if not generated, a political society that is convulsive, polarized, angry, literally unhealthy if we listen to the Surgeon General, and seemingly ready to go to war. Can we tame it? And that’s just the “Western” side of the question, where the supposed liberal consensus still clusters around democracy, civil liberties, and human dignity. Ongoing wars, rumors of wars, and genocides (like the other, more credible genocide in Sudan) suggest that large populations and their political representatives never, ever, bought into the liberal consensus in the first place. And equipped with the right technology….
I feel modestly certain nuclear war will not happen because anyone intended it to happen. It will be an accident. We have been saved by phone calls that weren’t made before, ordinary chains-of-command ignored or second-guessed. But serendipity cuts both ways. Information is imperfect. Intentions mistaken. Data gets misinterpreted. People crack under pressure.
Afterglow
The persistent menace of nuclear annihilation affects people in specific ways. Socialization is everything. Most people don’t think about it at all. I teach political science and, generously measured, 3/4 of Americans tell social scientists they just don’t care about politics, period. Nuclear disarmament never comes up in my classes today.
Many of my students, by contrast, are relatively passionate about climate change. They, like many politicians and activists, describe it as an existential threat. Nuclear war really isn’t in the running for their top concerns. Perhaps my generational rigidity is to blame, but I get hung up on the adjective “existential” when used to describe global warming. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a climate denier. I believe that climate change is driven by human activity, and that it constitutes an enormous challenge for human civilization. It portends loads of human suffering. But it’s not existential in the sense that nuclear war is. Truly species-eradicating. I’m frequently tempted to reply to students who deploy this adjective with the immortal words of the swordsman Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride: “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
Even assuming the worst climate change projections, at least climate change will be a slow-boil. Nuclear war is not an extended holocaust or annihilation on an installment plan. It’s “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll really blow your house down,” not “I’ll slowly melt your igloo.” And, practically, the generation that most of my students belong to seem to have a different coping response to their version of my nuclear fear. They’re not dating nearly enough. They’re not having sex. At least, not nearly as much of it. It’s not uncommon for my students to say they don’t want to have children, or families, because they don’t want to bring them into such a terrible future. Really? Is it that bad? I know there are a dozen other more important factors behind this generational malaise. The “doom scrolling” available through social media that induces a kind of moral and apparently libidinal paralysis, and, of course, the invidious self-comparison to perfect people on Instagram and its ilk. And again, if the kids are not alright, why do we need to overload their plates with one more truly terrible thing to worry about? To be fair, my generation didn’t grow up with the 24-hour news cycle and omnipresent, algorithmic screen-feeds. We had plenty of time for, and fewer distractions from, splendor in the grass, picking petals from daisies, just rolling about in the proverbial hay.
But I refuse to believe that the Bomb is, or should be, a “Hey, Boomer” problem. Apologies to Greta Thunberg.
Let me close with a happy scene. Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Freshman year. I am experiencing something wonderful. I was with a new date watching this brooding, exciting, black-and-white film. As if it were any good horror movie, my companion and I found creative ways to come into ever-increasing physical contact as the story progressed. Small victories measured by micro-surface areas. And I am paying attention to the movie, in what, looking back, was an impressive job of multitasking. During the closing credits, our faces finally, slowly docked, noses touching first. Our mouths opened and met. My fingers, cautiously under her blouse, lifted the cup of her bra and inched achingly toward our own closing credits. There were all kinds of textures texturing and pheromones exploding, in tiny compressed places and in and around our body parts. A fission reaction. Fusion. Our molecules dissolved, reassembling into one another.
You destroy me. You are good for me.
When the bomb drops, it will not be that sexy.