Anyone who has read my father’s work will have some idea of what he is like to argue with. When I told him that I was writing about nuclear weapons, he said, with a lilt, “Ah. I suppose you’re . . . ‘against them,’ are you?” Epater les bien-pensants is his rule. (Once, having been informed by a friend of mine that an endangered breed of whales was being systematically turned into soap, he replied, “It sounds like quite a good way of using up whales.” Actually he likes whales, I think, but that’s not the point.) I am reliably ruder to my father on the subject of nuclear weapons than on any other, ruder than I have been to him since my teenage years. I usually end by saying something like, “Well, we’ll just have to wait until you old bastards die off one by one.” He usually ends by saying something like, “Think of it. Just by closing down the Arts Council we could significantly augment our arsenal. The grants to poets could service a nuclear submarine for a year. The money spent on a single performance of Rosenkavalier might buy us an extra neutron warhead. If we closed down all the hospitals in London we could …” The satire is accurate in a way, for I am merely going on about nuclear weapons; I don’t know what to do about them.
We abandon the subject. Our sessions end amicably. We fall to admiring my one-year-old son. Perhaps he will know what to do about nuclear weapons. I, too, will have to die off. Perhaps he will know what to do about them. It will have to be very radical, because there is nothing more radical than a nuclear weapon and what it can do.
Another satirical voice in the debate is that of Civil Defense. Unlike Professor Thompson’s, these jokes are funny. Civil Defense Against Nuclear Attack—the concept is a joke in itself. There are only two words to be said, and they are forget it. Nevertheless, books on this subject continue to appear. I suppose someone has to write them, but the whole genre is scuppered by subhuman bathos. It is like trying to acquaint the Royal Family with the consolations of life in a blood-soaked lean-to, or a medieval field hospital. (And, against this particular backdrop, every family is a royal family.) In the nuclear hospital, by another feral irony, there will be a reversed triage: only the comparatively healthy are considered treatable. The process of nuclear inversion is complete when one realizes that the correct attitude to nuclear war is one of suicidal defeatism. Let no one think that it is thinkable. Dispel any interest in surviving, in lasting. Have no part of it. Be ready to turn in your hand. For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don’t want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound. There is only one defense against nuclear attack, and that is a cyanide pill. Recently I came across an American offering, Civil Defense in Nuclear Attack: A Family Protection Guide by Capt. T. Kalogroulis. It is a peach. It is also full of illiteracies and misprints (“A schematic illustration of the blast wave is shown in the neat page?”). But I imagine we can live with that. After a nuclear attack, I imagine we can live with a few misprints. The book begins with the Justification—the justification for all this ghoulish prattle. “The Communist aim is world domination . . . they will use nuclear blackmail based on their boasted capabilities. And they are prepared to use force if they need to and can afford the risk.” That if is not a big one, because the Soviets “might accept a risk in human and property losses that we would not consider risking. They are hardened to losses.” The enemy is not made of flesh and blood but of hide and ice; to them, nuclear holocausts are meat and drink. Over the page, Captain Kalogroulis lists the “strategic advantages of population protection.” There are seven of them. Number four states that “protection of the people gives meaning to all military defense; the latter has no meaning if the populations perishes.” What meaning does the former have, if the population perishes? Here is number five: