Our leading military authorities agree that ability to limit our casualties in event of an attack has definite military advantages. It would mean that an enemy must commit greater military and economic strength to the venture. It would thus take him longer to attain capability.
In other words, the enemy would have to go to extra trouble in rendering the casualties unlimited. One wonders, too, how much clout and prestige our leading military authorities would really enjoy, “in event of an attack.” Number seven concludes that population protection “creates ability to endure a nuclear war.” One is obliged to pull through, then, for strategic reasons.
The clear truth is that after a nuclear war the role of the civil and military establishment would change or invert. The authorities would no longer be protecting the population from the enemy: they would be protecting themselves from the population.One of the effects of nuclear weapons —these strange instruments—would be instant fascism. In 1980 the British government conducted Operation Square Leg, in conjunction with NATO, to assess the realities of nuclear attack. Together with many other mysterious assumptions (seven-day warning, no detonation in central London), it is imagined that the populace would spend its last week stocking up with food and turning its back gardens into shelters—in other words, digging its own grave. Because when you stagger out of your shelter, following the “All Clear” (all clear for what?), the only thing worth doing would be to stagger back in again. Everything good would be gone. You would be a citizen of a new town called Necropolis. Nuclear civil defense is a nonsubject, a mischievous fabrication. It bolsters fightability. It bolsters thinkability.
For all its black slapstick, however, the genre has a plangent undertow. Not everyone (by definition) is as thoroughly, as exemplarily subhuman as Captain Necropolis. The admirable London After the Bomb, for instance, starts off as a book “about” nuclear defense and ends up as a disgusted rejection of nuclear defense. Even with semiofficial publications like Nuclear Attack: Civil Defence (Commissioned and Edited by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies) you get the following impression: that of a team of experienced paramedics, well prepared for a vicious assault on their senses, who then find themselves reeling from the scene of the accident, in helpless nausea. Language cannot live with this reality. “It is important to have a good supply of painkillers . . . tranquilizers will be important . . . psychological problems in a nuclear war . . . health problems in a nuclear war …” Is problems really the word we want? Well, there will be extinction problems too, as— with aspirin tablets, four-by-four-inch sterile pads, small scissors (blunt ended) and a provident supply of safety pins —we hunker down for the nuclear winter.
Nuclear winter has been the best news on this front since 1945. It is the best news because it is the worst news (and because nuclear realities are always antithetical or palindromic). To put the matter simply, if a considerable fraction of the world’s arsenals were used, the planet might cease to support life. Thus even a successful first strike might fatally redound upon the attacker. It took nearly forty years to grasp an obvious truth: that there is no fire without smoke. How long will it take us to grasp that nuclear weapons are not weapons, that they are slashed wrists, gas-filled rooms, global booby traps? What more do we need to learn about them? Some people—and it does take all sorts, to make a world—are skeptical about nuclear winter; extinction is something they feel they can safely pooh-pooh. Certainly the case is not proven: like every other nuclear ramification, it pullulates with uncertainty. (The chemistry of ozone creation and destruction, for example, is only partially understood.) But the pessimistic view would seem to me to be the natural one. Where are the hidden pluses, where are the pleasant surprises, when it comes to nuclear weapons? Anyway, the ethical argument remains watertight. If the risk is infinite—as Schell points out in The Fate of the Earth—a scientific possibility can be treated as a moral certainty, “because if we lose, the game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever get another chance.” Or, as he puts it in his later book, The Abolition: