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Tomgram: Ira Chernus on Where Fear Can't Take Us

Tomgram: Ira Chernus on Where Fear Can't Take Us

A world of fear: By the end of 1953, the United States had close to 1,000 A-bombs, H-bombs, and "tactical" nuclear weapons. I was 9 years old. The effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had, by then, largely disappeared under a cloud of official secrecy, as had evidence of atomic dangers in the United States, where test blasts were already being set off with remarkable regularity. And yet in private dreams and popular culture, a lack of information about nuclear weapons and their effects, a lack of "realism," would only lead to a splurge of apocalyptic fantasies in which ever more bizarre, mutant futures were imagined, all of which put a deformed ending on anything resembling an American tale. In one of the great victor nations of World War II, children like me would huddle under school desks with test sirens howling outside and learn to live with a kind of triumphalist despair. Amid the stories of our fathers' triumphs, imagining ashes where there were burgeoning su! burbs, we would try to adjust to and find thrills or excitement in, a strange new world of apocalyptic destruction; while at night, in our dreams, that mushroom cloud would rise again and again.

And those world-ending dreams of ours couldn't have been more normal. After all, by the early 1950s, wakeful officials at the highest levels of our government -- in secret directives written only for each other -- were discussing a possible "global war of annihilation." In classified National Security Council documents, these men began to plan for the possibility that 100 atomic bombs landing on targets in the United States would kill or injure 22 million Americans, and that an American "blow" might result in the "complete destruction" of the Soviet Union.

By 1960, American military and political leaders had signed off on the country's first Single Integrated Operational Plan or SIOP for the use of nuclear weaponry in war. It promised the delivery of over 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world. Included among these targets were at least 130 cities which would then, if all went well from a war-making perspective, cease to exist. Official estimates of global casualties ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (and radiation effects may have been underestimated). Tens of millions of Chinese, for example, were guaranteed to die in any future superpower nuclear exchange, or U.S. first strike, even though China then had no nuclear weapons -- and even if China's leaders opted not to go to war with the United States.

On October 22, 1962, President Kennedy appeared on nationwide television to tell Americans that the world was at the brink of destruction. "Unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on [the] imprisoned island [of Cuba]," he warned, informing us of a confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, whose unthinkable possibilities were then being considered. "We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth," he said grimly, "but neither will we shrink from the risk at any time it must be faced."

Neither will we shrink from the risk. I was 18 years old and at college when I heard Kennedy deliver his Cuban Missile Crisis speech. Like many Americans at that moment I thought I might be toast by morning; that my life, which (as far as I could tell) showed no sign of having begun, might well be over. Nothing could rally Americans for such a war, even if the Soviet Union had launched a first strike -- something that it was essentially incapable of doing at the time. After such an Alamo, there would be no Texas; after such a Pearl Harbor, no Hawaii (possibly, we feared, no planet).

This was the world before George W. Bush, before the Soviet Union fell, before the post-Cold War "peace dividend" came and went without paying out a cent to any of us. This was the world of insecurity that underlay American prosperity, that so many of us grew up enmeshed in during those years when American politicians and military men were building a Pentagon-based national insecurity state.

Today, young people are caught in a veritable grid of exterminatory possibilities, both real and fantastical -- and grim enough that nuclear weapons have to line up in a jostling queue of possibilities just to get their fifteen seconds of apocalyptic infamy. In the meantime, just beyond our sight, the Bush administration has been hard at work ramping up our nuclear forces. Plans are afoot to wield nuclear weapons "as just another item in the warfighting toolbox" for future "preventive" wars against powers our government merely thinks might be considering using chemical or biological weaponry against U.S. forces or our allies. (Check out the Greenpeace website for the latest Pentagon document on this. "Executing a nuclear option, or even a portion of an option," it reads, "should send a clear signal of United States' resolve. Hence, options must be selected very carefully and deliberately so that the attack can help ensure the adversary recognizes the ‘signal' and should therefore not assume the United States has escalated to general nuclear war, although that perception cannot be guaranteed.") At the same time, Bush and his top officials managed to focus American fears -- well banked from all those decades of insecurity -- on a significant but non-exterminatory threat, that of terrorism, which made a mobilization for war possible. After this New York, there could be an Afghanistan, an Iraq, an...

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posted by Annamarie at 8:04 PM