On nuclear disbelief
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers ON NUCLEAR DISBELIEF 'MAYBE IT JUST WONT HAPPEN' I have never seen a nuclear weapon. But last spring I visited the Atomic Museum at Kirtland Air Force Base on the...
...You might have said all those things about the great armies of Europe in 1914...
...Airfields, ports, railway marshaling yards, and major highway intersections would be destroyed...
...Everybody, that is, professionally involved in defense matters...
...The thing is so huge, the casing is so massive you simply can't believe it could get off the ground...
...Some match your idea of what a bomb ought to look like-Fat Boy, for example, the 9000-pound bulbous monster which destroyed Hiroshima...
...But later the man who assembled the core for the fourth bomb told me I was wrong...
...A story in the paper, or a siren late at night, can bring it heaving up out of the unconscious part of the mind...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...They can't bear to think anything else...
...Thus we all go on, sustained by disbelief...
...No one has to tell me that blacks and Puerto Ricans live in a different world because I brush their alien shoulders on the city's streets...
...I devoutly hope they are right...
...He really meant it...
...Since the news on the geological front is all good, and the planet can expect to survive another couple of billion years, that meant, as a practical matter, we would go on as we were until we used them...
...Sir," he said, "what is your clearance...
...For the most part, they have been an impressive group of men-sober, intelligent, knowledgeable, and orderly in their habits of mind...
...In late August, 1945, I thought, there were no bombs in the world at all...
...It was quite clear, in fact, that we were going to go on pointing them at enemies until we used them or the world came to an end...
...One of the instructors began to rattle off statistics and then stopped abruptly...
...Then I became convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons, and when I realized that I was able to sleep again...
...The normal means of recovery and reconstruction would be threatened in too many ways to calculate...
...Everything suggests tomorrow will be much like today...
...IT'S difficult to remember how I thought about things a couple of years ago, when I first started to read seriously about nuclear weapons...
...Maybe fear of nuclear weapons is enough to keep everyone sober and cautious...
...It is 21 feet long and five in diameter and it weighs 24 tons...
...It is not over the horizon...
...The officer wasn't being smarmy...
...After a year or two of seeing things in this light, for the first time I feel the tug the other way...
...Ordinary citizens often entertain foreboding of the darkest sort...
...The breakdown in transportation would make it hard to feed or care for them...
...These things we can't believe...
...If factories remained, the workers might be dead or too sick to work...
...There is nothing to be gained...
...Power lines would be out...
...The motto of the Strategic Air Command, which has authority over bombers and land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, is "Peace is our Profession...
...For them, I suspect, no belief is deeper and stronger...
...The missiles are all mock-ups used as teaching aids...
...In short, it seemed to me as clear as night follows day that it is going to happen...
...The military men involved in nuclear weapons policy-and their civilian colleagues, too, for that matter-don't believe it's ever going to happen...
...The moments of recognition are few and they fade...
...I know the price of gasoline is up...
...I have heard dozens of defense people explain why nuclear weapons will bever be used...
...For us the bomb is a purely mental thing, an abstract concept, a kind of pocket of anxiety in the mind...
...Their confidence is sunny and unshakable...
...Then I told myself I was an idiot...
...The government goes on churning out civil defense and reconstruction plans, but the Pentagon has never made a serious official guess how well they would work-or even if they would work at all-because the computers can't factor in all the variables...
...The bomb casings are all hollow...
...They can serve no useful purpose in war...
...That was the end of the lecture...
...A lot of things came as a shock then which seem familiar now...
...We know what they will do...
...In a quite matter of fact way they will say, "What else were they built for...
...Reasons for not using nuclear weapons are also reasons for not having them...
...The destruction would be too general...
...When you put these two things together-knowledge of what nuclear weapons can do, and a conviction we shall always have them-you can see why military men tell themselves, and everybody else, the bombs will never be used...
...But like all the others it's hollow...
...As I remember it's carved on the lintel over the main entrance to SAC headquarters at Offut Air Force Base near Omaha...
...An argument is the ephemeral stuff of the mind...
...It's tempting to poke ironic fun at such earnest remarks, but it wouldn't be fair...
...It is the same with the missiles in their silos...
...The world has its disconcerting way of going on from day to day, just as if nothing were ever to change...
...They are flesh and blood, after all...
...If we just stick to our guns and make sure we've got a weapon for every weapon they've got, then there's nothing to worry about...
...The one at the Bradbury museum at Los Alamos is painted white...
...Two hundred years ago Malthus was worrying that the world's population had already stretched the planet's resources to the groaning limit...
...I find myself wondering if perhaps the military men aren't right after all...
...It is a considerable undertaking to go out and see the Air Force bases and atomic laboratories and missile-launching centers...
...I asked a colonel at Offut if he thought the ICBMs would ever be launched, and he said no-they all say no-and added, "If that happened we would have failed in our job...
...That, of course, is true enough...
...It comes and goes, a kind of mood...
...The answer is you can't...
...But last spring I visited the Atomic Museum at Kirtland Air Force Base on the edge of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and saw a great many bomb casings...
...They know the Pentagon periodically tries to plan for the post-attack world but always throws up its hands in despair because there is simply no way of projecting how bad it would be...
...Nobody shows any sign of fear...
...Maybe the only danger is falling behind, just as the Pentagon says...
...At Vandenberg Air Force Base a year ago I saw a Mark 12-A re-entry vehicle, a black cone-shaped object, perhaps three feet high, with a carbon-carbon skin and a polished nose cone of specially heat-resistant alloys which erode away in the terrible heat and wind of re-entry at ten thousand miles an hour...
...But the numbers don't suggest the impression...
...But does that mean they won't be used...
...Citing the litany of their horrors is an argument against their possession or use, not an argument we won't use them-given we have them...
...It's hard to imagine anything could get it off the ground, short of a derrick...
...Such arguments are really an expression of hope, and we depend on hope because there is nothing else...
...I made lots of errors in writing about the subject...
...Maybe it just won't happen...
...No rational man would ever use nuclear weapons...
...This is the sort of thing to invite a bitter smile, everything considered, but so far as I could tell, SAC people take it seriously...
...This is a mood I'm describing, not really an argument...
...We know we are mortal but we don't feel mortal and we live, generally, as if there were plenty of time for everything...
...At first I didn't know what it was...
...What they say is, "It doesn't make sense...
...The designer of the Atomic Museum had talent and a flair for the dramatic...
...It's not really a bomb at all, just a suggestion of the bomb, nothing more than a teaching aid...
...They say it would be crazy, and are absolutely right...
...The problem is disbelief...
...It was so small, light and sleek...
...Maybe all those people in Washington are right, and I'm wrong...
...But knowing and believing are very different things...
...But I marveled at the RV all the same...
...Defense community people never say that...
...But scariest of all is the Mark 17 bomb casing...
...Indeed, people did say them...
...The bomb guts are missing...
...His job was preventing wars, not winning them...
...I'd gotten the details straight about radiation sickness, theories of war-fighting which all imply any nuclear war will go the limit, the steady march of technical improvement in weapons design which makes military people so jumpy, and so on and so forth...
...Take transportation...
...I said I was a journalist and didn't have any sort of clearance...
...It surrenders to the world, over time, and the world tells us tomorrow will be much like today...
...well, quite a lot like the great blue whale which hangs from the ceiling in the American Museum of Natural History...
...I had read or been told nothing which suggested we were going to learn to get along without these weapons...
...Every last one of them, I am convinced, has looked it in the eye at one time or another...
...After two or three months of reading I went through a period of intense sadness...
...Aircraft, ships, rolling stock and large numbers of busses, trucks, and cars would be destroyed...
...Arms agreements may-even that is in doubt-limit their number and type, but disarmament is not on the horizon...
...Their assurances on this point have none of the tinny quality of budget officials, say, telling you the federal deficit will disappear in 1984, when they know full well this barely qualifies as even an honest hope...
...Most people don't even have to be told...
...On top of that, they know we shall never get rid of nuclear weapons...
...Nothing they said suggests that the defense of the United States is in careless or reckless hands...
...Even Nikita Khrushchev had his dark moment...
...Somehow the guts of the Mark 17 leviathan had been refined and reduced and squeezed into this neat package a couple of men might cart off in a wheelbarrow...
...But even there the note of the lethal is missing...
...Both are grossly fat and thoroughly lethal in aspect...
...But everybody I talked to took the contrary view...
...They know the United States and the Soviet Union have got 15,000 strategic nuclear weapons between them...
...Things physically present announce themselves unmistakably, but the bomb is like the knowledge of death...
...It has no solidity...
...Of course I was sad...
...Is there any limit to human genius...
...He once told the Egyptian journalist, Mohammed Heikal, "When I was appointed First Secretary of the Central Committee and learned all the facts about nuclear power I couldn't sleep for several days...
...This is the sort of thing military men know, generally in great detail, and none of it is encouraging where the subject of nuclear war is concerned...
...The sting in my eyes tells me Los Angeles has an air pollution problem...
...The military men work eight to four and go home to their families...
...The one in the Kirtland Atomic Museum is painted olive drab...
...According to the sign this was the first hydrogen or fusion or thermonuclear bomb which could actually be dropped from an aircraft, but it's hard to credit...
...And so on and so forth...
...They know...
...Most people haven't seen the skins...
...It was sitting in a classroom where Air Force officers take an introductory course in ballistic missiles...
...In the last two years I've talked to a lot of military people about nuclear weapons, strategic policy, what the Russians are up to, and the like...
...The people in the defense community have all had their ghastly moments, from the president on down to the missile-launch control officers reading paperback novels in their steel cubicles suspended on springs forty feet beneath the Great Plains...
...When you think about it, the equanimity of military people makes perfect sense...
...Most petroleum refineries would have been destroyed, fuel would be in short supply, and the little remaining would be hard to distribute...
...But then it sinks back, like other things we know but can't bear to think about...
...There is a soothing quality to these reassurances, as if we were being told that airplanes really do work, and it's safe to fly...
...But now comes the curious thing...
...but your mind says they are just hollow shells...
...Once, for example, I wrote that the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was the last one in the American inventory...
...We worry about so many things that fail to come to pass...
...Still, you get the idea...
...The displays are in a great cavernlike hall, dramatically lit from below, and the Mark 17 looms up in the gloom like a...
...I don't believe it for a minute...
...Belief is frail and fades away...
...How can you predict how long it would take to get things moving again when so many factors are involved, which overlap in so many ways...
...I thought the source might be worry about my father, who is 89, or a friend whose marriage was breaking up, or chronic financial anxiety, or something else of the kind...
...So I've never really seen a bomb-just drawings, photographs, and the outer skins of bombs...
...We know that nothing lasts, nations die, the continents move, atmosphere whirls off into space, suns burn out-but not here, now, to us...
...I know the New York City subway system is going through hard times because I ride it every day...
...Their wives and children all live in target areas...
...When you look at them your eye says bomb...
...They did not seem at all warlike...
...Many of the factories which might build more would.be destroyed...
...I had finally schooled myself in the numbers and knew for the first time that we really had built weapons enough to break the back of our civilization...
...They've been trying to figure out a way to fight a genuinely limited nuclear war for thirty years, and haven't come up with anything convincing yet...
...I have never heard a note of fear or despair...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 1
