Living with the fear
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers LIVING WITH THE FEAR THE BENEFITS OF FAMILIARITY Last spring I had lunch in Washington with S., a young theoretical physicist who had switched to defense work....
...it seemed to me I coped with it very badly...
...He wanted to know more about the actual process of reaching decisions on important defense issues, and he wasn't quite sure if the MX would make us safer, by convincing the Soviets they could never catch us napping, or threaten us, by giving the Soviets a compelling reason to strike first in a crisis...
...The final reassurance, I suppose, is to hold the scalpel in their hands, to wield the thing they fear...
...In our world there are two groups of people obsessed by nuclear weapons - the men who design them, build them, aim them, and prepare to fire them...
...Like everything he did, the move was deliberate...
...They were too destructive and numerous for that...
...Preparations for war can be disguised as "defense," but preparations for disaster speak for themselves...
...Not long after I met him S. moved again - to the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in Washington where he worked on a study of the proposed MX missile system...
...it is not...
...Then he said he had a new job...
...He'd learned everything he could at OTA, he didn't want to go to the Pentagon, there was still a lot he didn't know about the weapons themselves...
...But familiarity, over time, drains away the fear...
...The basic steps are all obvious ones...
...So he took up defense work, and told himself the switch was temporary...
...The Mormon church, for example, takes the matter entirely seriously...
...But at the same time, human nature rebels against perpetual fear...
...I told him to keep in touch...
...That was the beginning of our running argument...
...The weapons seem ineradicable...
...No democracy can be expected to fund such a program...
...They say that surgeons are motivated by the fear of death, and conquer the fear by plunging their very hands deep into the stuff of mortality...
...Modern weapons are technically sophisticated and planning for their use in war demands a spirit of scientific rigor and detachment...
...When I first met him he had an office at the Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, where he was doing technical studies on weapons policy...
...Kerosene lamps will provide light when the power lines are down...
...The hard part was to avoid upsetting the balance by ill-considered technical improvements in the weapons themselves...
...All promise doom...
...Its members are required to stockpile a year's supply of food, and many of them do...
...We pushed up as close to it as possible...
...For the best part of a year he immersed himself in the minutiae of MX...
...He's blond and slight, wears gold-rimmed glasses, curls his upper lip when he laughs...
...S. thought this possible...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...His professors in graduate school sometimes slid around certain subjects with vague disclaimers...
...Just the opposite...
...But occasionally the danger sinks in and takes hold, as it did for S. in graduate school...
...Survivalism" has got a bad name, not because it represents an impossible fantasy, but because its focus is narrowly personal, even selfish in its way...
...S. met no one who thought of nuclear weapons as weapons in the usual sense, useful tools for achieving limited military objectives...
...Afraid of blood and trauma, they push right up close to them, and learn to live with them as daily companions...
...Some of these defense professionals have been thinking and talking about nuclear weapons for thirty years or more...
...Survivalism is now a light industry in the United States, and while much of it seems obsessed with childish dreams of a return to frontier days, much is not...
...He thought of this as a hard problem, not an impossible problem...
...I thought not...
...What S. learned about the weapons was troubling but inconclusive...
...They were frightened, and they were tired of feeling helpless...
...He was afraid of the bomb and at the same time wanted to know more about it...
...Mormon opposition to one version of the MX missile system, which would have turned large areas of Utah into a target, was apparently based on sensible reluctance to invite such a danger...
...He worked most Saturdays, and sometimes on Sunday as well...
...On the other was the confidence of highly qualified men that we could live with them indefinitely if we only remained sober in their management, and alert to Soviet weapons development...
...Most people "know" the bomb is a problem, but they know it the same way they know that oil is running out, the burning of fossil fuels may be heating up the Earth, farmland in the Midwest is losing fifty or a hundred tons of topsoil per acre per year, the forests of the Amazon are being cut down, the Sahara desert is creeping south, acid rain is poisoning our lakes, we are running out of water, and so on and so forth...
...Woodstoves will give heat when oil deliveries come to a halt...
...We can't all go to New Zealand - indeed, New Zealand doesn't want any of us - and we can't all prepare to survive right here, since the first step is-to get out of the target areas...
...He says he's not sure, he doesn't see how we can get rid of them, he still has a lot to learn about defense policy, and besides, it's worked so far, hasn't it...
...Some have to be written off...
...His temperament is trusting, literal, and serious...
...But they have conquered the fear just as S. did, by pushing right up close to the weapons...
...Mormon survival programs may prove inadequate, but they are not foolish...
...Another inherent weakness in civil defense is that it requires an admission these expensive preparations may be necessary, a message so bleak no administration can long bear to insist on it as a matter of policy...
...Fear of the bomb is a sometime thing...
...He told me he ate lunch in the same cafeteria every day, and never went out in the evening...
...The path between science and defense has been well-traveled since WW II...
...If she didn't, why go to the extra expense...
...There are lots of things which might be done t6 help people survive the after-effects of a nuclear war, but not all the people...
...A stock of seeds will serve to plant a garden when Burpee is no longer filling mail orders...
...When they speak now it is with the equanimity of long, easy intimacy...
...Proposals to solve the problem are mostly Utopian, or so modest in scope they amount to gestures of despair...
...They loom in the background of every international crisis...
...We immersed ourselves in the details, learned how the weapons all worked, read all the strategic literature, thought about it obsessively...
...We reasoned it back and forth...
...He was afraid of nuclear weapons - that is, afraid they might be used - but without, by his standards, knowing much about them...
...Once, after giving a talk in my local church, I was asked how I coped with all this depressing knowledge...
...He had been plucked from pure physics by a Harvard professor with a long history in bomb design and work as a consultant for the Department of Defense...
...We go back and forth...
...It all depends...
...He was going to design nuclear warheads...
...So he was going out to California, to the Livermore Lab, to resume - after a fashion - the practice of physics...
...On the one hand was their mighty destructive power...
...People who move out of target areas won't be killed in them...
...Somehow this intimate knowledge has a soothing effect...
...There is a lot more to bombs than fission and fusion, pure and simple, and much of it is classified...
...and those who fear the first group does not know what it is doing...
...There is no way to think one's way out of danger...
...People who have stored food won't starve...
...One afternoon last fall, S. telephoned me from Washington...
...Talking to them is a little like talking to a doctor about cancer...
...S. figured it had to be one or the other, and he assumed that hard analysis would help him decide which it was...
...They have not ceased to respect the weapons, but they have learned to live with the fear...
...When he was governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller once proposed an expensive plan to subsidize backyard fallout shelters...
...This confidence is a given in the world of defense consultants...
...The bomb is the crowning product of the twentieth century's revolution in physics, but for S. it remained a kind of separate country with sealed borders...
...I think he's in his late twenties, but he looks much younger...
...The long stems are much more expensive, and he wasn't sure the girl in question would know the difference...
...But S. had a personal reason for giving up physics, the first love of his life...
...People with refuge from fallout won't contract radiation disease...
...He had been living in Washington for nearly a year but I had to pick the restaurant...
...The problem then is to learn to live with it, which is not easy to do...
...But most people seriously worried about nuclear weapons choose another way to live with the danger...
...Who can solve so many problems...
...It was pointed out that many people in New York do not have backyards, including five or six million in New York City...
...I say we can't defend ourselves with nuclear weapons, down this road disaster lies...
...We have got to get up in the morning whether they are solved or not...
...But after awhile I saw that in fact I handled it in the same way as the young physicist, S. We didn't try to escape it...
...It is not clear what is to be done...
...But individuals can sometimes do what governments cannot...
...Many of them had worked at Los Alamos or the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory near San Francisco...
...Right away - no preamble at all - he told me he had decided on the long-stemmed roses, she loved them, and she didn't know the difference...
...Many issues divide the two groups, but on one thing they are in agreement: the awful destructive power of the weapons...
...We might call this denial, or just a sense of helplessness...
...For some people, preparing to survive a nuclear war is a way of conquering the fear of it...
...The result has been a thirty-year history of intermittent, irresolute, ill-considered, often downright silly civil defense programs which will not offer much defense when the time comes...
...I wasn't sure what to say...
...The idea was to maintain a kind of permanent standoff by threatening retaliation for any nuclear attack, without ever threatening the other side's ability to retaliate as well...
...Into this latter category, for most people most of the time, falls the bomb...
...I once met two staffers on the National Security Council, both men deeply involved in nuclear weapons policy, who were stocking food in the cellar of a summer house in the Shenandoah Mountains...
...This is the reef which sank the ambitious civil defense programs of the late 1950s...
...Sooner or later, the mind is going to quit being afraid...
...S. wanted to send a dozen roses to a girl he knew, but he was having a hard time deciding between regular roses and long-stemmed roses...
...Some people begin to dream of escape, either by going someplace the bomb won't follow - to New Zealand, say, or Chile - or by preparing to survive right here...
...The scale of a nuclear war might easily overwhelm a lone citizen's frail preparations, but then again it might . not...
...For the last couple of years S. and I have been conducting a kind of intermittent argument...
...I don't mean to say it is reassuring...
...It comes and goes...
...When we had lunch last spring we discussed two things at length - the fact MX would be accurate and powerful enough to destroy Russian land-based missiles in a first strike, a prospect the Russians are bound to find alarming - and roses...
...I have rarely heard someone in the defense community make a slighting or dismissive reference to the danger posed by nuclear war...
...It is easy and natural to draw a line between things you can do something about, and things you can do nothing about...
Vol. 109 • March 1982 • No. 5
