WAITING FOR THE END?
Hausknecht, Murray
Prospects for Nuclear Destruction The bellicose nationalism of Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign and his insistence on the need for "nuclear superiority" help explain the interest stirred by...
...The conclu282 sion is a rational reading of available knowledge, although, as Schell is at pains to point out, our areas of ignorance far exceed our knowledge, and it is far more speculative than the conclusions reached by scientists about the immediate effects of nuclear explosions...
...It is now accepted by friend and foe alike that he is an ideologue...
...By definition, a disturbance in one part or element of the system affects the whole...
...In these circumstances it seems to me it is really an open question whether leaders would decide to retaliate or not...
...Human beings are human, that is, something "more than" members of a species, because they are enmeshed in that complex, tangled snarl of social relations, the material artifacts they produce, the institutions they evolve, the history they share along with what is labeled philosophy, theology, science, and art that is collectively termed "civilization...
...After a holocaust the survivors would still be members of the same biological species as before the catastrophe, but they would bear only the faintest resemblance to the humans who exist now...
...When, for example, we use the commonplace of intellectual discourse, "the vast changes modernization brings to societies," we are implicitly recognizing that there are historic events that fracture communities, that result in massive disjunctions affecting the structure of human personalities and social institutions...
...But throughout human history, no matter how severe the consequences of such fractures, there has always been enough continuity so that those who came after could recognize and feel some affinity, some kinship with those who preceded them...
...Or, to put the matter with rather less solemnity than Schell and Zuckerman permit themselves, they will provide something politically useful to do until the Messiah comes...
...284...
...if no testing is possible there can be no "uninterrupted elaboration and multiplication of warheads and their means of delivery...
...One expert, who himself directed a study of nuclear war, told a New York Times reporter that Schell uses a National Academy of Science study "without mentioning that its bottom line is the exact opposite of his bottom line...
...This is far from a certainty, but since it cannot be ruled out, any thinking about nuclear warfare must assume this result...
...The political problem of the nuclear era is the problem of national sovereignty, and avoiding extinction requires ridding ourselves of the "system of national sovereignty...
...What rational purpose could they have in launching a retaliatory strike...
...As a basis for political action its very ambition subverts whatever power it may have...
...Finally, the build-up of nuclear weapons could be halted by a comprehensive test ban treaty among the nuclear nations...
...Zuckerman's work, which covers some of the same ground as Schell's, suggests some directions for action...
...Zuckerman, a leading British scientific adviser to the Macmillan and Wilson governments of the '60s, writes with admirable brevity about matters of immediate political relevance, but inevitably The Fate of the Earth will continue to attract the lion's share of attention...
...To make the issue of nuclear arms and war the critical moral and political question of our time—this is the obvious end of the book— requires overcoming the drag of indifference that has surrounded the question in the past decade...
...A more basic defect of deterrence theory is, Schell says, that "the nuclear powers put a higher value on national sovereignty than they do on human survival . they are ultimately prepared to bring an end to mankind in their attempt to protect their own countries...
...Schell's book consists of three parts...
...Solly Zuckerman, Nuclear Illusion and Reality (New York: Viking Press, 1982...
...Current doctrine on prevention of nuclear war invokes a deterrence theory that assumes a potential aggressor will not launch a "first strike" if he is convinced that the enemy can respond with a powerful retaliatory "second strike...
...The first is devoted to an "account of the principal consequences of a full-scale nuclear holocaust" based on a meticulous search of the best available technical literature...
...The belief that there can be a "limited nuclear war" using tactical weapons like the neutron bomb, he contends, is sheer illusion: any use of nuclear weapons must escalate into a full-fledged nuclear war...
...An immediate objective of political action could be to work for a comprehensive test ban treaty...
...But if "victory" is impossible and the second strike "means the end of us," the capacity for the retaliatory response is not a credible threat...
...After recalling for us some previous descriptions of what actually happened to Hiroshima and its inhabitants, he describes the anticipated effects of a nuclear bombing on New York City...
...On Schell's own evidence, extinction of the species is merely a logical possibility, and thus the claim is vulnerable to a type of rebuttal that has already been voiced...
...The implied corollary is that only some form of world government will protect the species...
...Successful political action demands significant but realizable goals...
...Even those who accept the basic premise will find this heavy going and will turn with relief to the consideration of what must be done if death is not to prevail...
...Among other "awesome tasks" it will entail "the reorganization of political life," and Schell says that he has "left it to others" to work out the necessary steps to attain the goal...
...This, I think, is a more likely outcome and one perhaps more terrifying than the vision of extinction...
...it] might be the action that would finally break the back of the ecosphere and extinguish the species...
...Obviously the impossibility of "victory" is not accepted by this "leader...
...Those who survive a nuclear holocaust will still be biologically (despite the damage done by radiation) members of the same species as ourselves, but they will not be "human" in the sense that we understand the term today...
...It leads to a stark conclusion: a nuclear holocaust can destroy the human species...
...Deterrence theory may not be as useful as conventional wisdom would have us believe, but Schell's argument is not sufficient to refute it...
...again, by definition, a person in the grip of a few fixed ideas that are highly impervious to modification by exposure to reality...
...nuclear war on a concrete human level...
...New York City and its suburbs would be transformed into a lifeless, flat, scorched desert in a few weeks...
...An example: If a 20-megaton bomb one thousand six hundred times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb [and the one most likely to be used against New York, were to be dropped on the Empire State Building, then] people caught in the open twenty-three miles away from ground zero, in Long Island, New Jersey, and southern New York State would be burned to death...
...He argues that no "further elaboration of nuclear weapons could significantly improve the military security or strength" of the two superpowers...
...If we conceive of history as the record of continuity in discontinuity, a holocaust would mark the start of another kind of history in which the sense of continuity is almost wholly submerged in the sound of exploding nuclear weapons...
...But it is unlikely that any one will be encouraged to act in face of the enormity of such tasks...
...First, he assumes that the leaders accept extinction as a realistic probability rather than "the bottom line" of their scientific advisers...
...As an ideal, abolishing national sovereignty is worthy of respect...
...After reading Schell and Zuckerman, who uses many of the same sources, it is easy to accept the former's conclusion that "a full-scale holocaust would, if extended throughout the Northern Hemisphere, eliminate the civilizations of Europe, China, Japan, Russia and the United States...
...The mushroom cloud would be seventy miles in diameter...
...It is not implausible to consider the earth, its various forms of life, and the atmosphere surrounding it as making up one complex, interacting system, very much like a cell of an organism...
...Consider Ronald Reagan...
...and repetitious...
...Those who believe in and advocate "limited wars" or who believe that we have an insufficiency of nuclear weapons do not deserve any political support and, indeed, must be vigorously opposed...
...Though the conclusion is dramatic and riveting it runs against the grain of the book's purpose...
...Prospects for Nuclear Destruction The bellicose nationalism of Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign and his insistence on the need for "nuclear superiority" help explain the interest stirred by Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth when it first began to appear in the New Yorker...
...The theory also assumes both sides will accept the notion that "in the present-day nuclear world 'victory' is oblivion...
...The response obscures the essential point that Schell is making and distracts attention from our common peril...
...The Academy said that the preponderance of evidence is that human life would survive even the largest nuclear war...
...On another level, Zuckerman's analysis specifies the kinds of political programs and leaders we cannot afford...
...The writing here tends to be both portentous— "The question now before the human species, therefore, is whether life or death will prevail on earth...
...The book along with news of the European antinuclear movement has probably helped rally, in turn, antinuclear sentiment in this country...
...In a highly publicized speech this past spring Alexander Haig said that "deterrence depends on our capability, even after suffering a massive nuclear blow, to prevent the aggressor from securing a military advantage and prevailing in a conflict...
...Zuckerman, for example, accepts the probability of human survival...
...For those involved in the movement here Solly Zuckerman's book, though it arrived with less fanfare, should be of considerable interest...
...Schell is good at detailing the meaning of * Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982...
...The important implication is not the possible extinction of the species homo sapiens but the irremediable damage to human beings...
...But it is the latter vision that grips Schell's imagination and governs his examination of its implications for "the human condition...
...Can we expect more of Brezhnev and the Politburo...
...Schell asks us to imagine the circumstances of leaders whose country has been annihilated in a first strike . . . their coun283 try is on its way to becoming a radioactive desert...
...Deterrence theory and its reliance on the balance of terror, then, cannot be relied upon to protect us against the holocaust...
...It is not hard to imagine Ronald Reagan saying, "Okay, so it may be the end of the species, but we can't let the bastards get away with it...
...A second problem is most easily appreciated by considering a set of actual leaders...
...Still, Schell asserts, it is in the realm of the possible, and therefore we must assume that it will happen—extinction allows for no second chance...
...There would be, therefore, long-term as well as short-run consequences of a nuclear holocaust for animal and plant species, climate, and the atmosphere, separately and as parts of an interdependent whole...
...But Schell goes further...
...Taking everything we know into consideration and in awareness of much still unknown, "a full-scale nuclear holocaust could lead to the extinction of mankind...
...These reflections lead to the logical question, what is to be done...
...But they have at least one virtue: if achieved, they will increase the chances of the survival of human beings and their civilizations...
...but it is a type of response that Schell's presentation invites...
...Keeping such people out of office and supporting a test ban treaty are modest goals compared to the "awesome task" of doing away with national sovereignty...
...Pointing to the threat of extinction cannot by itself dispel that indifference...
...The premise is the ground for the second part in which Schell reflects upon how human existence is affected by our ineradicable knowledge of the means of destroying mankind...
Vol. 29 • July 1982 • No. 3
