Reflections

...Schell's is the latest in a long and distinguished train of landmark articles through which The New Yorker has focused public attention on seminal subjects that at the time lay well beyond the horizons of orthodox journalism: John Her-sey's "Hiroshima" etched the city into the world's consciousness one year after the bombing...

...Schell's solution is the obvious one: We must disarm ourselves...

...Call a friend, says Schell...

...As one who put aside other daily business about a year and a half ago, I see mounting evidence of a rebirth of the gut fear of nuclear weapons—the visceral understanding of Einstein's warning—which pulsated in the months and years immediately following the first appearance of the mushroom cloud, but then disappeared from consciousness as the world returned to pre-nuclear business as usual...

...But now, thirty-six-and-a-half years into the nuclear arms race, having amassed a worldwide total of some 50,000 nuclear bombs and warheads yielding the equivalent of more than twenty billion tons of TNT (five tons for every man, woman, and child on Earth), humanity may have passed into the zone of ultimate peril...

...Had future generations been so fortunate as to have a hydrogen bomb explode every so often in one of our cities, there is little doubt that by now the world would have been reinvented to provide the minimum protection...

...That effort has begun...

...A similar fate would befall the attacker...

...a victim standing amidst the ruin, his eyeballs in the palm of his hand...

...Where to begin...

...This growing concern accounts for the widespread support for such measures as the "nuclear freeze" campaign, which calls for a halt to the deployment of more U.S...

...It is essential to the doctrine, which has led to the ultimate fine-tuning of nuclear war-fighting capabilities (Hiroshima-scale warheads that can fit into eight-inch artillery shells), that the threat of assured destruction be "credible"—that the government must really intend, if sufficiently provoked, to risk exterminating the human species...

...What Einstein meant, and what Schell illuminates, is that we have never drawn the appropriate lessons from the two revolutions that were set in train by the splitting of the atom...

...If it is homicide to kill a single human, and genocide to exterminate a race, and "omnicide" to extinguish all living humans, then, Schell asks, "what crime is it to cancel the numberless multitude of unconceived people...

...You see them all the time in magazines like The New Yorker...

...For years the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have made plain their readiness to start a nuclear war against Warsaw Pact forces in the event of a conventional military setback in Europe...

...The doctrine of nuclear deterrence is often challenged by traditional, pre-nuclear military doctrine (one of whose adherents is now President), which seeks superiority and victory...

...It is by eliminating nuclear weapons, by getting rid of conventional weapons as well, by replacing the system of national state sovereignty, by reinventing politics, by reinventing the world...

...But there is a way to ease the immediate danger, to pull back the hands on the doomsday clock of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists...

...Schell examines the implications of a 1975 study by the National Academy of Sciences which concluded that a 10,000-megaton exchange (employing barely half the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers) could deplete the Earth's ozone shield, which filters out ultraviolet rays from the Sun, below the level needed to sustain human life...

...In such an eventuality, a canopy of brown dust would cover one-third of the U.S...

...But the most telling signs of rebirth are here in the United States...

...Sooner or later, radiation would kill the wretched birds and the mammals, the trees and broad-leafed plants that had survived the initial heat and blast, and the nation would become, in Schell's apt phrase, "a republic of insects and grass...

...The mind boggles even more at the extinction of a city-full, a country-full, a planet-full of people...

...Furthermore, it is easier to grasp, and to be moved by, disaster of less cosmic proportions...

...We will all die some time anyway, and our cities will eventually crumble...

...Third, coming as it does at a time of rising political ferment over the question of nuclear Armageddon, "The Fate of the Earth" could contribute substantially to the reshaping of public opinion and public policy on a matter so important that it is, quite literally, almost beyond imagining...

...It is one thing to run the risk of causing the death of all the world's people and the destruction of all their works...

...the magazine's Vietnam coverage in the mid-1960s, including some on-the-scene reports from Schell himself, did much to undermine the respectability of the war...

...neither can we be sure that it wouldn't...

...The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima released from just one gram (one-thirtieth of an ounce) of Ura-nium-235 the energy equivalent of 12,500 tons of TNT...

...The religious community, led as much by mainstream Catholic bishops as by peacenik Quakers, has begun at last to preach and practice what once was whispered only by a few: "It is a sin to make—or to have—a nuclear weapon...

...The pulling of the trigger not just on ourselves but on all who are to come would be the ultimate evil...

...Steeped as we are in more familiar energy scales, we do not yet really comprehend what it means to have at our disposal a physical force twelve billion times more powerful than anything we had commanded before...

...Three-fourths of the country would be subjected to incendiary levels of heat...

...In 1979, President Carter extended the nuclear umbrella to cover the Persian Gulf, which was a way of saying that the United States is prepared to threaten the canceling of all future generations in all countries so that this generation in this country might continue to have enough gasoline to drive its automobiles...

...Governments—principally our own, which initiated the nuclear weapons buildup and has always led it—are holding a gun to the head of the human species, and thus to all future generations...

...There is no question that in recent times all over the world, but especially in America, where the need is greatest, those calls have begun...

...What of the one million simultaneous Hiroshimas the world's atomic weapons are now capable of wreaking...

...Deterrence theory has been the intellectual screen behind which the doomsday machine was built, giving nuclear weapons a false respectability and benevolence...

...Having let the nuclear genie out of the bottle, we have squandered the little time that remained to adapt our pre-atomic political institutions to the new reality...

...But it is quite a different thing to risk the cancellation of future generations, thereby interrupting a process that began only about a million years ago and, in the absence of some cataclysmic intervention, could be expected to continue many billions of years more...

...At first, the threat was just potential...

...But safeguarding the human species at this late date will require immeasurably more personal commitment, more effort, more sacrifice—and more luck...

...We are moved by the word pictures painted for us by the witnesses: a human head cooked by radiation to the consistency of a boiled octopus...

...It takes greater effort to contemplate, or comprehend, the simultaneous death of all the people on the plane...

...We understand the gravity of the consequences at the intellectual level but not in our gut, and so we continue to run our private and public lives as though the atom had never been split...

...What of the Hiroshimas that are yet to be...

...In acquiescing in that threat we are accomplices in the ultimate crime...

...The unlocking of so much physical power meant that humanity, after thousands of years of searching, had at last achieved the capability of its own destruction...

...The most obvious evidence is in the streets of Europe—East as well as West— where, for the past year, hundreds of thousands have demonstrated their new-found and entirely well-founded concern about the use of their continent as a nuclear battleground for the superpowers...

...Never before had that been true...

...If America's reborn peace movement is to survive its infancy, it must confront and somehow overcome some hard realities of the nuclear arms race...

...Let our daily business drop from our hands for a while...

...The United States and the Soviet Union have reached a point where the firing of just a part of the nuclear weaponry of one, either in attack or retaliation, would, as a practical matter, destroy the other...

...The reinventing of the world calls for early and successful attention to some deep-seated economic and political structural problems in the United States...

...Without the help of visual aids—the boiled heads, the melted eyeballs—how are we to achieve the comprehension that would seem necessary to the prevention of such a calamity...

...The essential madness which underlies the doctrine of nuclear deterrence is compounded by a codicil, patented in the United States, which asserts the right to initiate nuclear hostilities in deterrence of, or in retaliation for, certain non-nuclear provocations...

...Spurred by the urgings of its own members, most notably Helen Caldicott, the Australian-born pediatrician, the American medical community has at last begun practicing serious preventive medicine, often with devastating effect, by speaking out publicly about the public health consequences of policies contemplating "limited nuclear war...

...Moreover, since there is no way a country can defend itself against a nuclear attack or mitigate its effects, and since a retaliatory strike can have no effect other than to extend and compound the damage, the doctrine is based on what Schell calls "a monumental logical mistake: One cannot credibly deter a strike with a second strike whose raison d'etre dissolves the moment the first strike arrives...

...The reinvention of the world "must begin with each person making known his desire that the species survive...

...A single groundburst in New York City could kill as many as twenty million people—and there would be enough firepower left over to drop one megaton (eighty times more than Hiroshima) on every American community with a population of 1,500 or more...

...There also seems to be increasing recognition—from labor, from environmentalists, from those most sensitive to human needs and civil rights—that unhooking the engine of nuclear war must be the prelude to attainment of other goals...

...Since the fall of 1980 he has been an independent author, lecturer, and political organizer in the field of nuclear weaponry and its hazards...

...land mass...

...At the root of the problem is the rationale for building the weapons: the doctrine of "nuclear deterrence," which holds that one state can protect itself from another by threatening nuclear annihilation...

...That is a formidable agenda, Schell concedes, especially since none of it has been begun and the time left for achieving it may be close to zero, but it constitutes the minimum reasonable protection for our progeny...

...Just thinking about it, let alone saying or doing something about it, calls up images of those shaggy, half-potty cartoon characters who carry signs admonishing us to "Repent—The End Is Near...

...of the power of the atom, everything has changed except our mode of thinking—and so we drift toward unparalleled disaster...

...The splitting of the atom was, in the first instance, a physical revolution—a quantum increase in the amount of physical force available to humans...

...Rachel Carson's "The Sea Around Us" in 1950 presaged the dawn of the modern environmental movement...

...Devastating as these effects would be, the global consequences of such an exchange are in an altogether different realm of hazard...

...Human-scale details, not astronomical totals of death and destruction, are what bring home to us the meaning of a catastrophe like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima...

...Preeminent among these is the fact that, whatever threat they may present to the world as a whole and to future generations, nuclear arms are of benefit to some powerful interests here at home: to the military, to vast sectors of industry, labor, science, and academia...

...The weapons also outmoded the very concept of sovereign nation states...

...No longer can it be assumed, says Schell, that civilization in some form, however decimated, would survive a nuclear war...

...The interests are deeply entrenched...

...Jonathan Schell and The New Yorker have helped it along...

...The development of nuclear weapons meant that in a nuclear-armed world, all-out war could never again work as a means of settling disputes...

...Second, the raising of such a subject in a magazine which comes close to being the national arbiter of cultural respectability suggests that nuclear weapons are moving from the periphery to the center as an issue in American politics...

...John McPhee's classic "The Curve of Binding Energy" (1973) taught non-specialists the ABCs of the dangers of nuclear proliferation...

...In the light of such challenges, nuclear deterrence can appear to be a model of restraint and circumspection...

...But the appearance is deceiving...

...When a crowded airliner plunges into a river, what fixes the drama in our minds are the human-scale aspects of the larger tragedy—the motorist crushed to death by the weight on the roof of his car as the plane grazes a bridge on the way down, the survivors struggling in clumps of two or three in the icy water...

...The danger of universal nuclear destruction will always be with us because, having learned the natural laws on which nuclear weapons are based, there is no way we can forget them...

...There is no way of being certain this would happen...

...In failing to grasp the significance of the physical revolution, we have failed to deal with the political revolution that is its direct result...

...We must rely instead on our own sense of fear, or outrage, or love for humanity, or obedience to God, or simple reverence for life—anything to cut through the psychic numbness, the moral torpor, the bureaucratic inertia that have thus far kept us on the course to nuclear oblivion...

...If not to guarantee the oil flow, then perhaps to secure a warm-water port or some other "vital interest"—but the fate of the Earth depends increasingly on transient and temporal concerns of human organizations that hold ultimate destructive powers...

...Such doomsday questions are prompted by a remarkable series of reflections on that very subject—doomsday—by Jonathan Schell in, yes, The New Yorker...

...and Soviet nuclear weapons...

...But the fates have not seen fit to provide us with such fearsome object lessons...

...Repugnant though the thought may be, for us the living a nuclear war would merely hasten a natural process—and none would survive to rue the premature demise...

...Substantially the whole human construct" in the United States would be destroyed...

...The danger of the doctrine is that, in inviting us to place our ultimate trust in terror, it wedges the bomb more deeply into our lives...

...Schell's essay, "The Fate of the Earth," occupying a considerable part of three recent issues (February 1, 8, and 15), is remarkable for three reasons: First, it is a comprehensive and compelling elucidation of what Albert Einstein meant when he said, when the nuclear arms race was still young, "With the unleashing Samuel H. Day Jr., a contributing editor of The Progressive, is a former editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and former managing editor of this magazine...