Feeling the Unfeelable
Powers, Thomas
Feeling the Unfeelable THINKING ABOUT THE NEXT WAR by Thomas Powers Alfred A . Knopf. 155 pp. $10.95. Several years before Jonathan Schell aroused Americans with his exegesis on nuclear war,...
...History suggests that war is something less—a characteristic and habitual form of human behavior—a thing men do...
...Down the Miracle Mile" has Powers visiting a warhead engineering plant where he compares a sleek, "zillion dollar" carbon-carbon re-entry vehicle with the cheap, prefab tackiness of the Sunbelt town outside the factory gates and, further out, the greed and hopelessness of Reagan's America...
...In "What Is War...
...That is not to say he trafficks in the increasingly redundant "apocaporn" of megadeath that fills too many of the current barrage of books on nuclear power...
...We aren't faced with a choice between guns and butter," he writes, "but guns and bread...
...Rather, Powers approaches genocidal warfare from an intensely human perspective, zeroing in on some unhappy home truths along the way...
...Let others think the unthinkable...
...Hardly unique in itself, this gloomy thought is the jumping-off point for a series of elegant meditations on the meaning of war in general and nuclear war in particular...
...Powers describes a weapons planner whose "study of the subject had convinced him it just can't happen...
...Powers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter best known for books on Weatherwoman Diana Oughton (Diana: The Making of a Terrorist) and spy Richard Helms (The Man Who Kept the Secrets), began research in 1980 on a history of nuclear weapons and delivery systems...
...But of course a father can kill his own child...
...Nineteen of his essays have now been collected in Thinking about the Next War, a kiloton-sized volume that packs a multimegaton punch...
...The arms race, then, is fueled by disbelief that these awesome weapons will ever be used...
...It is difficult to avoid the conclusion," he decides, "that the most profitable result of a general nuclear war would be a race to recover economic and military strength in order to be ready for a second general nuclear war...
...On the new Cold War: "We are watching a tentative replay of the 1950s, an effort by the pessimists, perhaps only half-deliberate, to reestablish the Cold War consensus that once insulated the defense and intelligence communities so effectively from scrutiny...
...The consolation is that these essays are but appetizers preceding the main course: Powers's forthcoming study of strategic planning since World War II...
...On what to tell the kids: "Adults are practiced in denial, but children are defenseless...
...In a chilling chapter, "After the Bombs," Powers ponders the likely outcome: two pulverized superpowers, their mutual hatred inflamed by their suffering...
...Studying this situation in detail was a dismal experience," he writes, "and I began writing these essays as a way of coming to terms with it...
...The unhappiest of these truths is his conviction that "we have not seen the last of the big wars, and the next one will probably involve the use of nuclear weapons...
...D A V I D C . MORRISON (David C. Morrison is a research analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C...
...If—barring a radical reassertion of genuine common sense or a mass suspension of our dangerous disbelief—a major nuclear war is a major possibility, what world awaits us on the other side...
...Powers has much to say on the theory of deterrence as a rationale for our having amassed such absurdly gargantuan arsenals...
...In essay after essay, Powers grapples with the slippery, if not slimy, questions posed by life in the nuclear age...
...Insisting that war is a rational enterprise, our nuclear warriors, Powers maintains, place their faith—and our fate—on that slenderest of reeds, human common sense, and "allow themselves to be privately hopeful, much in the manner of oncologists determined not to worry about getting cancer...
...The temptation to go on quoting from this wise, sorrowful, and unflinching book is powerful...
...Several years before Jonathan Schell aroused Americans with his exegesis on nuclear war, The Fate of the Earth, in The New Yorker, Thomas Powers was quietly tapping out thoughtful essays on the same subject for the progressive Catholic biweekly, Commonweal...
...Powers takes that old Prussian warhorse Clausewitz out for a canter, noting that his penultimate definition of war as " 'violence pushed to its utmost bounds' is now beyond the capacity of society to bear...
...I can hardly wait...
...On Jimmy Carter's Presidential Directive 59: "Pointing nuclear weapons at military targets, and thereby emphasizing their nature as weapons, marks the beginning of a seachange in the psychology of the Russian- American confrontation, a gradual acceptance of the possibility of war...
...On whether we can go on balancing terror indefinitely: "In history nothing never happens...
...He notes that it is based on belief "that war is an act of aggrandizement, and that nothing can prevent it but fear of consequences...
...Not in the sense that objects can't fall up, spring can't follow summer, two and two can't equal five, a man can't breathe under water, but in the sense that a father can't kill his own child...
...Powers feels the unfeelable...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 5
