At the Brink? - TomDispatch.com

At the Brink? - TomDispatch.com Andrea Mazzarino, Nuclear Deterrence, Really? September 28, 2023 Here’s something strange about our all-too-nuclearized planet: in my youth during the 1950s and early 1960s, the possibility of an obliterating nuclear war played a significant role in our everyday nightmares. We schoolkids then regularly engaged in “duck and cover” drills, diving under our desks to protect ourselves from a possible nuclear attack on New York City. (You might, of course, ask how protective our modest-sized metal-and-wooden desks would have been, if our city had indeed experienced a worse-than-Hiroshima event.) We kids were also urged to consider the advice of Bert the Turtle, a character in a cartoon we were shown at school. After all, he “never got hurt because he knew just what we all must do: he ducked and covered!” In those years, New York was, in fact, filled with public “fallout shelters” and I still remember the yellow symbol for them that you could see as you walked the streets of the city. Similarly, popular culture was then remarkably saturated with fantasies of nuclear annihilation. If you doubt me, just get a copy of Walter Miller, Jr.’s 1959 near-world-ending novel A Canticle for Leibowitz (still a striking read today) or check out that earliest of mutant nuclear monster movies, Them!, about giant irradiated ants let loose in Los Angeles. And so it went in those years when it came to imagining the possibility of a world-ending nuclear event. And yet consider this the irony of all ironies: for most of the 1950s, while the United States could have delivered a devastating nuclear Armageddon to the Soviet Union and the rest of the then-communist world, the Russians, though they had indeed developed atomic weapons, didn’t yet have the ability to deliver them here by plane or missile. Hence, the fears that the Soviets might somehow smuggle a bomb into the country. Hence also, the particular terror when the Soviets placed such weaponry in Cuba in 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis commenced. Today, as TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino reminds us, not just two but nine countries are nuclear-armed and the possibility of a nuclear war has increased accordingly. In addition, we now know that even a conflict in which the U.S. played no part could create a “nuclear winter” that would devastate this country, too. And yet, despite the recent hit movie Oppenheimer, nuclear fears and fantasies are now largely in absentia. Bert, it seems, ducked, covered, and never came up again. So, I think it’s particularly useful at this moment for Mazzarino to remind us that, 78 years after those two nuclear bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it’s a small miracle that another such weapon hasn’t again been used in war and that, whatever the other dangers on this planet, we should never take our eyes off the nuclear one. Tom