Longneck
December 2013
Peace, goodwill and nuclear warheads.
Scanning my bookshelves the other day, I came across a once-sleek tome that has fallen on hard – or at least fallow – times. My copy of The Fate of the Earth, US writer Jonathan Schell’s 1982 warning about nuclear holocaust, is showing its age. The pages have yellowed, the spine is cracked, the ink has curdled. Its cover was once jet-black – apart from the white words, which stood up like neatly stacked bones. But now that blackness, symbolising ever-lasting oblivion, is rubbed and scuffed, as if life endures despite Schell’s best efforts to scare us silly: ‘In judging the global effects of a holocaust, therefore, the primary question is not how many people would be irradiated, burned or crushed to death by the immediate effects of the bombs but how well the ecosphere … on which all forms of life depend for their continued existence, would hold up.’ Humans and cockroaches: BEWARE.
When I pulled The Fate of the Earth from my shelf and opened it for the first time in 25 or so years, I might as well have dug it out of a pit. It not only looks and smells like a relic, it reads like one too. US-USSR posturing has come and gone (as has the USSR itself, although I find President Putin pretty scary when he’s shirtless). All we have to do – ‘we’ being the everybody-loves-everybody-even-though-we-all-spy-on-each-other global community – is hose down the North Koreans and the Iranians (‘non-status-quo nations’, as some experts like to call them) plus a few pockets of crazed terrorists. And if any of these rabblerousers get too uppity, Obama can nuke ‘em. What could possibly go wrong?
Ah, the 80s, when I whipped myself into a frenzy of fear: bad dreams, beer-drinking to block the horrors out, grand plans for activism never acted upon. And my fears were – or so I believe – legitimate. Schell tapped into this era, not with literary fireworks but with a sober, ‘just the facts m’am’ tone. The Fate of the Earth contains plenty of startling details, from the scientific mysteries of how bombs actually manage to do what they do, to a list of the ways that a nuclear war might kill a person. But it’s a fine line: adopting a calm pose when discussing the end of the world might be a smart way to avoid having friends, family and critics tell you that you’re hysterical, but sometimes it seems as if Schell is intent on boring readers into a heightened level of interest.
It’s hard – and Schell knows it – to keep people feeling scared about an event that’s almost impossible to imagine. As he puts it, ‘Futurology has never been a very respectable field of inquiry.’ After all, those dire 80s predictions didn’t come true: last time I checked I wasn’t a lonely survivor fending for myself in a bitter and twisted post-nuclear wasteland. Nuclear weapons worry me more than, say, an asteroid hitting the earth but less than, say, road rage. Or cancer. I’d rather tell a joke about Kim Jong-un getting his remote controls mixed up (you know, that one where instead of changing the TV channel he accidentally vaporises himself, ha ha ha) than ponder the consequences of North Korea managing to lob a homemade warhead as far as Seoul … or Fukushima.
I might have become complacent about a nuclear holocaust but Jonathan Schell sure hasn’t. Unlike The Fate of the Earth, he hasn’t sat on a shelf silently ageing. He’s been talking, teaching, writing – preaching – a no-nukes message this whole time. And he’s got me anxious all over again, a sort of mid-life crisis for somebody who’s not into cars.
The dangers are different now. Messier too, even though America and Russia still have the bulk of the things pointed here, there and who knows where. Still, the message, boiled down to bare bones, hasn’t changed that much. As Schell said in The Fate of the Earth, ‘Two paths lie before us. One leads to death, the other to life.’
And yet I feel another type of complacency kicking in: why do I need to worry about nuclear annihilation when Jonathan Schell is worrying on my behalf? It’s nearly Christmas, after all, a time of peace and goodwill to all men and women. She’ll be right … right?
@PatrAllington
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