Friday, April 23 J 982
Daily Nebraskan
Page 5
Extinction: new twist to horrors of nuclear war
One of the byproducts of living in an age capable of
devising weapons as fearsome as the atomic bomb is the
apocalyptic quality of journalistic rhetoric on the subject
It seems to be a law of nature, or at any rate of journal
ism, that any major scientific development will be seized
on by imaginative writers and quickly pushed through,
past all sorts of intervening obstacles, to what they fondly
William Rusher
regard as its logical conclusion, lor good or ill.
In the case of the atom bomb, extinction was from the
very start the name of the game, and it has had a perverse
fascination for many intellectuals. About 20 years ago,
the description of the horrors of nuclear war became a
cottage industry, but recently that industry has been in a
recession. To the rescue comes Jonathan Schell, who has a
new twist.
Thanks to increases in the total number of atomic
weapons, and "improvements" in their performance,
Schell calculates that a nuclear war would, or at any rate
might, result not only in the immediate deaths of
hundreds of millions of people but, thanks to the
consequent poisoning of the environment by radiation,
etc., in the subsequent extinction of all human life: i.e., of
the species itself.
Having constructed that mighty gong, Schell banged it
three times in the New Yorker, then published the articles
as a book. It is being hailed by Americans numerous pho
nophiles (a word I have just invented, meaning "people
who love to be frightened") as the best high since cocaine.
Where all this is supposed to leave the world's policy
makers Schell doesn't say; apparently inventing his grisly
scenario exhausted his creativity. For what it's worth,
however, it bears noting that the vast majority of serious
thinkers on both sides of the Iron Curtain reject Schell's
conclusion. Any nuclear war would be ghastly, even "un
thinkable" if you wish; but extinction of the human
species is not in fact a technically plausible consequence
of one.
The political effect of this Schell game, therefore, is
simply to further mobilize (on this side of the Iron
Curtain only) those individuals and institutions for whom
hysterical collapse - a pure blue funk - is the unstated
objective. Day by day they are edging closer to the
moment when they will say, in one vast exhalation, what
they are really thinking: "Yes - give up! Let the Russians
have it all. Hotter - far better - Red than dead, because
the dead can never again stand for anything at all."
The sooner they say it, the better, as far as I'm con
cerned. For then the rest of the free world, that far larger
part of it that keeps a grip on reality and has noticed that
the scheer existence of these awesome weapons has kept
pace between the superpowers ever since they were
invented, can begin to be heard from. Is it, after all, so
utterly impossible that if major governments have
developed the ability to make such weapons, they may
simultaneously have developed the sense not to let
matters get to a point where they must use them?
1982 Universal Press Syndicate
Reagan 's nuclear scare backfires to own nation
In the car the other day, my son started to talk about
nuclear war. He thinks it's a possibility, and because he is
young and does not want to die young he considers
nuclear war "unfair." It's his favorite word, but there is,
for the moment, none better.
He is not the only one talking about nuclear warfare
these days. The New Yorker, which can usually guarantee
an article obscurity simply by publishing it, in February
Richard Cohen
ran a three-part series on nuclear war by Jonathon Schell,
and people are still talking about it. Esquire did one on
civil defense and Time had the bomb on its cover.
Those of us with a memory have been through this be
fore. The late 1940s were rough and the 450s were no fun
either. We learned how to take cover under the school
room desks. We were marched into the hallway and told
which way to face. We were told never to look into the
blast and to cover the backs of our necks and to listen to
our teachers. It was silly, but after a while it all went
away.
Now it is back and the reason is that the Cold War is
back too. Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig and Caspar
Weinberger, with their talk of limited nuclear war and
firing nuclear warning shots, their tough rhetoric and their
incessant military posturing, have given the whole country
the willies. They want us to face facts, but the facts they
want us to face are truly horrible.
There are about 50,000 nuclear warheads in the world
- Hiroshima and Hiroshima and Hiroshima over and over
again until you get to 50,000 The Hiroshima bomb, 12.5
kilotons, was a puny affair. Still, it leveled the city and
killed half the people in it. Nowadays, Johathon Schell
writes, "It would be classed among the merely tactical
weapons."
For most of us, nuclear war, like one's own death, is
unthinkable, and so we have left the thinking of it to
others. But what is refreshing about what is happening
now is the apparent refusal of lots of people to accept
nuclear war as one accepts the inevitability of death itself.
These are people who now are saying that something
can be done, that the fate of the world is in the hands of
the people of the world. This was the message of the anti
nuclear rallies of Western Europe. They weren't so much
anti-American as pro-hope - a statement by the people
that they were no longer going to leave nuclear policy to
the professionals.
Now the same thing is happening here. Only instead of
the administration seeing that we are all on the same side
- that when it comes to the nuclear issue there is no other
side - it senses a fifth column, a softness, a break in our
resolve on which the Russians will capitalize. Reagan's
people fear the Russians will sense that we are afraid of
nuclear war. The trouble is, this cannot be news to them.
So the drumbeat of belligerence continues. As a nation,
we have our dukes up. Our defense budget will grow. We
are no longer the 90-pound weakling of the Jimmy Carter
era, but a broad-shouldered country, seeking to show that
no country can kick sand in our face.
All this has revived and exacerbated the fears about
Ronald Reagan that came out during the presidential
campaign. He set out to scare the Russians, but he's scared
us instead.
(c) 1982, The Washington Post Company
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Featuring:
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Footloose
Mischief
also
the comedy of
Tom Parks
April 23
East Campus -12 to 5:00
University Program Council
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