Страница 5 из 28
The central concept in nuclear-winter theory is synergism. When two bad things happen, a third (and unpredictable) bad thing happens, exceeding the sum of the individual effects. This is on top of the bad things we know a good deal about, already quite a list. Prompt radiation, superstellar temperatures, electromagnetic pulse, thermal pulse, blast overpressure, fallout, disease, loss of immunity, cold, dark, contamination, inherited deformity, ozone depletion: with what hysterical ferocity, with what farcical disproportion, do nuclear weapons loathe human life… It is possible to imagine nuclear synergisms multiplying into eternity, popping and crackling away, inimical to life even when there is nothing left to be inimical to. The theory of nuclear winter was prompted by studies of dust storms on Mars, and Mars gives us a plausible vision of a postnuclear world. It is vulcanized, oxidized, sterilized. It is the planet of war.
Soon after I realized I was writing about nuclear weapons (and the realization took quite a while: roughly half of what follows in this book was written in i
For some reason, and it is no doubt an intriguing reason, the bulk of imaginative fiction on the subject belongs to the genres. Pentagon-and-Kremlin countdowns, terrorist or rogue-leader nail-biters, love and pain in the postapocalyptic tundra. Science fiction started concerning itself with doomsday weapons long before such weapons were ever mooted, and nowadays about one SF novel in four is set beyond the holocaust. Meanwhile, it is astonishing how little the mainstream has had to say about the nuclear destiny-a destiny that does not want for complication, inclusiveness, pattern, paradox, that does not want for interest. (Nuclear weapons have many demerits, but drabness is not one of them.) And yet the senior generation of writers has remained silent; prolific and major though many of them are, with writing lives that straddled the evolutionary firebreak of 1945, they evidently did not find that the subject suggested itself naturally. They lived in one kind of world, then they lived in another kind of world; and they didn't tell us what the difference was like. I recently asked Graham Greene what the difference was like, and he said that he had never really thought about it. I do not count this as any kind of defeat for Graham Greene, the most prescient writer of our time. But I do count it as some kind of victory for nuclear weapons.
Clearly a literary theme ca
Mutual Assured Destruction: it sounds like an insurance firm or a building society until we reach its final element. Will we reach its final element? MAD is a disgusting and ridiculous doctrine, and a desire to escape from it has now given us SDL I had been reading the pro-SDI literature for quite some time when, sure enough, I finally came across something to be said for it. It might lessen the slaughter of an accidental war. The next day I read Daniel Ford's brilliant book, The Button, and learned that accidental war is something that many of the fiercest critics of nuclear policy now utterly discount. So SDI has nothing to be said for it. Arms improvement is the very crux of the present danger. A new emphasis on defense combined with arms reduction and obsolescence is a possible future. A new emphasis on defense combined with the status quo is just more of the same. It is just more weapons. Weapons are like money: no one knows the meaning of enough. If we could look at ourselves from anything approaching the vantage of cosmic time, if we had any sense of cosmic power, cosmic delicacy, then every indicator would point the same way: down. Down, down, down. We do not need this new direction, which is up.
In The Logic of Deterrence, Anthony Ke
… there is nothing that it would make sense to do "if deterrence fails"… When the President is asked what the United States will do if it is subjected to nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, he ca
Generally it is encouraging to see the weight of the churches being enlisted toward the Utopian unanimity, in the form of papal statements, pastoral letters, responsible activism, and so on. But nuclear weapons are mirrors in which we see all the versions of the human shape. Incomparably the most influential religious body on earth, the New Evangelicals, who exercise real power, warmly anticipate "a holy nuclear war," which will exalt Israel (where the hostilities begin) and crush Russia, before going on to dramatize the Apocalypse. These people are Born Again; and they seem to want to Die Again. A "holy" nuclear war: here we stare into the foundry of the moronic inferno, an inferno that is one of our possible futures.