Have we finally learned to stop worrying about the bomb? In the west, at least, it would appear so. The rituals and artefacts of the nuclear age have never seemed more distant. Black and yellow nuclear fallout signs that once adorned public buildings are now collector’s items. People store wine in what were once atomic shelters. The bunker under the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, where the US Senate was once designated to spend the nuclear winter, is now part of the guest tour. Ambitious young cadets at the military academies prefer to go into counterinsurgency or cyber warfare—anything to avoid the tedium of sitting in a room with the button. Hollywood has known the well went dry years ago: natural disasters and terrorism draw more of an audience than mushroom clouds.
In a world where the bomb is no longer a nightmare, it is easy to forget how profoundly nuclear weapons and nuclear power have shaped our culture and politics. Throughout the 20th century, many leading thinkers recalibrated their political bearings when confronted with the reality of the bomb. In the 1980s, EP Thompson, perhaps the fiercest left-wing critic of nuclear weapons in Britain, turned from writing history to writing science fiction about nuclear war, and from socialism to what he called “human-beingism.” The socialist revolution, he believed, would have to be deferred until the threat of nuclear winter was averted. Nuclear weapons and nuclear power have also affected our political structures. Just as coal power is more conducive to populist politics, with miners able to strike or sabotage trains carrying product, and oil seems to require some form of global oversight to guarantee its extraction, trade, and shipment from politically volatile regions, so nuclear power, in all its forms, lends itself to technocracy and centralised control. In the US, the Cold War concentrated political power in the executive branch, at least in part because of the President’s sole command over nuclear weapons. It is hardly feasible to put a motion to the floor of Congress when there are just 10 minutes to decide whether a nuclear counter-strike is warranted.
Three provocative new books on the history of nuclear weapons seek to rouse us from our post-Cold War slumbers. The authors want us to worry about the bomb all over again, but in new ways. In Command and Control, the American journalist Eric Schlosser tells the story of a series of catastrophes and near-catastrophes with America’s nuclear arsenal in the past 60 years. Rudolph Herzog’s A Short History of Nuclear Folly is an idiosyncratic catalogue of nuclear mishaps by a German writer whose sensibilities were shaped by the rise of nuclear power. Patrick Marnham’s Snake Dance is a more impressionistic account of nuclear weapons and some of the key figures present at their creation. It is a penetrating historical x-ray of the first generation of people to live under the nuclear shadow, many of whom were convinced humanity was on the eve of destruction.
When we think of close calls in the Cold War, they tend to be episodes like the Cuban missile crisis, Eisenhower’s stand-off with the Chinese over the Taiwan straits, or Nixon’s threat of a nuclear attack if the Soviet Union intervened in the 1967 Six Day War. They are games of cat-and-mouse where each side tries to out-bluff the other. But as Schlosser reveals, the causes of a nuclear disaster were always more likely to result from human error or technical failure than any conscious decision to use the bomb. Even in the moments when the US seemed most in control of its weapons, it wasn’t. After bombing Hiroshima, the plane that was supposed to drop the “Fat Man” bomb on the city of Kokura experienced malfunctions with its fuel pump and bomb fuse indicator. Running low on fuel and with poor visibility over the city, the rookie pilot opted for the secondary target, Nagasaki, where his bomb missed the intended drop-site—the commercial district—by a mile, and detonated on the outskirts of the city, where it killed far fewer people than intended.
Typically, the story of nuclear weapons runs from the top down, with starring roles assigned to the Manhattan Project scientists (Oppenheimer, Fermi, et al), the Megadeath intellectuals (Herman Kahn, Alfred Wohlsetter, et al), and the spies (the Rosenbergs, AQ Kahn, and so on). The innovation of Schlosser’s book is to tell the same story from the ground up. His book is populated by the men inside America’s missile silos, the military personnel who tended to the day-to-day operations, and the technicians who rushed to the scenes of accidents. Command and Control comes armed with countless examples of forgotten almost-disasters: a US military plane that drops a nuclear bomb on a farm in South Carolina that somehow fails to detonate; a shipment of nuclear warheads mistakenly sent to Taiwan, where it stayed unnoticed for two years; a security crew at North American Aerospace Defence Command that accidentally simulated a full-scale Soviet attack. One gets the sense, reading Command and Control, that the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States from the 1940s onward has been in the hands of men in their twenties with a zealous faith in protocol and check-lists. These are men who, when confronted with situations that threaten to blow them and their hometowns sky high, tend to mutter: “This is not good,” “This is a hot one” and “Dang.”
Even today, when the US and Russia have significantly reduced their nuclear stockpiles (the US currently has 7,700 warheads, down from its peak of 31,225 in 1967), Schlosser believes it’s only a question of time before the “accidental mass murder” happens. The missiles, he writes, “are a collective death wish, barely suppressed.” Command and Control is a rallying cry to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether before it is too late. But as Schlosser acknowledges, there are reasons for why this is virtually impossible. Now that the Faustian bargain with nuclear power has been made, it seems only a tragedy of epic proportions would provide enough impetus for democratically-elected politicians of the west to pursue a full nuclear ban, much in the same way American liberals always fail to pass any real gun-control after mass shootings.
Moreover, the legacy of nuclear weapons is still unclear. To be sure, they allowed real wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan to be fought with impunity during the Cold War, with nuclear weapons guaranteeing the exclusion of the other rival superpower (except in covert forms). Yet for all of the criticism that was heaped on it from the left and right during the Cold War, the old liberal policy of “mutual deterrence” in large part succeeded, and continues to succeed in places like India and Pakistan, where, before both acquired the bomb, the two engaged in real wars every few years. One of the more positive legacies of the nuclear age may be the sort of international dialogues it formalised, which the political scientist Joseph Nye suggests can now be applied to new areas of international discord, such as cyber war.
Schlosser’s sense that anything-that-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong also pervades Rudolph Herzog’s A Short History ofNuclear Folly. Growing up in Bavaria, Herzog remembers as a child not being able to drink milk after the clouds from Chernobyl passed through his town. This memory appears to have permanently soured Herzog’s relationship with nuclear reactors. In a chapter on nuclear energy in Brazil, Herzog recounts the story of a medical radiation machine left behind in a poor district of the Brazilian city Goiania. The machine was broken open by squatters, which unleashed radioactivity in large quantities. Herzog’s point is not that we should abandon the use of radiation in medicine altogether, but that we do not always think through the consequences of such technological leaps. He gives the example of the plutonium placed in pacemakers, which allows them to run for a full lifetime without needing to be serviced. In much of the world, no one considered what happens to the plutonium after the person dies. Herzog is not quite anti-technology, but his tragic view of technological development sees unforeseen disasters behind every advance. In this sense, he exemplifies some of the political spirit of today’s Germany, which is the most implacably anti-nuclear nation in Europe.
Unlike Command and Control or Nuclear Folly, Patrick Marnham’s Snake Dance bears little trace of polemic. Instead, it is a reminder of how far the bomb has faded from our night-thoughts and imagination. In the tradition of Bruce Chatwin and Sven Lindqvist, he takes us on a journey from the Belgian Congo of Joseph Conrad where the uranium that furnished the first American nuclear warheads was extracted, back to the desert of New Mexico where it was tested, and onto Hiroshima where it was detonated. There is something occasionally too whimsical about this itinerary, but Marnham has a remarkable ability to write synchronic history. He reminds us, for instance, that at the same time Robert Oppenheimer was falling seriously ill near the uranium mines in Bohemia, Niels Bohr was opening his Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, and Conrad was touring the battlefields of the First World War with his son, Borys, who had fought in them. These ruminations might make for a frustrating book if read alone, but alongside Schlosser’s great factual monument, it feels almost complementary.
For all their power and verve, however, Schlosser, Herzog, and Marnham’s books lose something when they turn to the present. Schlosser in particular suggests that we do not worry about the bomb in the right way—that we should worry less about Iran developing the bomb than about Iran accidentally detonating a bomb while trying to develop it. (With that worry in mind, a columnist in the current issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists goes so far as to wonder whether the west should extend its “responsibility to protect” to citizens who could be in danger from their nation’s nuclear programme.) Yet this focus on nuclear accidents risks overlooking what may become the main story about nuclear weapons in the 21st century. If Iran successfully develops the bomb, it is plausible that a new Cold War could play itself out within the more limited confines of the Middle East, with a race for weapons in Saudi Arabia, intense nuclear stockpiling in Israel, and the US installing missiles in allied states, as it once did in western Europe.
Even so, thoughts of a new Cold War are not top of the list of everyday worries in the west today. Disappointingly, all three authors fail to ask why our anxiety about the bomb has faded, and what, if anything, has replaced it.
The answer seems to be an expanded form of environmental anxiety. Environmentalism and the anti-nuclear movement have much in common. Both confront apocalyptical scenarios that require immediate attention, if future generations of humans are not to suffer. Both seek a goal that seems impossible to arrive at through the morass of democratic politics. Yet the dissimilarities are more intriguing. No one—right, left, centre—ever denied during the Cold War that a world without nuclear weapons was desirable in the abstract, whereas in the current intellectual climate, many continue to deny that climate change is real. The debates over nuclear war were almost always seen in terms of strategy and military necessity, whereas the environmental challenge is seen in terms of how much political will is available and what the market can bear. Finally, the end of nuclear weapons in the public mind was at least imaginable; it only required relinquishing the Promethean gift and destroying all extant warheads. When it comes to the environment, however, simply returning to some status quo ante is not an option—we continue to hurtle toward a status unknown.
One speculative solution to the global warming crisis these days comes from the realm of science fiction. Films such as The Core (2003) imagine a future in which we will someday be required to burrow deep into the core of the earth and rearrange its composition to cool the planet. This fantasy—popular with various crank communities online—always seems to require a series of nuclear explosions to get sufficiently deep underground. And so, at just the point when we have purged the bomb from our nightmares, it invades our dreams for the future.
Command and Control by Eric Schlosser (Allen Lane, £25)
A Short History of Nuclear Folly by Rudolph Herzog (Melville House, £18.99)
Snake Dance: Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky by Patrick Marnham (Chatto & Windus, £18.99)
In a world where the bomb is no longer a nightmare, it is easy to forget how profoundly nuclear weapons and nuclear power have shaped our culture and politics. Throughout the 20th century, many leading thinkers recalibrated their political bearings when confronted with the reality of the bomb. In the 1980s, EP Thompson, perhaps the fiercest left-wing critic of nuclear weapons in Britain, turned from writing history to writing science fiction about nuclear war, and from socialism to what he called “human-beingism.” The socialist revolution, he believed, would have to be deferred until the threat of nuclear winter was averted. Nuclear weapons and nuclear power have also affected our political structures. Just as coal power is more conducive to populist politics, with miners able to strike or sabotage trains carrying product, and oil seems to require some form of global oversight to guarantee its extraction, trade, and shipment from politically volatile regions, so nuclear power, in all its forms, lends itself to technocracy and centralised control. In the US, the Cold War concentrated political power in the executive branch, at least in part because of the President’s sole command over nuclear weapons. It is hardly feasible to put a motion to the floor of Congress when there are just 10 minutes to decide whether a nuclear counter-strike is warranted.
Three provocative new books on the history of nuclear weapons seek to rouse us from our post-Cold War slumbers. The authors want us to worry about the bomb all over again, but in new ways. In Command and Control, the American journalist Eric Schlosser tells the story of a series of catastrophes and near-catastrophes with America’s nuclear arsenal in the past 60 years. Rudolph Herzog’s A Short History of Nuclear Folly is an idiosyncratic catalogue of nuclear mishaps by a German writer whose sensibilities were shaped by the rise of nuclear power. Patrick Marnham’s Snake Dance is a more impressionistic account of nuclear weapons and some of the key figures present at their creation. It is a penetrating historical x-ray of the first generation of people to live under the nuclear shadow, many of whom were convinced humanity was on the eve of destruction.
When we think of close calls in the Cold War, they tend to be episodes like the Cuban missile crisis, Eisenhower’s stand-off with the Chinese over the Taiwan straits, or Nixon’s threat of a nuclear attack if the Soviet Union intervened in the 1967 Six Day War. They are games of cat-and-mouse where each side tries to out-bluff the other. But as Schlosser reveals, the causes of a nuclear disaster were always more likely to result from human error or technical failure than any conscious decision to use the bomb. Even in the moments when the US seemed most in control of its weapons, it wasn’t. After bombing Hiroshima, the plane that was supposed to drop the “Fat Man” bomb on the city of Kokura experienced malfunctions with its fuel pump and bomb fuse indicator. Running low on fuel and with poor visibility over the city, the rookie pilot opted for the secondary target, Nagasaki, where his bomb missed the intended drop-site—the commercial district—by a mile, and detonated on the outskirts of the city, where it killed far fewer people than intended.
Typically, the story of nuclear weapons runs from the top down, with starring roles assigned to the Manhattan Project scientists (Oppenheimer, Fermi, et al), the Megadeath intellectuals (Herman Kahn, Alfred Wohlsetter, et al), and the spies (the Rosenbergs, AQ Kahn, and so on). The innovation of Schlosser’s book is to tell the same story from the ground up. His book is populated by the men inside America’s missile silos, the military personnel who tended to the day-to-day operations, and the technicians who rushed to the scenes of accidents. Command and Control comes armed with countless examples of forgotten almost-disasters: a US military plane that drops a nuclear bomb on a farm in South Carolina that somehow fails to detonate; a shipment of nuclear warheads mistakenly sent to Taiwan, where it stayed unnoticed for two years; a security crew at North American Aerospace Defence Command that accidentally simulated a full-scale Soviet attack. One gets the sense, reading Command and Control, that the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States from the 1940s onward has been in the hands of men in their twenties with a zealous faith in protocol and check-lists. These are men who, when confronted with situations that threaten to blow them and their hometowns sky high, tend to mutter: “This is not good,” “This is a hot one” and “Dang.”
Even today, when the US and Russia have significantly reduced their nuclear stockpiles (the US currently has 7,700 warheads, down from its peak of 31,225 in 1967), Schlosser believes it’s only a question of time before the “accidental mass murder” happens. The missiles, he writes, “are a collective death wish, barely suppressed.” Command and Control is a rallying cry to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether before it is too late. But as Schlosser acknowledges, there are reasons for why this is virtually impossible. Now that the Faustian bargain with nuclear power has been made, it seems only a tragedy of epic proportions would provide enough impetus for democratically-elected politicians of the west to pursue a full nuclear ban, much in the same way American liberals always fail to pass any real gun-control after mass shootings.
Moreover, the legacy of nuclear weapons is still unclear. To be sure, they allowed real wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan to be fought with impunity during the Cold War, with nuclear weapons guaranteeing the exclusion of the other rival superpower (except in covert forms). Yet for all of the criticism that was heaped on it from the left and right during the Cold War, the old liberal policy of “mutual deterrence” in large part succeeded, and continues to succeed in places like India and Pakistan, where, before both acquired the bomb, the two engaged in real wars every few years. One of the more positive legacies of the nuclear age may be the sort of international dialogues it formalised, which the political scientist Joseph Nye suggests can now be applied to new areas of international discord, such as cyber war.
Schlosser’s sense that anything-that-can-go-wrong-will-go-wrong also pervades Rudolph Herzog’s A Short History ofNuclear Folly. Growing up in Bavaria, Herzog remembers as a child not being able to drink milk after the clouds from Chernobyl passed through his town. This memory appears to have permanently soured Herzog’s relationship with nuclear reactors. In a chapter on nuclear energy in Brazil, Herzog recounts the story of a medical radiation machine left behind in a poor district of the Brazilian city Goiania. The machine was broken open by squatters, which unleashed radioactivity in large quantities. Herzog’s point is not that we should abandon the use of radiation in medicine altogether, but that we do not always think through the consequences of such technological leaps. He gives the example of the plutonium placed in pacemakers, which allows them to run for a full lifetime without needing to be serviced. In much of the world, no one considered what happens to the plutonium after the person dies. Herzog is not quite anti-technology, but his tragic view of technological development sees unforeseen disasters behind every advance. In this sense, he exemplifies some of the political spirit of today’s Germany, which is the most implacably anti-nuclear nation in Europe.
Unlike Command and Control or Nuclear Folly, Patrick Marnham’s Snake Dance bears little trace of polemic. Instead, it is a reminder of how far the bomb has faded from our night-thoughts and imagination. In the tradition of Bruce Chatwin and Sven Lindqvist, he takes us on a journey from the Belgian Congo of Joseph Conrad where the uranium that furnished the first American nuclear warheads was extracted, back to the desert of New Mexico where it was tested, and onto Hiroshima where it was detonated. There is something occasionally too whimsical about this itinerary, but Marnham has a remarkable ability to write synchronic history. He reminds us, for instance, that at the same time Robert Oppenheimer was falling seriously ill near the uranium mines in Bohemia, Niels Bohr was opening his Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, and Conrad was touring the battlefields of the First World War with his son, Borys, who had fought in them. These ruminations might make for a frustrating book if read alone, but alongside Schlosser’s great factual monument, it feels almost complementary.
For all their power and verve, however, Schlosser, Herzog, and Marnham’s books lose something when they turn to the present. Schlosser in particular suggests that we do not worry about the bomb in the right way—that we should worry less about Iran developing the bomb than about Iran accidentally detonating a bomb while trying to develop it. (With that worry in mind, a columnist in the current issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists goes so far as to wonder whether the west should extend its “responsibility to protect” to citizens who could be in danger from their nation’s nuclear programme.) Yet this focus on nuclear accidents risks overlooking what may become the main story about nuclear weapons in the 21st century. If Iran successfully develops the bomb, it is plausible that a new Cold War could play itself out within the more limited confines of the Middle East, with a race for weapons in Saudi Arabia, intense nuclear stockpiling in Israel, and the US installing missiles in allied states, as it once did in western Europe.
Even so, thoughts of a new Cold War are not top of the list of everyday worries in the west today. Disappointingly, all three authors fail to ask why our anxiety about the bomb has faded, and what, if anything, has replaced it.
The answer seems to be an expanded form of environmental anxiety. Environmentalism and the anti-nuclear movement have much in common. Both confront apocalyptical scenarios that require immediate attention, if future generations of humans are not to suffer. Both seek a goal that seems impossible to arrive at through the morass of democratic politics. Yet the dissimilarities are more intriguing. No one—right, left, centre—ever denied during the Cold War that a world without nuclear weapons was desirable in the abstract, whereas in the current intellectual climate, many continue to deny that climate change is real. The debates over nuclear war were almost always seen in terms of strategy and military necessity, whereas the environmental challenge is seen in terms of how much political will is available and what the market can bear. Finally, the end of nuclear weapons in the public mind was at least imaginable; it only required relinquishing the Promethean gift and destroying all extant warheads. When it comes to the environment, however, simply returning to some status quo ante is not an option—we continue to hurtle toward a status unknown.
One speculative solution to the global warming crisis these days comes from the realm of science fiction. Films such as The Core (2003) imagine a future in which we will someday be required to burrow deep into the core of the earth and rearrange its composition to cool the planet. This fantasy—popular with various crank communities online—always seems to require a series of nuclear explosions to get sufficiently deep underground. And so, at just the point when we have purged the bomb from our nightmares, it invades our dreams for the future.
Command and Control by Eric Schlosser (Allen Lane, £25)
A Short History of Nuclear Folly by Rudolph Herzog (Melville House, £18.99)
Snake Dance: Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky by Patrick Marnham (Chatto & Windus, £18.99)
