It is fun to refight the battles in the Civil War or in the Second World War. The dead have all been counted and the battles are so complex that there might have been very different outcomes in many of them. War is more complicated than chess if for no other reason that the values of the elements of force can change over time. So long range artillery are more important in the Russia-Ukraine War than are jet planes. Maybe Italy wouldn’t have been such a long slog that was not decisive if Mark Clark had better handled Salerno. Would Hawaii have been invaded if we lost at Midway? What if Union forces had not taken the heights on the first day of Gettysburg or Grant had not persisted on the second day of Shiloh and turned defeat into victory? So many imponderables that are no longer at anyone’s expense. Unless you worry that Jefferson Davis and Hitler might have won. Now, those would be nightmares.
On the other hand, I don't like to refight the Cold War. I lived through the entire thing, from the late Forties through 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and I had nightmares throughout the period. During the Korean War, friends of mine in junior high school sang “MIG’s are a’comin; their planes are In sight” to parody the then popular tune “Shrimp Boats Are A Comin”. I calculated that I would survive a nuclear attack in my neighborhood, the central Bronx, if the A Bomb hit Lower Manhattan but not if it landed in Midtown. My friends and I were asked to tell our school how we went back and forth to home, probably for the innocuous purpose of redistricting school catchment areas. We took it as meaning that the school authorities could find where our bodies laid, though, of course, no one would bother. I dreamed of whether radiation was like a sunburn that fried me and, in my dreams, avoided windows because the shards of glass would riddle me as sure as a tommy gun. Pamphlets told me a brief coating of soil would keep me from radiation, but that didn’t help inside an apartment building. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I was a graduate student, a young woman was heard on Telegraph Avenue, in Berkeley, yelling out that she didn’t want to die and my friends and I made plans to go to the Oregon coast because I thought the wind currents were west to east and so likely to have little fallout. The crisis eased when Russian ships carrying missiles turned back from the American blockade of Cuba but I did not know at the time that there was a secret agreement that Kennedy would withdraw the Jupiter IRBM’s from Turkey because they were only offensive missiles in that they took time to get fueled and so could only serve as a first strike, not a response to the enemy's nuclear strike. There were so many loose ends in mutual deterrence that it seems likely that one of them would ignite the nuclear fire. Early on, writers wondered about what a war would be like. Collier’s Magazine, while in the Fifties, before it folded, had a sense that a war might be punctuated with atomic bombs but more conventional warfare might obtain. It believed the Allies would conquer Russia by land although New York City would have been hit by two nuclear attacks. Comic book artists imagined that the Soviets would attack the west coast of South America with an army. Science fiction authors postulated the Soviet occupation of America. Then there was the later version, which estimated, according to Herman Kahn in his “On Thermonuclear War”, that by the mid Sixties, it was now possible to annihilate the civilization of the attacked enemy, and so led to movies like “Fail Safe” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”. No way out of a conventional war then, only the apocalypse.
The most frightening version of the nightmare of a full nuclear exchange occurred late in the Cold War when the BBC presented “Threads”, a movie about what a nuclear apocalypse would be like. The movie wasn’t powerful because at the time a nuclear exchange was indeed possible. A similar commercial movie, on ABC, called “The Day After”, had pulled its punches by showing how outside help came to rescue a hospital before it descended into chaos. Rescue from where? Was a single hospital an issue? Hurricane Katrina also would have a hospital deteriorate, but not the entire country, and yet the ABC program was nevertheless found upsetting by faculty and students at the time. Rather, “Threads” worked through what would likely have happened and so earns its rank as a post-apocalypse movie along with Alexander Korda’s “Things to Come”, based on the H. G. Wells novel ,the movie set in the late Thirties, when a totally unleashed warfare would reduce England to barbarism, a “boss” taking command of a town so as to weather plague, fight the Hill People, and try to get flying machines working again. Both are far superior in their recognition of devastation than the Terminator series or “On the Beach” which shows the end of humanity after the nuclear war had ended but recounts just the end of the Australian based survivors who remain civilized throughout.
“Threads” remains a chilling and profound art on the Cold War and not just an apocalypse movie for that historical moment when nuclear fears were real ones, because of the details of its imagery and plotting. After a single atomic bomb had been lauched by the Allies so as to deter any further Soviet aggression, there is a day or two pause before an all out attack is unleashed, the view to conclude that the leaders had thought long and hard about their options and thought it wiser to initiate an all out nuclear strike than to do without it. This war is not imagined to have been by mistake or the result of a side show over Palestine and Israel, as was imagined in “On the Beach'' but rather because the logic of deterrence did not hold if one side would be defeated if it failed to engage in a nuclear response, just as war theorists at the time thought that certainly tactical nuclear weapons would be used by the Allies to stop a Soviet attack across the German Plain if NATO was not successful with only conventional armaments at containing the Soviets from reaching the Channel. Tanks had to be trumped by A-bombs.
Then there was the battle to retain civil order in Britain. Troops held guard for a while to keep stores of food supplies protected. The underground bunkers where the city’s administrators tried to keep up communications and move supplies and other assistance all died because of asphyxiation when the air conditioning failed. Hospitals were without staff and so all the protagonist could do was lie on a bed when she delivers birth unattended by experts.
Later on, there is a desperate attempt to sow and harvest a new crop to feed what is left of the population. People live in communes and work constantly, like indentured medieval peasants. The only education for the young are the tapes of pre-war children’s programs. Finally, the protagonist dies of exhaustion, eyes covered with cataracts from the exposure to the unfettered infrared radiation. What and whether there will be a recovery is uncertain.
And then, five years after “Threads”, to everyone’s surprise, the Cold War was over. Liberals thought it would take generations for the Soviet Union to become sufficiently economically and sociologically developed so as to be rid of its totalitarian nature, so deeply was it into its ideological inclinations. George Kennen and Barrington Moore, Jr. predicted a long slog of social evolution whereby internal developments would lead to dispensing with nuclear saber rattling. Conservatives thought that only military confrontation would weaken the Soviets, perhaps through multiple proxy wars or guerilla tactics behind the Iron Curtain. The CIA might win the Cold War. What in fact happened was that Gorbechev said Soviet troops would no longer guarantee that Iron Curtain countries would remain within the Soviet realm, and these states liberated themselves. Gerald Ford had been correct that Poland and presumably the rest of the Soviet Bloc, had not bought into the Soviet point of view but remained independent minded. Ideology was not all that powerful. Perhaps it was also that George Schutz had been able to make a deal with the Soviets because the Strategic Defense Innitiative, where we would develop an umbrella over our own nation with anti-ballistic missiles, might well have worked even if at great expense and even though Russian scientists like American scientists were saying the plan was unfeasible however much it cost. The Soviets believed it because Reagan was spending money on it. A fool’s errand paid off and Schultz, so he hints in his memoirs, got the Soviets to agree that the person in charge of the Soviet Rocket Forces would be appointed who was someone the Pentagon approved and so make sure that the Soviets would never launch a nuclear attack. It is a miracle that we all survived.
Ever since, I have had a breather of relief of just how bad it could have been. Even the destruction of the World Trade Center was nothing by comparison even though 3000 people died on one day and America expected that other planes would careen into important targets, but it was a one off raid and nothing nuclear was involved. Neither AIDS nor Coronavirus threatened civilization however short tempered people got about masks. I did worry a bit that Russia indeed had nuclear missiles when it attacked Ukraine and I don’t know whether Schultz’s arrangements still hold, but Putin is too prudent to do more than rattle nuclear sabers once or twice and Biden is certain it won’t happen and I assume Gen. Milley, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has as his job to be in touch with his Russian counterpart to make sure it doesn’t. Whether or not Putin winds up getting Ukraine’s south, NATO has tightened its ability to guard the frontiers of Europe and no other threat to world order looms large, China more in trouble with domestic economic matters than refighting over the Taiwan Straits, when the Sixth Fleet protected Taiwan from being invaded in the early Fifties. So we have had a long peace, an extension of the seventy five years of peace in Western Europe. Maybe the old dream of a parliament of nations has taken place through realpolitik rather than supranational organization, unless you want to consider the European Union as a step to a regional federation. All in all, we can be satisfied with international progress and concentrate on Earth conquering the Moon and Mars. Conflict is a long way away and let us hope we can never forget how close we were on the brink.