The coronavirus pandemic is pretty bad as catastrophes go. It has killed more people in the United States than the number of U. S. soldiers killed in World War I. It has had a heavy economic impact and we do not know how quickly the country will recover from the economic downturn. It has had a psychological impact in that people are asked to stay home and they are rebelling against that because it disrupts their lives too much, whatever may be the dangers of contagion. It leaves everybody with the feeling of how vulnerable we are to the almost invisible world of microbes. And the situation is getting worse rather than better. What if this turns into a general panic, with people roving the streets to attack who knows what? I have been told that Periclean Athens survived a plague and life went back to normal. I am not so sure that will happen this time around. The Black Plague changed the European economy and may have been responsible for the end of feudalism.
But this pandemic, I would insist, has not been the scariest time in the past hundred years, dating back to the last pandemic, the so-called “Spanish Flu”, which was, in fact, of American origins. That “honor” is to be reserved for the Cold War which was waged between the United States and the Soviet Union from, let us say, the time of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, which all but declared it, the President of the United States sitting behind Churchill at the time, to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and Reagan had arrived a few years before at what amounted to a Soviet surrender arrangement with Gorbachev, the details of which have not yet been made public. During that 43 year long war, the United States also lost as many soldiers as it had in World War I, if you add together Vietnam and Korea, two wars in which the United States and its allies engaged with Soviet or Communist proxies, and also add in the dead among our allies that resulted from other proxy wars in Africa and South America (remember Chile? Remember the Bay of Pigs?). Worse than that, during the Cold War. we were under the threat of most of us dying as a result of a nuclear exchange in which both sides would destroy one another within thirty minutes of launching. “The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” was posting how close we were to midnight on its monthly cover and, according to its editors, we came within one minute of midnight. The talk was of “Better Dead Than Red” and children were taught to hide under their desks to avoid bomb blast and many of us who were children at the beginning of the Cold War dreamed about atomic attacks and their aftermath.
But the Cold War has become an episode of cultural amnesia. We don’t think about it as the climactic event of the Twentieth Century, even more than was the Second World War, of which there are no end of memories and retellings. I want to revisit the Cold War catastrophe by going through some of the movies that punctuated it and that told the story of what might have happened.
The scariest movie I have ever seen about the period was a pre- and post-apocalypse faux documentary made by the BBC in 1984. It gave a step by step account of the developments that would lead to a nuclear exchange between NATO and the Soviet Bloc, the impact of a nuclear explosion over Sheffield, a middle sized English city, and the long term impact of the nuclear exchange on Great Britain. The same post-apocalypse genre was also evidenced in numerous early MTV videos that featured a garage band working out of a cave and by a rock group named “The Grateful Dead” in honor of the sentiment that those who lived in the aftermath of a nuclear war would envy the dead. “Threads” was the best of a genre that has since been largely replaced by and reduced to zombie epics.
“Threads” was much scarier than “Five”, an early Fifties Hollywood film about the few people who survived a pandemic, a biological catastrophe used as a metaphor for nuclear catastrophe, something we can’t do today because what was once the euphemism is now the reality. “Five” portrayed and evoked a sense of awful loneliness. I still remember the silences and the crunch of branches as those five people walked to and from the house in the woods where they had come to live. “Threads” was even scarier than “The Day of the Triffids”, made in 1963, which also substitutes a biological cause for the apocalyptic future, even though it was much tamer than the John Wyndham novel on which it was based, prose much better evoking the sightless plants moving in mass against the electrified fences that kept colonies of sighted humans safe, the odds of a contest between walking plants and humans somewhat evened by a meteor shower that leaves most of humanity blind.
Both of these, as well as numerous science fiction stories, are far scarier than “Panic in the Year Zero”, made in 1962, where American cities are evacuated so as to avoid the devastation that would come when they were bombed. (Remember, this is early in the Cold War when there would be a few hours of warning and when most rural areas would survive physically intact.) The film was too much a Paddy Chayefsky like drama of family dysfunctionality, the father dropping his wife and son off at a gas station with a lot of money (to use for what?) because they had been such nags so that he could go off to survive with his very comely daughter. Then again, maybe it was not supposed to have the incestuous overtones. Also short of the mark was “On the Beach”, made in 1959, where everyone remains fervently well mannered while awaiting the end of humanity. That will arrive when the winds that carry radioactive dust finally reach Australia, the last outpost of mankind. One character, played by Gregory Peck, is even so loony that he turns down an affair with Ava Gardner because he imagines himself as loyal to a wife who has no doubt died in America.
It took me a while, years, to see those two movies as spoofs on themselves. It was easier to spot the flaws in the 1983 ABC special “The Day After”, which told of an atomic exchange that leaves Omaha devastated but morally intact. and nonetheless left my students at the time speechless. Just before the local hospital in the film is about to be overwhelmed by the demands placed on it, the United States government arrives. A real nuclear disaster, of course, might mean there would not be any outside assistance, that sine qua non of disaster planning. It had been available to San Francisco after its 1903 earthquake via ferries from and from railroad trains coming from the East, and should have been available in short order to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “The Day After”, nonetheless, left my students at the time speechless when it was shown in a school auditorium soon after its broadcast release. I had hoped that some professors talking about the movie could help ease its burden by providing context. We weren’t able to do so, a colleague saying to me that the film provided too few straws on which to tie one’s hopes. He was right. There is no way out of an apocalypse other than by avoiding it.
9/11 was no overwhelming shock to someone who had as a child contemplated whether he lived far away enough from a nuclear explosion over the Empire State Building to have a chance of surviving, and had to give up the calculations made on the basis of pamphlets provided by the United States Office of Civil Defense when it was realized that New York City was an important enough target that it would be the beneficiary of two nuclear explosions, not one, and so the one over Manhattan that would accompany the one over Brooklyn would be sufficiently north of the Empire State Building that it would create a fire storm that would reach north of Yonkers and so, of course, catch those of us living in the Central Bronx.
“The Day After” did not provide a good indication of just how scary the Cold War was. The film was just a disaster movie. It provided a sense of helplessness rather than the terror that accompanies a vision of the end of the world as it has been known for the four or five thousand years since the domestication of agriculture led to settled communities subject to governments more or less able to protect the way of life of their peoples. All this could be ended in thirty minutes, which is the time it would have taken, as I have said, for nuclear missiles launched from the United States and the Soviet Union to reach their targets, which was the situation after both sides, by the end of the Sixties, had produced numerous intercontinental missiles available for launching from submarines or silos. No missile shields; just a policy of mutually assured destruction that, if it had for some reason broken down, would become known as a failure only when the missiles hit. No World Trade Center disaster followed by millions and millions of dollars conferred on the families of survivors; the government would have no time for such banalities. No special pleading about how to arrange the names on a World Trade Center memorial; just devastation so vast that whether any government or corporation or university or network or fire department would be able to function for a great deal of time afterwards was problematic. Mel Gibson’s “Road Warrior” movies were much more to the point.
“Threads”, for its part, was a documentary rather than a melodrama about the future because it constructs its narrative from information provided in government manuals written at the time of the film about the lives lost, the weapons used, and the circles of devastation created by a nuclear bomb, and also because it is not inclined to sweat the small things, like whether infidelity is wrong after the apocalypse. It uses a fictional cast but treats those people as if they had been filmed by a documentary crew while they made their arrangements to deal with an attack, their idle chatter and worldly concerns “documented”, and then how they respond to the onslaught itself.
The film opens with a young couple who are marrying before they had expected to because the girl has become pregnant. In the background are television reports about a developing international situation that may set NATO against the Soviet Bloc. By the time people focus and run off to the groceries for provisions and are building makeshift fall out shelters in their homes, the United States has launched a single nuclear weapon against a military objective and there is a pause to see if there is a way to work out of the impasse.
This view of how a nuclear exchange might get started is not far off the mark of how specialists in the field thought it might come about. Sir Andrew Hacking, working on the basis of his experience in military planning, had a year or so earlier written a future history that suggested that what the West would do if the Soviets attacked NATO across the North German plain would be to try to have NATO hold out long enough for an airlift from the United States would bring enough troops, the munitions already stockpiled in Europe for such an emergency, to stem the Soviet advance. That way there would be no need to unleash the nuclear response that was the only sure way to prevent the Soviets from making it to the English Channel. In Hacking’s scenario, superior communications and armored vehicles allow NATO to hold out until reinforcements arrive. No nuclear weapon necessary. It is difficult to imagine, however, how there could be a World War III fought so carefully that both sides could be counted on not to engage in a preemptive use of nuclear weapons.
The “Threads” scenario varies the Hacking scenario only a little bit. It would make sense for NATO, uncertain that they could hold back a conventional invasion with conventional weapons, and fearful of the devastation that would occur throughout the continent even if they were successful, to decide to launch just one nuclear missile to show just how much NATO meant business, bluffing the Soviet Bloc into negotiations, just as had been the case when Kennedy bluffed Khrushchev into negotiations about Cuba by threatening full scale retaliation for any Cuban attack on the United States. “Threads”, very cleverly, reports on grand strategy only by having network news broadcasters say they are told negotiations are underway, as if any report on negotiations would be credible, and there is clearly no report on why the negotiations failed, every armchair general knowing, during the entire course of the Cold War, that such last ditch attempts to avert the apocalypse might fail. The news of failure is the arrival of the incoming missiles. This is war seen by its civilian victims, not by the generals, whatever happened to them.
Those victims include the civilian authorities who man the response to the attack. From an underground bunker, municipal officials are able to keep enough order to rush emergency supplies to some places. They argue about but decide not to release food supplies in the two weeks after the bombing because they need that food to keep their own forces fed so that they will continue to maintain whatever civil order is possible and so as to conserve resources for the long winter to come. By the time outside forces arrive to open up their bunker, they are all dead from asphyxiation. The film never makes clear what kind of central government still exists, only that people wander from place to place fending for themselves as best they can in the midst of the rubble. That includes the young woman we were introduced to at the beginning who delivers her baby in what is a charnel house.
There is a mad scramble to reap the harvest that will be the last before an unforeseen number of lean years. The film does not go so far as to apply the theory, not at that time as yet popularized by Carl Sagan, that there would be a permanent nuclear winter. It goes with the much more modest proposal that agriculture would be impoverished for an unforeseeable period of time. People are dragooned into agricultural labor battalions. Meanwhile, our heroine again delivers by herself, this time a deformed baby that was the product of rape.
The last images in the film follow a placard saying that thirteen years have passed since the nuclear exchange and Great Britain is reduced to a fraction of its pre-war population. The society is medieval. Women in cowls to protect them from the ultraviolet radiation pouring down from an ozone depleted atmosphere work with primitive hoes to plant seeds in land that is little more than sand, while children are “schooled” in rooms still cluttered with post war debris by pre-war videos that have seen better days and which the children do not comprehend. The woman who we met at the beginning of the movie dies in her bed, an old crone, her eyes covered with cataracts. Her daughter rummages through her belongings and leaves.
A discursive account that spelled out the options available in nuclear war in the hope of deterring it was provided by the defense intellectual Herman Kahn in his 1961 book “On Thermonuclear War”. There he presumed to do what he called “thinking about the unthinkable”. Kahn postulated that there were five military strategies for nuclear war that the United States could consider. The “weakest” level, in that it required the lowest level of defense, was the idea that we were faking a nuclear defense. The football with nuclear codes that the President always had beside him was not connected to our nuclear capability. It was all a bluff. Kahn argued that a bluff always gets out, that it is never believable, and so we would be setting ourselves up for a Soviet preemptive strike. (Kahn could not then have known that his Secretary of Defense would glean from conversation with John Kennedy that Kennedy would never have ordered a retaliation, and that Kissinger would later argue that no one had ever figured out how the President would have time to give his informed consent to a nuclear response. In effect, the weakest strategy was, in fact, the one that worked to keep nuclear annihilation at bay.)
The next level on Kahn’s list was “damage capability”. In that view, we needed only some few nuclear weapons to deter an enemy from unleashing its nuclear arsenal, because the threat of knocking out even a few enemy cities would be enough to keep the enemy from undertaking nuclear war. Kahn argued that the Kremlin could accept the loss of Leningrad and Moscow if it could be sure that it had destroyed the military capabilities of the United States. So he moved on to the next level, that of “first strike capability.” That meant the United States needed enough weapons so that it could take out the Soviet Union’s ability to fire a return salvo. But Kahn dismissed that view. Such a military posture would trigger nuclear war because we would have to fire our missiles before we lost them. Decisions to launch would be made in a panic, and perhaps upon faulty information, creating the disaster it was supposed to avoid.
The fourth level was “second strike capability”. That meant we would have enough missiles so that we could launch a devastating attack on the Soviet Union even after we had absorbed an atomic attack by the Soviets. That way the Soviets would know there was no possibility of winning a nuclear exchange, and so would be deterred from attacking in the first place. The last possibility was to build a “death machine” in our own country that would blow up the world, or at least make it uninhabitable, and would go off automatically if we were attacked. That would certainly scare the bejesus out of the Soviets.
Kahn thought this last bit bizarre, though his book did provide some inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”. The title character was modeled on Kahn rather than on Kissinger, who was merely a professor at the time of the movie. Kahn preferred the second strike model. He estimated that both sides would have, by 1970 or so, delivery systems in place with enough nuclear fire power to stabilize the system of nuclear deterrence. He was not far wrong. Second strike capability was the officially announced military policy to keep nuclear war from happening. Moreover, by that time, an automatic doomsday machine seemed to have come built into the system of mutually guaranteed destruction. Earth scientists were calculating-- incorrectly, it turned out-- that a major nuclear exchange would create so much debris in the atmosphere that the earth would be subject to a nuclear winter. Few crops would grow for a number of years, and the human race might be wiped out in the process. The secondary effects of a disaster would be worse than the primary effects. The disaster would turn into a final cataclysm that terminated much more than a single civilization. Indeed, critics of nuclear policy, such as Jonathan Schell, argued, as did the critics of civilian nuclear plants for the creation of electricity, that the technology could easily get out of hand. Mistakes would inevitably be made. We would shoot off our nuclear arsenal because of blips made by geese on a radar screen. And so the only way to save humanity was to abandon the idea of nuclear deterrence. It was just too risky.
The specter of nuclear war died down with the end of the Cold War. We are living through an amnesia about the terrors of nuclear war that is similar to the amnesia about the Holocaust that went on for most of the Fifties. It is not that we don’t know what could have happened in a cold war gone hot, just as it wasn’t that we didn’t know in the Fifties what did happen in the Forties; it is just that the American imagination was not sufficiently distanced from the events so that it could take in their significance. Ronald Reagan, for his part, was in the Eighties so appalled at the prospect of a nuclear exchange that he tried to arrange for a technological fix to abort the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, even though no one except Reagan and Edward Teller thought it would work. Which was just as well, because the idea of a nuclear missile shield violated the careful balancing of interests that those who thought about nuclear war insisted was necessary if it were not to come about. The nuclear missile shield would have been an offensive weapon because whatever nation had it would be free to rattle or even use its nuclear weapons. So possessing it was worse than a doomsday machine, which would lie passive until provoked. A nuclear missile shield would leave the other side with very little choice but to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike or sue for peace, and that is what the Soviets decided to do.
If Reagan had been engaged in a grand bluff, he would indeed have been an important actor in history, but there is no evidence to suggest this. He believed a missile shield would work and so the end of the Cold War on his watch was an unanticipated consequence of a policy, if taken a step or two further, that might well have led to a Soviet decision to die with their boots on, as some analysts of the ratcheting up of tensions in 1984 think nearly happened.