Martin Amis - Einstein's Monsters

It is gratifying in a way that all military-industrial writing about nuclear "options" should be instantly denatured by the nature of the weapons it describes, as if language itself were refusing to cooperate with such notions. (In this sense language is a lot more fastidious than reality, which has doggedly accepted the antireality of the nuclear age.) In the can-do world of nuclear "conflict management," we hear talk of retaliating first; in this world, deaths in the lower tens of millions are called acceptable; in this world, hostile, provocative, destabilizing nuclear weapons are aimed at nuclear weapons (counterforce), while peaceful, defensive, security-conscious nuclear weapons (there they languish, adorably pouting) are aimed at cities (countervalue). In this world, opponents of the current reality are known as cranks. "Deceptive basing modes," "dense pack groupings," "baseline terminal defense," "the Football" (i.e., the Button), acronyms like BAMBI, SAINTS, PALS, and AWDREY (Atomic Weapons Detection, Recognition, and Estimation of Yield), "the Jedi concept" (near-lightspeed plasma weapons), "Star Wars" itself: these locutions take you out onto the sports field-or back to the nursery.

In fact there is a resilient theme of infantilism throughout the history of nuclear management. Trinity, the first bomb (nicknamed the Gadget), was winched up into position on a contraption known as "the cradle"; during the countdown the Los Alamos radio station broadcast a lullaby, Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings"; scientists speculated whether the Gadget was going to be a "girl" (i.e., a dud) or a "boy" (i.e., a device that might obliterate New Mexico). The Hiroshima bomb was called Little Boy. "It's a boy!" pronounced Edward Teller, the "father" of the H-bomb, when "Mike" ("my baby") was detonated over Bikini Atoll in 1952… It is ironic, because they are the little boys; we are the little boys. And the irony has since redoubled. By threatening extinction, the ultimate antipersonnel device is in essence an antibaby device. One is not referring here to the babies who will die but to the babies who will never be born, those that are queueing up in spectral relays until the end of time.

I first became interested in nuclear weapons during the summer of 1984. Well, I say I "became" interested, but really I was interested all along. Everyone is interested in nuclear weapons, even those people who affirm and actually believe that they never give the question a moment's thought. We are all interested parties. Is it possible never to think about nuclear weapons? If you give no thought to nuclear weapons, if you give no thought to the most momentous development in the history of the species, then what are you giving them? In that case the process, the seepage, is perhaps preconceptual, physiological, glandular. The man with the cocked gun in his mouth may boast that he never thinks about the cocked gun. But he tastes it, all the time.

My interest in nuclear weapons was the result of a coincidence. The two elements were impending fatherhood and a tardy reading of Jonathan Schell's classic, awakening study, The Fate of the Earth. It woke me up. Until then, it seems, I had been out cold. I hadn't really thought about nuclear weapons. I had just been tasting them. Now at last I knew what was making me feel so sick.

How do things go when morality bottoms out at the top? Our leaders maintain the means to perform the unthinkable. They contemplate the unthinkable, on our behalf. We hope, modestly enough, to get through life without being murdered; rather more confidently, we hope to get through life without murdering anybody ourselves. Nuclear weapons take such matters out of our hands: we may die, and die with butcher's aprons around our waists. I believe that many of the deformations and perversities of the modern setting are related to-and are certainly dwarfed by-this massive preemption. Our moral contracts are inevitably weakened, and in unpredictable ways. After all, what acte gratuit, what vulgar outrage or moronic barbarity can compare with the black dream of nuclear exchange?

Against the hyperinflation of death that has cheapened all life, it is salutary to return to the physics, to remind ourselves about nuclear scale. The amount of mass expended in the razing of Hiroshima was about a thirtieth of an ounce- no heavier than a centime. In accordance with Einstein's equation, a single gram assumed the properties of 12,500 tons of TNT (together with certain properties of its own). This is Jonathan Schell:

… the energy yielded by application of the universal physics of the twentieth century exceeds the energy yielded by that of the terrestrial, or planetary, physics of the nineteenth century as the cosmos exceeds the earth. Yet it was within the earth's comparatively tiny, frail ecosphere that mankind released the newly tapped cosmic energy.

Let us ignore, for a moment, the gigaton gigantism of present-day arsenals and reflect on what a single megaton could do: it could visit Hiroshima-scale destruction on every state capital in America, with about thirty bombs to spare. The Soviet arsenal alone could kill approximately twenty-two billion people-or it could if there were twenty-two billion people around to kill. But there are only four billion people around to kill. And still we pursue the dynamic rationale of the missile gap. There is no gap. We live in a Manhattan of missiles. Rather, there is no room. We are full up.

Meanwhile the debate goes on. And what kind of debate is it? What is its tone? If we look at the controversy over the Strategic Defense Initiative we find that this, for instance, is Ronald Reagan's tone: "[SDI] isn't about fear, it's about hope, and in that struggle, if you will pardon my stealing a film line, the Force is with us." No, we will not pardon his stealing a film line. And the Force is not with us. The Force is against us. In such terms, at any rate (terms that aspire to an infinite frivolity), President Reagan entrained "an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history," but which also, he allowed, involved "risks." Unfortunately the risk is that of ending the course of human history. "God will not forgive us if we fail," Brezhnev told Carter at the pre-Afghanistan summit. Carter liked the phrase and used it himself, with one politic emendation. "History," he said, "will not forgive us if we fail." Actually Brezhnev was nearer the mark. In the event of "failure," God might just make it, whereas history would not.

Three books on SDI-three quickies on the end of time -have recently landed on my desk, two pro and one anti. How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete is by Robert Jastrow, the man who jumped into newsprint the day after the space-shuttle disaster with the comment, "It's almost fishy." First, Jastrow makes it clear how much he hopes that World War III can, if possible, be avoided, how much he would regret and deplore such an eventuality (the tone is the familiar one of hurried moral gentrification, as if this were all a wearisome matter of etiquette and appearances); he then addresses himself to the main business of the book, a stirred account of "The Battle." Here in the midst of the techno-philiac space-opera we glimpse the president coolly "ordering" this and "deciding" that, coolly erecting his untried "peace shield" as hemispherical butchery looms in the skies above. In fact the president, if he has not been vaporized by a suitcase bomb in the Russian embassy, will be understandably immersed in his own nervous breakdown, along with every other actor in this psychotic fantasy. For Jastrow, the unthinkable is thinkable. He is wrong, and in this respect he is also, I contend, subhuman,, like all the nuclear-war fighters, like all the "prevailers." The unthinkable is unthinkable; the unthinkable is not thinkable, not by human beings, because the eventuality it posits is one in which all human contexts would have already vanished. SDI can never be tested, and neither can the actors. How they would respond at such a time is anyone's guess. But they would no longer be human beings. In a sense, nobody would be. That status does not exist on the other side of the firebreak.