Martin Amis - Einstein's Monsters

We abandon the subject. Our sessions end amicably. We fall to admiring my one-year-old son. Perhaps he will know what to do about nuclear weapons. I, too, will have to die off. Perhaps he will know what to do about them. It will have to be very radical, because there is nothing more radical than a nuclear weapon and what it can do.

Another satirical voice in the debate is that of Civil Defense. Unlike Professor Thompson's, these jokes are funny. Civil Defense Against Nuclear Attack-the concept is a joke in itself. There are only two words to be said, and they are forget it. Nevertheless, books on this subject continue to appear. I suppose someone has to write them, but the whole genre is scuppered by subhuman bathos. It is like trying to acquaint the Royal Family with the consolations of life in a blood-soaked lean-to, or a medieval field hospital. (And, against this particular backdrop, every family is a royal family.) In the nuclear hospital, by another feral irony, there will be a reversed triage: only the comparatively healthy are considered treatable. The process of nuclear inversion is complete when one realizes that the correct attitude to nuclear war is one of suicidal defeatism. Let no one think that it is thinkable. Dispel any interest in surviving, in lasting. Have no part of it. Be ready to turn in your hand. For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound. There is only one defense against nuclear attack, and that is a cyanide pill. Recently I came across an American offering, Civil Defense in Nuclear Attack: A Family Protection Guide by Capt. T. Kalogroulis. It is a peach. It is also full of illiteracies and misprints ("A schematic illustration of the blast wave is shown in the neat page?"). But I imagine we can live with that. After a nuclear attack, I imagine we can live with a few misprints. The book begins with the Justification-the justification for all this ghoulish prattle. "The Communist aim is world domination… they will use nuclear blackmail based on their boasted capabilities. And they are prepared to use force if they need to and can afford the risk." That if is not a big one, because the Soviets "might accept a risk in human and property losses that we would not consider risking. They are hardened to losses." The enemy is not made of flesh and blood but of hide and ice; to them, nuclear holocausts are meat and drink. Over the page, Captain Kalogroulis lists the "strategic advantages of population protection." There are seven of them. Number four states that "protection of the people gives meaning to all military defense; the latter has no meaning if the populations perishes." What meaning does the former have, if the population perishes? Here is number five:

Our leading military authorities agree that ability to limit our casualties in event of an attack has definite military advantages. It would mean that an enemy must commit greater military and economic strength to the venture. It would thus take him longer to attain capability.

In other words, the enemy would have to go to extra trouble in rendering the casualties unlimited. One wonders, too, how much clout and prestige our leading military authorities would really enjoy, "in event of an attack." Number seven concludes that population protection "creates ability to endure a nuclear war." One is obliged to pull through, then, for strategic reasons.

The clear truth is that after a nuclear war the role of the civil and military establishment would change or invert. The authorities would no longer be protecting the population from the enemy: they would be protecting themselves from the population.One of the effects of nuclear weapons -these strange instruments-would be instant fascism. In 1980 the British government conducted Operation Square Leg, in conjunction with NATO, to assess the realities of nuclear attack. Together with many other mysterious assumptions (seven-day warning, no detonation in central London), it is imagined that the populace would spend its last week stocking up with food and turning its back gardens into shelters-in other words, digging its own grave. Because when you stagger out of your shelter, following the "All Clear" (all clear for what?), the only thing worth doing would be to stagger back in again. Everything good would be gone. You would be a citizen of a new town called Necropolis. Nuclear civil defense is a nonsubject, a mischievous fabrication. It bolsters fightability. It bolsters thinkability.

For all its black slapstick, however, the genre has a plangent undertow. Not everyone (by definition) is as thoroughly, as exemplarily subhuman as Captain Necropolis. The admirable London After the Bomb, for instance, starts off as a book "about" nuclear defense and ends up as a disgusted rejection of nuclear defense. Even with semiofficial publications like Nuclear Attack: Civil Defence (Commissioned and Edited by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies) you get the following impression: that of a team of experienced paramedics, well prepared for a vicious assault on their senses, who then find themselves reeling from the scene of the accident, in helpless nausea. Language cannot live with this reality. "It is important to have a good supply of painkillers… tranquilizers will be important… psychological problems in a nuclear war… health problems in a nuclear war…" Is problems really the word we want? Well, there will be extinction problems too, as- with aspirin tablets, four-by-four-inch sterile pads, small scissors (blunt ended) and a provident supply of safety pins -we hunker down for the nuclear winter.

Nuclear winter has been the best news on this front since 1945. It is the best news because it is the worst news (and because nuclear realities are always antithetical or palindromic). To put the matter simply, if a considerable fraction of the world's arsenals were used, the planet might cease to support life. Thus even a successful first strike might fatally redound upon the attacker. It took nearly forty years to grasp an obvious truth: that there is no fire without smoke. How long will it take us to grasp that nuclear weapons are not weapons, that they are slashed wrists, gas-filled rooms, global booby traps? What more do we need to learn about them? Some people-and it does take all sorts, to make a world-are skeptical about nuclear winter; extinction is something they feel they can safely pooh-pooh. Certainly the case is not proven: like every other nuclear ramification, it pullulates with uncertainty. (The chemistry of ozone creation and destruction, for example, is only partially understood.) But the pessimistic view would seem to me to be the natural one. Where are the hidden pluses, where are the pleasant surprises, when it comes to nuclear weapons? Anyway, the ethical argument remains watertight. If the risk is infinite-as Schell points out in The Fate of the Earth-a scientific possibility can be treated as a moral certainty, "because if we lose, the game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever get another chance." Or, as he puts it in his later book, The Abolition:

For now human beings, engaged, as always, in the ambitions and disputes of their particular place and time, can end the human story in all places for all time. The eternal has been placed at stake in the temporal realm, and the infinite has been delivered into the care of finite human beings.

And it makes imaginative sense, I think, that the enchanting mysteries of matter, of quanta, should encode an ending (the atom itself being no more than a set of relationships). Mathematically the universe is a fluke. So is the earth, this blue planet, and so is organic life. Though each confirmation is welcome, we do not need the Friends of the Earth or The Tao of Physics to tell us that in our biosphere everything is to do with everything else. In that they are human, all human beings feel it-the balance, the delicacy. We have only one planet, and it is round.