We — all of us on this planet — now live in one world and only one. Somehow, this remains hard for so many of us to grasp. Yet it’s been true since at least August 6, 1945, when a single atomic bomb obliterated the city of Hiroshima and, lest there were any doubts, three days later, a second one did the same thing to Nagasaki. From that moment on, no one should have doubted that we were, or would at least soon be, capable of obliterating not just two cities, but the whole planet. In the years since, as nuclear arsenals have been built to gigantic proportions and such weaponry has spread to nine countries, we’ve learned more about just how devastating such a conflict between great (or even regional) powers could be. After all, a significant regional nuclear exchange would create not just staggering global death and destruction but a nuclear winter of almost unimaginable proportions for all of us.
More recently, of course, it’s become apparent in a second way that all of us exist on one all-too-destructible orb in space. As 2022 begins and the news arrives that the last seven years have been the seven hottest in recorded history; as the planet’s oceans continue to absorb the equivalent in heat terms of “seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating each second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year”; as U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are once again rising, not falling; as the damage from flooding, heat, fire, and drought only increases, both immeasurably and measurably, it shouldn’t be that hard to grasp that the climate emergency we face is the potential equivalent of the wholesale nuclear destruction of the planet, just on a vastly different time scale.
And yes, as the so-called leaders of this world of ours in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing become absorbed in who controls Ukraine and in an intensifying replay of the Cold War of another age in Asia; as nuclear arsenals are built up, not down; as the changeover to alternative energy systems goes all too slowly, it’s obvious that we’re a distinctly self-destructive species. It’s in that context that you should read the latest from former Air Force lieutenant colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore, who now runs the Bracing Views blog, on his own once-upon-a-time military encounter with doomsday and what might be drawn from that grim experience. Tom
Only Fools Replay Doomsday
The Cold War, Reborn and Resurgent
In the early 1960s, at the height of America’s original Cold War with the Soviet Union, my old service branch, the Air Force, sought to build 10,000 land-based nuclear missiles. These were intended to augment the hundreds of nuclear bombers it already had, like the B-52s featured so memorably in the movie Dr. Strangelove. Predictably, massive future overkill was justified in the name of "deterrence," though the nuclear war plan in force back then was more about obliteration. It featured a devastating attack on the Soviet Union and communist China that would kill an estimated 600 million people in six months (the equivalent of 100 Holocausts, notes Daniel Ellsberg in his book, The Doomsday Machine). Slightly saner heads finally prevailed -- in the sense that the Air Force eventually got “only” 1,000 of those Minuteman nuclear missiles.
Despite the strategic arms limitation talks between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the dire threat of nuclear Armageddon persisted, reaching a fresh peak in the 1980s during Ronald Reagan's presidency. At the time, he memorably declared the Soviet Union to be an “evil empire,” while nuclear-capable Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles were rushed to Europe. At that same moment, more than a few Europeans, joined by some Americans, took to the streets, calling for a nuclear freeze -- an end to new nuclear weapons and the destabilizing deployment of the ones that already existed. If only...
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