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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
In 1957, everyone was talking about Nevil Shute's bestselling novel "On the Beach," the grim story of a handful of survivors in Australia, watching the slow approach of a deadly cloud of fallout from the war that has already devastated the Northern hemisphere. (The movie, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire, came out two years later.) At a dinner party in France, Winston Churchill said he planned to send a copy of "On the Beach" to Khrushchev, but that Eisenhower was too "muddle-headed" to appreciate the book. "I think the earth will soon be destroyed," he added.
That sense of doom was pervasive, and what "The Bomb" makes clear is that many world leaders (not just decommissioned ones like Churchill) felt it, too. What DeGroot denounces as "apathy" was really a kind of paralysis. Nobody was comfortable with the nuclear face-off between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but hardly anyone (and certainly no one in power) wanted to gamble on stopping or scaling back.
The stakes were too high. Each side, afraid that the other would develop first-strike capability, kept a frantic pace of arms buildup that the other side inevitably saw as an attempt to establish first-strike capability requiring that it, in turn, continue stocking its nuclear arsenals, and so on. By DeGroot's account, nearly every superpower leader saw the race as insane (as well as ruinously expensive) but also inescapable. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), though aptly acronymed, was, they concluded, the only way to secure the peace.
If the people in charge felt helpless to stop nuclear escalation, it's no wonder the general populace alternated between trying to ignore the situation (pretty much the only way to function) and freaking out about it. Relations between the superpowers improved for a while in the 1970s, but the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 brought on the last great outbreak of Cold War nuclear paranoia.
For most Americans under 40, the dread that saturated the 1980s is indelible. It was part of the fabric of their childhood. One friend recently rediscovered a little booklet of poems and stories she'd written in the second grade. "About half of them," she says, "mentioned nuclear war and how scared I was that I was going to die. The specter of nuclear war absolutely terrorized me when I was young and I think it's to blame for the fact that I had horrible insomnia from the ages of about 5 to 12."
It wasn't just children who were scared. In 1982, Jonathan Schell published "The Fate of the Earth," another book that originated as a long and much-discussed essay in the New Yorker. It described what some scientists considered the likely outcome of a full-scale war involving the thousands of thermonuclear devices the two superpowers had aimed at each other. The astrophysicist Carl Sagan with four other colleagues had recently speculated that the dust and smoke raised by so many detonations would cover the earth in darkness, causing temperatures to drop as low as minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks, if not months. Most plant life would be killed off due to lack of sunlight, and any human survivors would starve. This climatic catastrophe was dubbed nuclear winter.
Schell vividly described what the world would become after nuclear winter and widespread radioactive fallout had done their worst. Mass extinctions and the destruction of ecosystems would quite possibly wipe out the human race and many animals and plants as well. The U.S. would be left, he wrote, "a republic of insects and grass." "The Fate of the Earth," like "Hiroshima" and "On the Beach," became a bestseller. (Strangely enough, although I recall the book as being inescapable, stacked next to every bookstore cash register, it isn't even mentioned in "The Bomb." )
The dread reached its pinnacle on Nov. 30, 1983, with the broadcast of "The Day After," an ABC TV movie starring Jason Robards and John Lithgow that depicted the effects of a nuclear war on a small town in Kansas. "The Day After" was a nationwide event on a level seldom seen today. The publicity in the weeks leading up to the broadcast intensified when the White House complained of the movie's anti-nuclear "bias" and of the filmmakers' refusal to blame the Soviets for the fictional war. ABC handed out a half-million "viewer's guides" and groups were organized to discuss the film, including one featuring Secretary of State George Schultz, broadcast on ABC directly afterward. In the end, "The Day After" had the biggest audience for any television movie up to that date, 100 million viewers -- half the adult population of the U.S.
Although DeGroot (unfairly) dismisses "The Day After" as "a thermonuclear version of 'The Waltons,'" he acknowledges that it "had a profound effect on the American people." At the very least, the movie is remarkable, as a product of the mainstream American entertainment industry, for its uncompromising bleakness. While many echoed DeGroot's criticism that "The Day After" "treads lightly over the aftermath -- the disease and starvation of nuclear winter," every major character either dies or is clearly shown to be dying from radiation sickness by the movie's end. Perhaps the most piercing moment comes when a pregnant woman gives birth in a hospital crammed with disintegrating survivors and weeps with despair.
