The Great 20th Century Nuclear War

You mean you didn't know about it?

If you are old enough to have lived through some portion of the last century, as I did, you might be saying to yourself, well, at least we never blew ourselves up. Indeed, after the decades-long threat of nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War, it does come as something of a relief to know that the conflict finally ended without ever reaching that final cataclysm. It is commonly said that we only ever fought the Soviet Union "by proxy," when smaller conventional wars were waged in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan.

But conventional wisdom is wrong. A nuclear war did take place in those years, with thousands of nuclear detonations -- enough to have eradicated every major city in the world, along with most of the smaller ones. What's that? You say you didn't notice? Well, that's probably because it happened over such a long period of time. And instead of dropping them on enemy cities we mostly blew them up in our own back yards, or in the neutral territory of the Pacific Ocean where it was supposed that they would be relatively harmless.

I'm speaking of course about the testing programs that were carried out by every country that developed "the Bomb." The appalling scale of these tests (and I can't write the word without hearing in my mind the repetition by the Emergency Broadcast System, "this is only a test") is rendered abundantly clear in this short video by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto. 

On a map of the world, he has animated a time lapse of all the nuclear bombs exploded from 1945 in New Mexico, through Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then everywhere else, up to 1998. The image is compelling, as are the statistics. 2,054 explosions conducted by seven countires. Over half of them by the United States, and a huge percentage of those on our own soil. (Hint: you might want to steer clear of Nevada for the next few thousand years.) Russia came in second, of course. Want to guess who's number three? If you said China, bzzt, you're wrong. The correct answer is France.

Be sure to stick with the video to the end. The true cumulative effect does not become clear until the last minute when a recap is done one country at a time and you can sense the scale of what happened. It startled me to note that the Soviet Union appears to have trashed itself from one end to the other.

At some point, treaties reigned in the madness somewhat by dictating that tests had to be done underground in order to contain the radiation and the spread of fallout. As imperfect as that may be (what about groundwater, for example?) it's a far cry from the early 1950s when open air tests were viewed from a distance like spectator sports, and the Today Show and the daily newspaper displayed maps projecting where all the strontium-90 was likely to land. It may have gone boom in the far West, but the cloud carried across the Midwest to New England and beyond, tainting the grass to be eaten by our dairy cows and milk to be fed to our children.

It didn't matter that people like Albert Einstein read statements on TV declaring that an untold number of future deaths and cancers would be the result, visited upon us for decades and perhaps centuries to come. Government spokespeople insisted the radiation levels were "safe" and that the test were necessary for the national defense. Anyone feel safe yet?

I watched the video with my grandson and explained about all that had happened back then. His jaw literally dropped in righteous indignation. And well it might. He's a millennial baby, born after the Great Nuclear War had ended. But that stuff is still in the air and the water and the earth where we grow our food. What were we thinking?

We know now that there is no safe level of exposure to radioactive materials. Even a microscopic speck of plutonium lodged in your lung continues to irradiate the tissue around it, producing a constant threat of genetic damage. Look how concerned we were about the nuclear meltdowns in Chernobyl and Fukashima. Those things pale in comparison with what we deliberately did to our earth and air in the name of security.

And before we go, let's recall that thousands more of these weapons are still sleeping in their silos and submarines, ready to spring into action at a few minutes notice. Wasn't one nuclear war enough? Do we really have to prepare for another one?

A Man in Space

So what were YOU doing that year?

In April of 1961 I had just turned 14 and was entering a phase of historical and political global consciousness. I was caught up in the ideological struggle of the Cold War, and I was also a science fiction nerd who avidly followed developments in rocketry and space exploration.

Every day as soon as I got home from school I spread out on the floor the morning Herald that had been carefully re-folded by my grandmother, and read through all the stories that I found interesting, which were a lot of them. I prided myself on knowing the names of the Presidents, Premiers, and Prime Ministers of foreign countries, as well as being aware of the many fronts where the forces of Communism and Capitalism were facing off.

But on April 12th I didn't have to go any further than the front page, where the smiling image of Yuri Gagarin announced that those durned Russians had beat us again. Sputnik had been bad enough. Only four years earlier we'd all been amazed when the first demonstation of orbital flight had been acheived without warning, like a premonition of the kind of nuclear sneak attack that we lived in fear of.

After excitedly following the ironically named American effort, "Vanguard," I had a vested interest in its success. I felt personally shamed when "our" rocket was not only beaten to the punch but then blew itself up on the launch pad -- not once, but twice. Before Dr. Von Braun and his Army missile team from Alabama managed to put something up there (Explorer I), the Russians had launched a second satellite containing the first living organism to travel in space -- Laika, the dog -- in a 13-foot-long capsule that dwarfed anything the US would be capable of launching for years to come.

In the four years that followed, the Mercury program was put into high gear. America had astronauts in training, a batch of test pilots with "the right stuff" to fly the US into space. In 1961 the first sub-orbital test flights were to be made using the same Redstone rocket that had put up Explorer I. Meanwhile the Atlas ICBM was being tested as an orbital booster -- with a disconcerting record of its own explosive failures. And then ...

Gagarin. It was Sputnik all over again. Before Alan Sheppard could take his 15-minute peek into space, Gagarin's one-orbit flight was followed by Titov's of 17 orbits -- a full day in which he travelled over most of the entire planet.

It all sounds so quaint now, and hard to understand why we took it so seriously. What we were witnessing was the first baby steps to be taken on our inevitable journey as a species into a wider environment. Now, along with our Russian (no longer Soviet) friends, we can celebrate the daring and achievement of all those pioneers, not just the ones of our own nationality.

Oddly enough, if I could pluck my 14-year-old self out of that past and whisk him into my present, it would not be the state of space exploration that would amaze him. Given the rapid advancement from Sputnik to Cosmonaut, he would probably expect us to have not only a space station but permanent bases on the moon and maybe even Mars by now. He would be surprised at the way we lost interest in the moon after visiting it a few times, and how we have backed away from larger challenges. He would be suitably impressed by the space shuttle, but puzzled to learn how old the design is, and that it has yet to be replaced by something newer and sleeker.

He would be impressed too at the advances that have been made with computers, lasers, and astronomy. Video conferencing, cell phones, and 3D televisions would be science fiction dreams come true. Electric cars -- OK, but no flying ones yet? What would absolutely knock him out, though, is the demise of the Soviet Union.

That thoughtful and tentative youth -- the same one who was going to have to deal one way or another with the military draft and the Vietnam war only six years in his future -- expected that the USSR would be there throughout his lifetime, and that it would continue to threaten nuclear Armageddon perhaps for centuries to come. He would have thought that if a lasting peace agreement were ever to be reached, it would be an agreement with the Soviet government.

All of which goes to show that it is usually easier to predict technological progress than social revolution. Witness what happened in the American colonies, or what's going on right now throughout the Middle East. Sure, we're still moving into space. But what will really happen to us is bound to be far more interesting ... and unexpected.

Birthday Wish

"Will you still need me, will you still feed me ...?"



According to this card in the year of my birth
the transistor was invented, making possible
a radio with no vaccuum tubes. Chuck Yeager flew
faster than sound in a rocket propelled airplane,
and the Dumont Television Network inauguerated
broadcast news from Washington, D.C.
If you had gone to the ball park all the players
except Jackie Robinson would have been white.

Before this year you could not clean your sink
with Ajax or mix a batch of orange juice
from a tiny frozen can because those things
did not yet exist. The Department of War became
the Department of Defense, anticipating
the Newspeak of George Orwell who had not yet
published 1984. Princess Elizabeth got married.

The Atomic Energy Commission was formed
in an attempt to keep the lid on Pandora's Box,
the Marshall Plan began to rebuild Europe
while Radio Free Europe broadcasted to the East
and President Truman asked Congress for funds
to fight what he called "the Cold War."

So it was all set in stone, the story
of my life, beginning with the boom
of babies they could never build
enough schools for, continuing through
the years of Conelrad and bomb tests,
clouds of strontium-90 settling over
Mid-West cow pastures and seeping
into the wholesomeness of our milk,
of air raid drills, hiding under our desks,
the Sunday afternoon sirens, the missle gap,
the arms race, the space race, the moon race,
The Korean War, the Berlin wall, Cuba,
and Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam --
the entire agony of Communist hysteria
that mutated into Peace and Love
through a purple haze of electric
guitar music, then collapsed into a stupor
of sated Capitalist moneygrubbing,
Internet boom and bust, as we squandered
what was supposed to be the "peace dividend"
awarded to us as the righteous victors
by mortgaging our homes and building
an army so intent on finding a new enemy
that it did at last exactly that.

Now here I am, supposedly old enough to
know better, studying the accumulation
of my retirement funds and estimating when
the final payment will be made on my house,
wondering, if that day ever comes, how much
longer I will have to live. All around me
the world spins in confusion, lurching
from one disaster to the next like a drunk
wondering when he'll finally hit his bottom --
from which point there is only UP to go,
from where Salvation can be found,
and where life, as with the coming
of grandchildren, may reveal, finally,
its rewards.