Schell, Fate of the Earth

IS THERE ANY FUTURE?

Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth: a retrospective review.

I turned and watched the mushroom cloud rise over the mountains to the

north. It was a very emotional experience for me. My heart swelled with

pride and tears came to my eyes.

- A soldier witnessing an atomic bomb test,

Nevada, 1957

Rather infrequently, perhaps just a few times each decade, a book is published which acts like a crystal dropped into a supersaturated solution. Ideas which previously have been inchoate and thoroughly dissolved in the cultural medium suddenly take on an exact form and substance.

Such has been the growing reputation of The Fate of the Earth, a tripartite meditation on the meaning of nuclear warfare by a staff writer of New Yorker magazine. First released in 1982, the book has been famous ever since the essays which constitute it first began to appear; and when the book itself was published in the United States it was so much in demand that it went out of print within days. It was also a best-seller when issued by Penguin in a stark black cover. The dust-jacket of the first edition asserts that it "may someday be looked back upon as a crucial event in the history of human thought" -- a ridiculously hyperbolic claim, of course, but one which, after eight years, can be seen to have a grain of truth. The Fate of the Earth was, and is, a work of rare importance, which one sees referred to in all sorts of places. Recently, for example, the novelist Martin Amis registered his debt to it.

There is no doubt that the core assertion of The Fate of the Earth -- that the proliferation of nuclear armaments had, by the beginning of the Eighties, bought us to the very brink of the abyss -- was an idea whose time had come. Perhaps it is worth recalling some of suggestive public events which were contemporary with it. A long television docudrama on the career of J. Robert Oppenheimer was running on American public television, and its implications were being widely discussed. The nuclear protest movement was gathering force: a demonstration in favour of arms control in Pasadena's Rose Bowl drew a huge crowd, and on the same day 100,000 more gathered in Hyde Park in London; a few days after that, a crowd of more than half a million in Central Park was called the largest demonstration in American history. I was living in that country myself over those months, and I well recall some small but significant pointers to the new mood. The car bumper stickers, for example: The new injunctions "No Nukes!" and "Arms Freeze Now!" were definitely taking the lead over that previous favourite of the hawks, "Don't Let Jane Fonda Pull Your Pants Down." The time was ripe for a crystallizing statement, and Schell made it.

The interesting thing is that, to do so, he resurrected an almost extinct literary form: the sermon. For his was a lay sermon, written, one would guess, from an agnostic stance. The intention was not to offer religious consolation but to arouse us, to make us shake off our fatal lassitude before the nuclear threat. His tone was far removed from the grisly jovialities of Herman Kahn, a then-famous thinker about the unthinkable. In his central section, titled "The Second Death", Schell wrestles with the taxing concept of extinction; not personal extinction, but the prospective death-by-suicide of our species. The subject raises him to the heights of eloquence, and a fine eloquence it is. "Extinction ends death just as surely as it ends birth and life. Death is only death; extinction is the end of death." Such resonant paradoxes, no less than their subject, recall the stylistic mannerisms of seventeenth-century divines like Donne and Jeremy Taylor. Schell's endless circling -- this section is highly repetitive -- as he tries to get a headlock on the concept of annihilation ("the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment") is very reminiscent of Donne's attempt to come to terms with cosmic nothingness in A Nocturnal:

The world's whole sap is sunk:

The general balm th'hydroptic earth hath drunk,

Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,

Dead and enterred....

And, God knows, the nuclear debate could still do with some of Donne's, and Schell's eloquence. We sorely need an antidote to that schizoid and aseptic prose which has long been the official tongue in which to discuss such things; that tongue aptly christened 'Pentagonese'. Its hateful vocabulary and idiom are only too familiar: 'megadeaths', 'regret factor' (that is, the result of strategic miscalculation), 'humanitarian devices' (for restricted fallout bombs), 'babies satisfactorily born' (the code for the first blast in New Mexico). Schell's major achievement was that he could handle a style finely wrought, high, grave and passionate, which pierced through those periphrases and euphemisms.

He also managed to suffuse his book with a sense of urgency which is not dissipated today. The whole MAD strategy of 'mutually assured destruction' which has governed relations between the superpowers is based on the rationale of Churchill, first enunciated in 1955, that "safety will be the sturdy child of terror". But although we have been thoroughly terrorised by the nuclear threat since 1945, exactly how much safety have we bought thereby? In one sense, all that counts. Disaster has been averted. In another sense, very little. Since 1960, catastrophe has drawn close on four occasions that we know of. In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 it was by deliberate political choice. But three more times malfunctioning computers have moved the US defence network up to the early stages of alert. Under the present dispensation it is inevitable that one day a fatal concatenation of events will occur. Schell believes it will mean the end of the human world. Only "a republic of leaves and grasses" will survive us.

In the first part of the book, a piece of first-rate scientific journalism in its own right, Schell, in the guise of a latter-day Virgil takes all us unwilling Dantes by the hand for a descent into the thermonuclear pit. Like the author of the Inferno, his task is more to remind us of what we already know in outline. In our nightmares we all have what might be (let us hope not) precognitive glimpses of the holocaust, taken from science fiction or photographs: the grim details of terminal radiation sickness in On the Beach, eyeballs running like tears down faces in The War Game, the brave attempts at painting a post-nuclear landscape in The Day After, the woman with the pattern of her kimono branded into her back by the thermal pulse of the Hiroshima bomb. But such images, evocative though they may be, are no more than totally superficial symbols of the horrors of even a limited nuclear strike. The Hiroshima device which flattened a city and killed thousands had but the force of 12.5 kilotonnes of TNT; further, it was burst in the air, a mode which generates little fallout. So despite having made a trial run for Armageddon, the world knows nothing of mass radiation sickness and death.

As Schell forcibly reminds us, the talk of megatonnages flows so freely in the strategy manuals that it is easy to skate over the destructive power of one modestly sized bomb. A single megatonne air blast over New York would devastate sixty square miles. People in the open 12 kilometres away would be roasted to death. Should the bomb explode at street level, a light wind could produce a fallout plume of lethal intensity 200km long, and people over many more hundreds of kilometres would be dangerously irradiated. And all this from one warhead! -- and of a size which both powers have stockpiled by the hundred.

But probably on such a prime target as New York the USSR would choose to expend one of its 113 20-megatonne bombs. In that case, a ground burst would contaminate ten thousand square kilometres and perhaps 20 million people would be either killed, desperately burned or poisoned. What do such casualties mean in terms of present, intact medical resources? We can find the answers readily enough in the primary sources on which Schell himself presumably drew. The invaluable report drawn up by the Office of Technology Assessment back in 1979 for the edification of Congress tells us that the number of hospital beds in the United States is about one and a half million. Statistics offered in Arthur Katz' Life after Nuclear War (1982) suggest that only 200 severe burns cases occurring simultaneously would swamp that country's specialised facilities. Again, we repeat: these are the consequences of one bomb in one country.