On the Beach
I went to kindergarten in 1956. Up until the early 1960s, we were required to practice “duck and cover drills.” These drills required us to jump out of our seats then squat in fetal positions beneath our desks, which we were told was how we could survive nuclear attacks launched by the Soviet Union. Whether these measures would have been the least bit efficacious in a real attack, I don’t know; but their purpose was to amplify our general anxiety about the Soviets during the Cold War. It worked. We were all pretty anxious. The drills stopped in the early sixties, right after what’s now called the Cuban missile crisis — when the US and the USSR had a nuclear stand-off that was thankfully settled by Kennedy and Khrushchev putting their dicks back in their pants and acting like they’d recovered their common sense and common decency.
I was a precocious reader. In 1959, I discovered a novel in the local library at St. James, Missouri, written by Nevil Shute, called On the Beach. Published in 1957, around the time that the first intercontinental ballistic missiles came on line, the book is about the world stumbling into a nuclear war, whereupon the radioactive fallout begins migrating through various climes, killing all life in its wake. The protagonists, by the end, face a choice between suicide and dying of radiation sickness. Needless to say, as a lad of around eight, iirc, this was a perfectly terrifying read. To make things worse, whatever I’d missed as a juvenile reader was clarified in a film based on the novel that came out that same year.
By the time Kennedy and Khrushchev were re-sheathing their penises in 1962, after scaring the world shitless, nuclear anxiety had become a kind of chronic background noise in the psyches of everyone. Slowly, over the years, it faded. It became, again, unthinkable and un-thought-about.
I’m watching the war in Ukraine now, which has become a proxy war between Russia (the USSR has long since gone) and the US, and all the old anxieties have returned. For me, at least.
The mainstream media, on the other hand, seems uncannily unperturbed by the facts of this war — which are lining up each day in such a way as to make the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons by Russia more likely. The media narrative seems to be “Russia is bad. Ukraine and the US are good. ‘We’ can’t allow Putin to get away with it.” The media — who profit mightily from war, which increases viewership — are quite hawkish about the war, and about the US pumping weapons into the conflict at a rate that dwarfs the Lend-Lease Program of World War II. The supporting belief seems to be that all the leaders, US, Ukrainian, and Russian, are all rational, and therefore Putin will not escalate to the use of “tactical” nukes.
Really? We know that? As we push him further and further into a corner?
Let me say something, as an ex-military guy, about “tactical.” There are three levels, so to speak, in war. The tactical level is the individual battlefield. The operational, or campaign, level is the coordination of various battles. The strategic level is related to overarching national objectives, and provides the direction for campaign coordination. Tactical is the lowest. Operational is the middle. Strategic is the highest. Strategic is the level at which the character and scope of the war is determined.
Which is why there’s no such thing as a “tactical” nuke.
The very employment of a “small” battlefield nuclear weapon, by virtue of it being a nuclear weapon, automatically takes on strategic significance. It changes the character and the scope of the war. There is a physical and a psychological aspect to this. The physical aspect is the On the Beach problem — radioactive fallout that is spread around by the wind and water. This cannot be restricted to the battlefield. (There is already a tremendous threat in the Russian occupation of a Ukrainian nuclear plant, which could — by attack or accident — become a “dirty bomb” on the scale of Chernobyl or Fukushima.) Psychologically, tactical-not-tactical nukes are a kind of red-line, the chip on Biden’s strategic shoulder. The use of even one such munition would seem to require retaliation. It is by these increments — not by design — that we absolutely can stumble into World War III.
No one wants to talk about negotiated settlements, because Putin is bad and he has to be punished. No one wants to suggest that we quit pumping weapons into this conflict, this proxy war, where the US will fight to the last Ukrainian. No one wants the bad man to get away with it. No one wants to admit that bad people can get away with things, because it fucks up our fantasy that the world is just. Even the so-called “progressives” in Congress have been stone silent as they signed the checks for weapons shipments.
I’m just asking, what’s at stake? What principles justify the risk of stumbling into a full-scale nuclear war? I’m not some tankie. I’ve got no idiotic “anti-imperialist” attachment to Putin. What I’m saying is, God damn a bunch of fucking principles! I don’t want my family or your family or anyone or anyone’s family destroyed in a nuclear war. I don’t want casualties in the millions. I don’t want cities reduced to toxic craters. I don’t want generations of cancer, or worse, nuclear winter. And I don’t trust the media — a bunch of clueless fucks who couldn’t find their asses with a radar — when they blithely reassure us that it can’t happen here. It damn sure can, you irresponsible thoughtless motherfuckers! And we are closer now than we have ever been to the unthinkable.
The. Risk. Is. Not. Worth. It.
Praying daily and fervently. Just stop.