The Bomb Is Back

Today it all seems so naive, so idealistic, a towering grand illusion. For one brief, shining decade--a dozen years, tops--we’d convinced ourselves that the thermonuclear shadow had receded, the doomsday clock had been set to “snooze,” the threat of planetary suicide had vanished along with the Soviet Empire, apartheid and other cruel relics of the 20th century.

Even the experts among us, Foggy Bottom wonks and think-tank philosophers, had dared to dream of a world free of the damoclean sword of mutual assured destruction. “The simple truth is that people simply forgot about nuclear danger for about a decade, and there were some pretty good reasons for doing so. I had a feeling like that myself,” says Jonathan Schell, whose hair-raising tome, “The Fate of the Earth” (Knopf, 1982 ), helped fuel the nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s.

But in the bleak months since Sept. 11, the phantom menace of nuclear catastrophe has come back with a vengeance--stalking our imaginations, confounding our leaders, confronting us with a host of atomic terrors hitherto barely imagined: hijacked airliners rammed down the throats of nuclear power plants; “dirty bombs” spraying lethal radiation and rendering huge swaths of cities uninhabitable for years to come.

Looming over these lesser catastrophes is the threat of an actual nuclear weapons attack. After the lull of the ‘90s, we’re learning to start worrying and fear The Bomb all over again.

Only now America must face the possibility of dealing with more than just one or two mega-adversaries capable of sending our entire country up in a mushroom cloud. Now we’re conjuring up visions of a suitcase bomb detonated at Times Square, a 10-kiloton dose of megadeath delivered in a truck to downtown Los Angeles or Chicago. Or a regional conflict, like the present one pitting India against nuclear rival Pakistan over the disputed Kashmir territory, escalating into global Armageddon.

On the one hand, we’re being confronted anew with the sublime terror of extinction; on the other, with the banality and ridiculousness of a threat to our lives and our civilization from something that may be lurking in a briefcase, a pair of Hush Puppies or, as in the new Hollywood blockbuster “The Sum of All Fears,” a cigarette-vending machine.

That cognitive tension, some experts say, is nothing new.

“There’s something so extreme about [nuclear] weapons and their capacity to destroy much of the world’s population that has a dimension of absurdity,” says Robert Jay Lifton, a New York professor of psychiatry and psychology and co-author of “Hiroshima in America--A Half Century of Denial” (Avon, 1995).

“In my view, the only relatively accurate kind of perception of nuclear weapons is to see them in their apocalyptic dimension, in their world-destroying dimension,” Lifton continues. “So one has to be either apocalyptic or absurd. One has to draw upon the apocalyptic dimension of what they do, and one also has to draw on the absurdity of us destroying our species by our own technology and our own hand.”

To be sure, Lifton says, America isn’t the only nation to have undergone a kind of “psychic numbing” in response to the horrors of nuclear war. And since the twin towers fell, he believes, “we have become more aware of nuclear danger.” But while the White House is painting a bleak picture of potential nuclear terrorism, much of the American public seems to be treating these threats with a mixture of fatalism, disbelief and gallows humor.

In other words, it’s business as usual for a country that has never really sorted out its conflicted feelings about being the first nation to unleash nuclear weapons on the world. “In a sense you could say that America’s been in denial for pretty much five decades over this type of threat occurring,” says Mick Broderick, author of “Nuclear Movies” (McFarland & Co., 1991) and a professor of media analysis at Murdoch University in Australia.

If many aspects of our current anxiety look familiar, there’s at least one new wrinkle: The Bush administration’s assertion that a future nuclear terrorist attack is not merely possible but virtually guaranteed. In recent weeks, senior White House officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have grimly asserted that an attack on the U.S. with nukes or other weapons of mass destruction is “inevitable,” not a matter of if but of when. Last week’s news that a U.S. citizen and suspected Al Qaeda member, Abdullah al Mujahir (ne Jose Padilla), had been apprehended while allegedly plotting a radioactive-bomb attack, underscored the sense of looming danger.

Meanwhile, pop culture is holding up a mirror to our apprehensions. The aptly named movie “The Sum of All Fears,” based on a Tom Clancy novel, fingers every conceivable plot twist that could bring the world to the verge of nuclear annihilation: superpower misunderstandings, neo-Nazi madmen, mercenary arms dealers. The movie features a frightening depiction of an atomic weapon exploding in Baltimore, killing thousands.

Fatalism Could Be a

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Yet a number of nuclear, foreign policy and defense experts suggest there may be a danger in the view that a terrorist attack on the United States using weapons of mass destruction is practically a fait accompli. Yes, they say, the threats are real, some more than others. But to call them “inevitable” could trigger a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“I do not know the basis upon which anybody could say with confidence that it’s inevitable. Equally, I don’t see how anybody could say with confidence that it will never happen,” says Albert Carnesale, former U.S. delegate to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT I, with the Soviet Union in the 1970s and now chancellor of UCLA.

What’s needed at this juncture, Carnesale says, is a more comprehensive, contextualized understanding of how nuclear peril develops and spreads in the real world of international politics--and how it can be prevented through negotiation and arms-control agreements. Carnesale says he’d like to expand President Bush’s declared “war on terrorism” into a “war on weapons of mass destruction” in general.

Others reject the idea that any such attack would necessarily inflict a devastating physical blow. “There are three things that are difficult to talk about in public in America: religion, sexuality and radiation,” says Steven Koonin, provost of Caltech in Pasadena.

Koonin believes that an act of “radiological terrorism”--a so-called dirty bomb--is “probably the most plausible” type of short-term nuclear threat facing America. Relatively cheap and easy to make, a dirty bomb consists of some type of readily obtainable radioactive material such as Cesium-137, commonly used in heavy industry. Attached to an explosive device, such as dynamite, and dispersed through an explosion, a relatively small amount could make an area uninhabitable by current standards.

But how great a threat would there actually be to human life, Koonin asks rhetorically. Statistically, he says, a single dose of radiation creates a four in 10,000 lifetime risk of contracting cancer. For the overall U.S. population, the odds of getting cancer are one in five. “If you just live in the U.S. and drive around, your lifetime risk of getting killed in a car crash is one in several hundred,” Koonin says. “The point is we take bigger risks in our everyday lives.”

A Frank Look at

Worst-Case Scenarios

From his 14th-floor office suite in the Mid-Wilshire district, Jonathan Parfrey has been staring into the worst-case nuclear abyss for some time. As executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles, Parfrey says he’s “not willing to say it’s inevitable we’re going to suffer an atomic explosion. It’s a possibility.”

Parfrey says his group has performed computer projections on the likely effects of a 12.5-kiloton nuclear blast in downtown Los Angeles. Estimates of immediate deaths are about 150,000, and 100,000 more killed from neutron and gamma radiation exposure. An additional 800,000 people would be exposed to high-level radiation in the surrounding area. The number of local hospital beds available to treat severe-burn victims in the event of such an attack, according to Parfrey: 120.

“It’s been the hardest part of my job trying to get people to be reflective on this issue and to try to find solutions without being paranoid,” he says.

Americans’ feelings about nuclear warfare have always had an apocalyptic, deterministic undercurrent that derives from the country’s Judeo-Christian religious traditions, says professor Broderick of Australia. Practically from the moment it was first used against Japan, the bomb was seen by Americans as a kind of divine gift for ending fascist tyranny and setting the world right again.

But some Americans also recognized that, having let loose the nuclear genie, the United States opened up the possibility of one day becoming a nuclear victim itself. Our post-Sept. 11 fears partly reflect these unresolved doubts, Lifton and others suggest. Even the designation of the former World Trade Center site as “ground zero” evokes a nuclear analogy, revealing the popular perception that the twin towers were America’s Hiroshima, as well as its Pearl Harbor redux. Now, the nation is pondering the terrifying possibility of an encore--an American Nagasaki.

Yet Americans don’t necessarily oppose the use of nukes against others: During the 1991 Gulf War, for example, opinion polls showed that a near-majority of Americans backed the use of nuclear weapons against Iraq.

“Our having dropped those two bombs is not commensurate with our sense of being a decent people who refrain from harming others whenever we can,” says Lifton. “Our resistance to Hiroshima, our raw nerve in relation to Hiroshima, impairs our capacity to take in what nuclear weapons really do to human beings.”

Separating Nuclear

Fact From Fiction

From “Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response,” a publication of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services: “Type of Attack: Nuclear Attack--What you should do: 1) If you see the flash take cover and get low to reduce the effect of the shockwave. If you hear the blast or have felt the shockwave take cover to avoid debris. 2) Move away from the debris cloud. 3) If you cannot get away from the debris cloud, cover your mouth with a folded cloth and exit the cloud as soon as possible.”

From “Hiroshima,” by John Hersey: “Dr. Sasaki had not looked outside the hospital all day; the scene inside was so terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to him to ask any questions about what had happened beyond the windows and doors. Ceilings and partitions had fallen; plaster, dust, blood, and vomit were everywhere. Patients were dying by the hundreds, but there was nobody to carry away the corpses.”

For those who spend their lives trying to prevent nuclear war, perception and reality can seem dangerously close, because to achieve the unthinkable you must first imagine it. Or avoid imagining it.

Daniel Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a Los Angeles-based nuclear watchdog organization, says there’s “a disconnect” in the nation’s nuclear attitudes, including its perception of its own vulnerability. “If you ask [Americans] in polls, they say it is virtually certain there will be more terrorist attacks,” Hirsch says. “[But] in their hearts they believe we had this one event and things will return to normal.”

With Al Qaeda forces regrouping in Pakistan, and many parts of the world on yellow alert, it will be hard in the months ahead not to envision Yeats’ rough beast slouching toward Delhi, or Karachi, or Los Angeles, to be born. But some suggest it’s time to drop the apocalyptic rhetoric, already, and get on with the endless, indispensable (if not “inevitable”) task of somehow making the world a safer place.

“Armageddon is something that God does,” says Schell, now a Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute in New York. “It is a fulfillment of God’s plan for justice and righteousness on Earth. A nuclear war is something that man does. It’s a crime. It’s not the fulfillment of anybody’s plan, God’s or anyone else’s. And to confuse the two, even if we were to accept the biblical idea, would be blasphemy, in my opinion. And yet the two are confused.”