Author: Captain Future

Promoted by Chris

There were many influential figures in the history of nuclear weapons, but perhaps the most important didn’t actually exist: his name was Doctor Strangelove.

Strangelove came to symbolize the essential madness of nuclear war.  This was one of the psychological aspects of the Cold War nuclear stand-off–probably the healthiest, in that it was a factor in preventing nuclear war.

This is relevant today not only in considering the consequences if the U.S. launched nuclear weapons on Iran, but in the unrelenting Iraq war and the madness of Guantanamo, the Bush government in general, the Climate Crisis and other catastrophes of our time. They are promoted by those who try to sound rational and sane, but whose actions both indicate insanity, and cause people to become unhinged in view of what they are doing.  
In a previous essay, I wrote about how nuclear war was averted through a common global sense that it was suicidal and immoral.  But there was another element to the consensus: that nuclear war was evidence of insanity.  Not just madness in the loose sense, but in the sense of mental derangement.  The view that came to prevail was that only a species that had gone mad would engage in a war that would destroy itself.  

 But there were other psychological aspects that were less amusing or healthy, like helpless fear and anxiety, and dangerous projections and denial that threatened to provoke rather than restrain nuclear war. Now, in facing the prospect of a different kind of nuclear war or even the other potential catastrophes of our time, we are still haunted by these psychological spectres.    

Origins of Strangelove

Invented for a 1964 movie of that title, Dr. Strangelove was likely based on several men, including Nazi-turned-U.S. rocket scientist Werner von Braun and geopolitical strategist Henry Kissinger, but probably primarily on nuclear scientist Edward Teller and nuclear war futurist Herman Kahn.  Teller zealously promoted the H-Bomb and the arms race, as well as grandiose schemes such as using atomic bomb explosions as excavation tools.  Kahn…well, Kahn is another story.

Once it became likely that the next war could be an atomic one, the U.S. military wanted to know what to expect. A project within the Douglas Aircraft Company which soon spun off to become the Rand Corporation, and one of its guiding lights was Herman Kahn.

 Kahn and Rand made some lasting contributions to how we think about the future.  Together with scientists at M.I.T. and elsewhere, they were among the pioneers of systems dynamics.  Kahn developed and popularized the idea of developing “scenarios” to project a combination of chosen factors into a story of future happenings.  Out of this emerged a technique common to all kinds of “futurists,” and computer “war games,” the basis for a lot of electronic gaming today.  And we talk about “scenarios” all the time now, though before Kahn it was specialized theatrical term.

But in “Thinking the Unthinkable” and other works on nuclear war, Kahn was also the inventor or at least the popularizer of such terms as  “deterrence” and “throw-weight” or the ghastly jargon of “megatons,” and “megadeaths.”  Kahn insisted on the “rationality of irrationality” in studying nuclear war, and he advocated the Cold War situation which came to pass: two sides armed with the “overkill” capacity to destroy each other and humankind several times over, and with the technology to respond to an attack (or a presumed attack) with enough nuclear weapons to destroy its destroyers. This would be the basis of deterrence.  He called this doctrine Mutually Assured Destruction.  He used its acronym: MAD.

Doctor Strangelove was demonstrably mad in a characteristic nuclear age way.  He spoke very rationally and intelligently about mass murder and global suicide. As played brilliantly by Peter Sellers, he was confused in his allegiances–was he serving democracy, or Hitler?  Even his body was split, with a “paralyzed” arm that when he was about to commit the ultimate insanity, tried to choke him.  

He was not the only crazy character.  There was George C. Scott as a combination of several military leaders, who talked of millions of deaths as “getting our hair mussed,” and carried around a folder that said “the world in megadeaths.”

 But the moviemakers had trouble making the movie crazier than reality.  General Jack D. Ripper (who started nuclear war to protect his “precious bodily fluids”) was based on a general whose real name was General Powers.  He once said that if there are three people left alive after a nuclear war and two are American, it means we won.

In fact, the moviemakers had intended to make a serious drama, but the more they researched the subject the more they became convinced that it was all so crazy that the appropriate tone was as a “nightmare comedy.” The mood of the movie is reminiscent of the Marx Brothers, articularly their satire on war, “Duck Soup.”  In another movie, Groucho and Chico negotiate a contract.  Chico rejects every clause including the last one, the sanity clause.  He says he won’t be fooled, because “there is no sanity clause.”  That pretty much is the message of “Doctor Strangelove.”

Excavating the Madness

The madness of nuclear war was not always apparent to the public as a whole, or at least not articulated in that way.  The first reactions to Hiroshima were of horror, and the need to control nuclear weapons.  But once the arms race began, there was considerable pressure to support the U.S. nuclear weapons program.  

 The U.S. government worried about how the public was dealing psychologically with the atomic age.  They waited for psychological studies, but none emerged, because the public didn’t seem to be feeling anything. Eventually, the government quietly sponsored research into why the public wasn’t reacting.  The theories ranged from “cognitive dissonance” to a kind of apathy later identified as “learned helplessness,” to the simple but powerful psychological defense mechanism known as denial.    

 Denial was undeniably the national pastime of the 1950s, encouraged by the surface sunniness of suburbia and the patriotic repression of McCarthyism.  But what ordinary people faced was that their ordinary life could be transformed in a split second into hellfire.  No one could ever know how much the Bomb contributed to neuroses and psychoses, alcoholism and drug addiction, infidelity, domestic violence, and divorce, or to depressions that could be a crippling sense of pointlessness, or a lower-intensity, underlying sense of futility.  But eventually there was public evidence of how the Bomb changed the psychological state of the times.

The pressure of MADness fueled an age of black humor and absurdism.  Satire blossomed in the 1960s, with “Beyond the Fringe,” “That Was the Week That Was,” Firesign Theatre and edgier standup comedy by Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman and others.  

There were also serious explorations of just how insane this society might be, by Eric Fromm (“The Sane Society”), Lewis Mumford (“In the Name of Sanity”) and others.  Beat poets, absurdist playwrights and novelists explored similar themes.

By the early 60s, the madness of nuclear war was being expressed and reinforced in popular culture by jokes and cartoons which emphasized the absurdity, and by novels, movies and television dramas which emphasized the horror.  Though the horror and absurdity blended even in daily life (ask a Boomer about “Duck  & Cover”), the two weren’t brought together and expressed until Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.”

Though it was controversial at the time, “Dr. Strangelove” became at least as important as John Hershey’s book, “Hiroshima,” the Stanley Kramer film, “On the Beach,” and much later, Nicholas Meyer’s TV film, “The Day After,” in both forming and expressing common responses and beliefs about nuclear war.  “Dr. Strangelove” expressed the sane view that nuclear war was insane.  That deep psychological consensus, in my view, was a major factor in preventing anyone from starting a nuclear war.

Since the Berlin Wall fell, the constant psychological as well as moral presence of nuclear war has faded.  New generations didn’t live through that time, even though the threat of accidental nuclear war is as real today as it was then, and we have plenty of evidence that the potential for that kind of madness exists in our government and military.

My previous essays on nuclear war, especially relating to the possible nuclear attack on Iraq, sought to bring into light some of the lessons of those years: that nuclear weapons are not just bigger bombs, but unleash destruction that is different in kind as well as scale, especially through the long-term and potentially widespread effects of radiation.  That because of the Bomb’s history, and the sense of immorality attached to their use, nuclear weapons are considered in a special category around the world, and the next use of them in war will likely bring immense geopolitical consequences.    

To these I add the assertion that nuclear war was averted without either a coercive or cooperative world government or authority, largely because of a shared sense that however rational scientists, political and military leaders pretend it is, nuclear war is insane. We know they are all Dr. Strangelove.  We need to remind ourselves of that. It requires a step back from the chain of logic employed by policymakers to see this.

There is another pertinent psychological implication–the danger that, from the power-mad leaders to the fear and despair of ordinary people, the use of nuclear weapons can itself drive a society or perhaps all of humankind insane.  

Some of the responses to my previous essays expressed fears and anxieties that are very similar to those experienced earlier in the atomic age.  The sense of helplessness feeds these fears.  In my next commentary, I want to suggest strategies for dealing with the psychological impact of nuclear weapons and other manifestations of political madness.

In an interview with CNN, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Iran is months away from developing a nuclear weapon, not the five to ten years that most experts estimate.  He said that while Israel is not comtemplating unilateral military action, he “expressed confidence” that President Bush “will lead other nations in taking the necessary measures to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power.”  

Olmert meets with Bush today.  We don’t know if he will urge military action, or even if this is a message already coordinated with the White House, but the spectre of U.S. bombing of Iran in the near future must again be faced.

Presumably, planners are anticipating possible military and geopolitical responses to bombing targets in Iran. But is anyone thinking about the geopolitical consequences of one possible aspect of such an attack: the use of nuclear weapons?  Because this act is in itself highly consequential.  If it were to happen, it could well mark the beginning of the end of the U.S. as a world power, and certainly change how this country is viewed in the world, forever.  
In a previous essay, I wrote about the realities of radiation, and the policy of secrecy and lies that masked these realities.  Today the subject just isn’t talked about.  Nor is the subject of this essay: the moral and geopolitical dimensions of the specific act of using nukes, even the so-called bunker-busters of relatively small yield (though they may be far larger than the Hiroshima bomb.)

    The atomic bomb was “invented” by the same person who invented the armored tank, trench warfare, the bombing of cities from the air, suburban sprawl, the Blitz, television news and the Time Machine.  Though the first such Bomb would not be built and exploded until 1945, H.G. Wells foresaw—and named–the atomic bomb in 1913, in a novel called “The World Set Free.”

    This novel, written before World War I, was not just remarkably prescient. It actually affected the real development of the atomic bomb.  

    Physicist Leo Szilard read “The World Set Free” in Berlin in 1932.  Its story–of the discovery of atomic power, of the ensuing atomic war that destroyed the world’s major cities, and that war’s outcome–deeply impressed him.  About five years later, a number of puzzling experimental outcomes were beginning to suggest the reality of what Wells had proposed (based on his intuition of what Einstein’s 1905 theory of relativity and Frederick Soddy’s work on radiation implied): splitting the atom to release immense energy.  

    In 1938, when Szilard realized how to create a chain reaction, he remembered Wells’ tale of a disastrous nuclear war.  Until Hitler took over in Germany and even for awhile afterwards, discoveries in physics were freely shared internationally.  But warned by Wells’ novel to the danger of his discovery, Szilard decided to keep it secret.  

    Szilard left for America, where he worked with Enrico Fermi, who had emigrated from Italy with his Jewish wife when Mussolini began to adopt Hitler’s persecution of Jews.  When Szilard was sure an atomic bomb was theoretically possible, he discussed it with Einstein, who had also recently fled to America from Berlin.  As a result of their discussion, they wrote the famous letter to FDR that Einstein signed, warning of the Bomb and the likelihood that Germany would pursue it, and urging the U.S. to develop it first.

    Szilard eventually worked on the Manhattan Project, but when Germany was defeated and no German Bomb had been built, he got Einstein to write another letter to FDR, urging that the U.S. Bomb not be used in the war.  After FDR’s death, he also led 69 other Manhattan Project scientists to write and sign a similar letter.  He argued that using the Bomb against people would undermine the moral authority of the U.S. after the war, especially its ability to bring “the unloosened forces of destruction under control.”

    Szilard realized two things that he might also have learned from Wells’ novel: because it was so immensely destructive, the atomic bomb was going to be the center of the largest moral questions the world had ever faced, and the geopolitical reality of the world had changed, because warfare with atomic weapons could destroy civilization and perhaps humankind itself.

    These two areas–the moral and the geopolitical–were fused together by the first atomic explosion.  They are fused together still.  But for the purposes of analysis, let’s look at them separately.

    Morality, War and the Bomb

     When Islamic armies were the most powerful in the world, conquerors of Asia Minor and North Africa, and poised at the gates of Europe in the 8th century, Abu Hanifa, founder of a school of law in the city of Baghdad, proposed that the killing, maiming and raping of civilian noncombatants in war be forbidden. It was one of the first attempts to codify some kind of moral and legal restraints on civilized societies engaged in the dangerously uncivilized practice of warfare.

    Though from its inception, the intent of bombing was to terrorize people rather than to destroy military targets, there was still widespread moral opposition to the bombing of civilians and cities, until World War II.  The moral outrage expressed in probably the most famous work of art depicting warfare, Picasso’s “Guernica,” immortalized the horror of the first terror bombing of a civilian population in Europe, by German bombers aiding the Franco forces in Spain.  

    While Americans remember the bombing of Pearl Harbor (a sneak attack, but on a very military target) and the British remember the Blitz, Germans may be justified in recalling the years of nightly bombing by British planes, culminating in the firebombing of Dresden, and Japanese the incessant bombing of practically every city in Japan by Americans.

By the time of Hiroshima, bombing cities with the express purpose of destroying them and killing people was a regular feature of the war on all sides.

    But people were still troubled by the morality of killing the innocent, even when they half-believed the half-truths of their governments about the purpose and necessity of the bombing.  The atomic bomb was so destructive over so large an area, that any pretence that it was a strategic weapon was impossible to maintain. “In 1945, when we ceased worrying about what the Germans would do to us,” said Leo Szilard, “we began to worry about what the United States might do to other countries.”

    When the world began to find out what really had happened in Hiroshima, moral revulsion became attached to the Bomb and its future.  After “Hiroshima,” John Hershey’s account of the aftermath was published, this revulsion was particularly acute.  Even American military leaders, including General Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral William Halsey and General Curtis LeMay condemned the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  General Omar Bradley referred to “nuclear giants and ethical infants.”  

Leo Szilard asked people to imagine what the feeling would be if Germany had dropped an atomic bomb on an Allied city, but still lost the war.  Would not that act be added to other war crimes at Nuremberg?

Though some of these figures became nuclear weapons supporters, moral revulsion became a widely and deeply felt reason for why the Bomb had to be controlled, and why it must never again be used.

    The Geopolitics of Apocalypse

    In Wells’ 1913 novel, The World Set Free, the atomic war leads to the inevitable conclusion that the world must unite in a single World State, or destroy itself forever.  In the novel, the world does unite—something else that Leo Szilard may have learned from it.

    After Hiroshima, many others quickly came to a similar conclusion.  Not only scientists like Szilard and Einstein, but writers like Norman Cousins’ whose essay published immediately after Hiroshima, expanded into a best-selling book, suggested that humankind now faced extinction in an atomic war, and only a new world order could prevent it.  The main test humanity faced, Cousins wrote, is the “will to change rather than [the] ability to change…That is why the power of total destruction as potentially represented by modern science must be dramatized and kept in the forefront of public opinion.”

    Cousins supported world federalism, and a United World Federalist movement arose in 1947.  Though many people considered world government as too idealistic, there was widespread support for the United Nations as it was being formed, and something amounting to almost a consensus that nuclear weapons must be brought under international control.  Even President Truman, who never regretted using the Bomb, believed that international control of atomic weapons was the correct goal.

    But nothing close to world government or even international control of nuclear weapons ever materialized.  Instead there was an arms race, principally between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.  As nuclear weapons grew in power and number, the basic sanity of humanity was called into question.  But as close as the world was to total assured destruction, it did not happen.

How the World Saved Itself

    What did happen was something few could have imagined, because it seemed so contrary to human nature and human history.  Without the restraint of world government, the nations possessing nuclear weapons engaged in warfare and the undercover violence called the Cold War.  But for sixty years and counting, no nation ever used a nuclear weapon against another.

    Why they didn’t is not as important right now than the fact that they didn’t.  The world was saved by forbearance.  It was saved by the common knowledge that if one nation used a nuclear weapon, the restraint on their use by other nations would be broken.  It was saved by a combination of moral revulsion and geopolitical realities.

Despite such pipedreams as fallout shelters and Star Wars, it was commonly known that there is no defense against nuclear weapons, and immense destruction was assured.  Eventually there were international agreements that limited the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and allowed the major nuclear powers to limit and then reduce their weapons.  But forbearance was the key to it all.  

    The U.S. under Bush has largely repudiated or violated many international nuclear weapons agreements.  It has attempted to aid another nation (India) in expanding its nuclear capabilities.  It has planned to add to its nuclear arsenal.  And now, under Bush, the first and only nation to use a nuclear weapon against an enemy population of men, women and children, is said to be contemplating the first use of such a weapon since Nagasaki in 1945.    

    The consequences of thermonuclear war between the US and the USSR were studied repeatedly, and in outline were well known: basically the annihilation of civilization.   The consequences are not widely known of nuclear devices becoming acceptable weapons in warfare at a time when many nations have some.    But it can hardly be doubted that this is an avenue to widespread catastrophe that may have the same eventual result.

    If the U.S. uses even one “small” nuclear device, the forbearance will be broken.  The moral revulsion and geopolitical realism could be cast aside, and nuclear warfare of an unpredictable kind could begin, with no way to end it.

    But what if moral revulsion and geopolitical realism holds?  What if the only nukes that are used turn out to be the ones the U.S. uses on Iran, at least in the immediate aftermath?  The consequences for the U.S. could well be severe and lasting.  Much of the world is already troubled if not disgusted with recent U.S. international behavior. (See for example the dKos diary by NBBooks that outlines several growing alliances that don’t include the U.S.) The use of any nuke could unleash a tide of sentiment and action that could devastate the U.S. politically and economically.  Nuclear weapons still have potent symbolic as well as physical power.

The U.S. could become an outcast giant overnight, drummed out of the international community, treated with contempt.  Real penalties could be exacted through the UN and other international bodies.  Now that other nations are economically strong and America makes little of what the world needs, there is less incentive for allowing this violation–this most violent single act since World War II– to be forgiven and forgotten.  As our debts are called in, America may find that its chief exports–Hollywood, weapons and garbage–are no longer sufficient to balance its offenses.

    Even if nations are cowed into silence by the U.S. willingness to use its greatest remaining source of world power–its nuclear arsenal–terrorism against the U.S. would undoubtedly increase, but the rest of the world will turn a blind eye.      

To break the nuclear peace is potentially the most consequential single act possible.  For it is only the remarkable shared forbearance on the use of nuclear weapons, a forbearance unique in human history, that has allowed civilization to continue. No matter how I look at it, it’s hard to see this any other way: the day that America uses a nuclear weapon against Iran will be the darkest day in American history.  

[Promoted by Chris]

Secrets and lies have driven the history of the Bomb. We see this pattern repeated today, in an effort to make nuclear weapons seem no different from other explosives.  But with continuing signs that the Bush administration may be heading for war on Iran, with reports of U.S. officials considering using nuclear weapons in Iran, and with a large explosives test scheduled in Nevada in early June that many believe is intended to provide data for designing a new nuclear “bunker-buster” weapon, or in reference to an existing nuclear device, these lies become even more dangerous.

The most important secrets and lies concerned radiation, the distinguishing effect of the Bomb, beyond its sheer power.  The effects of radiation were denied, dismissed and minimized for decades.  Today they are not even mentioned.  It is especially important to revisit this history because, according to the the Physicians for Social Responsibility, a nuclear earth penetrating weapon “would actually create more fallout than a ground-burst or airburst weapon, due to the increased distribution of radioactive debris from detonation at a shallow depth in soil or rock.”  

Radiation and the history of denying it and confronting it is the subject of this essay.

From its very beginnings, the atomic bomb has been mysterious.  Even the physicists who lived together in Los Alamos to develop it did not know what they had invented.  They didn’t know how powerful the first Bomb would be–they had a betting pool on the yield, and many seriously underestimated and overestimated the result.   About half the scientists didn’t think the device would explode at all. Enrico Fermi was taking bets on whether it would burn off the Earth’s atmosphere.

But most of the mystery was deliberate.  The Bomb was developed in complete secrecy so as not to tip off the Nazis, who were believed to be working on their own Bomb project.  Even after Germany’s defeat, the Bomb was kept secret from the remaining enemy of Japan, but also from America’s war allies.  Then after the war, as the truth of what the Bomb’s effects became clear to scientists, the American military and Washington policymakers tried to keep some of those effects secret from U.S. citizens, even to the point of outright lies.

The Bomb produces three effects: blast, heat and radioactivity (commonly called radiation.)  The blast is immensely more powerful, and the heat is immensely more intense, than any other manmade device can produce.  Together they resulted, in the Bomb’s first test, in killing every living thing within a mile, including insects.  A single Bomb each virtually leveled the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Human beings were vaporized.  Nothing was left of some but their shadows burnt into concrete.  Others were seared to a small pile of ashes.  The remains of some were fused with metal doors and other objects.  

Those effects were immediately apparent.  But it took some time for the effects of radiation to be understood, and even longer to be acknowledged.

What We Know Now

The first humans exposed to an atomic bomb blast were those living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945.  These included some American children of parents who were Japanese or of Japanese ancestry or origin living in the U.S. who were sent to internment camps.  These children were sent to “safe” areas in Japan, such as Hiroshima.

Some of those who survived the initial blast and heat but were heavily exposed to radiation began to develop radiation poisoning symptoms after about twenty-four hours: severe nausea, fever and vomiting. In his 2005 book, “The Bomb: a Life”, scholar Gerard DeGroot writes: “The damage to cells was so widespread that recovery was impossible.  Death occurred after about a week, before doctors had any inkling of what was wrong.”

For others, symptoms didn’t begin for ten to fifteen days.  They suffered from bloody diarrhea, “a loss of appetite, general malaise, persistent fever and hair loss.”  The symptoms were delayed because gamma rays attack bone marrow where new blood cells are formed, and begin to produce defective cells.  

“In the worst cases of radiation poisoning, the gamma rays virtually destroy the entire bone marrow.. The cessation of red cell formation leads to progressive anemia.  Deficiency of platelet formation causes thin blood to hemorrhage into the skin and the retina of the eye, and sometimes into the intestines and kidneys.  The fall in the number of white cells lowers the victim’s resistance to infections. When infections occurred among Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims, it usually spread from the mouth and was accompanied by gangrene of the lips, tongue and throat.  Patients often emitted a terrible smell—they had effectively started to decay from the inside.”[pages 107-08]

Those who escape this severe radiation poisoning, who may be farther from the blast, will not know for years, and perhaps will never know, the extent of the damage caused by radiation.  “Ionizing radiation released in a nuclear explosion passes through the skin without causing external damage. It interacts immediately with tissues within the body, causing an irregular pattern of cell damage. ”   Those who survive the attack on high turnover tissues, such as those involved in blood formation, may suffer effects on tissues with slower turnover, in the brain, liver or thyroid gland.  In these, “…the effects of radiation damage may not become apparent for months or years, and can eventually manifest themselves as cancers.”

Then there is danger to the unborn.  Damaged or destroyed cells in a fetus may impair the development of organs and parts of the body.  “Radiation can also damage DNA in the reproductive system, causing mutation in future generations. While scientists once thought that a `safe’ level of exposure existed, current medical opinion holds that there is no threshold dose below which an effect is not produced.”[emphasis added]      

These effects were caused by the Bomb dropped on Hiroshima (approximately 20 kilotons) and Nagasaki (about 15 kilotons.)  The nuclear bunker-busters that could be used in Iran may have a yield up to 10 kilotons, but most believe the yield goes up to 340 kilotons, more than 22 times more powerful than the Bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

More than half of those who died from the effects of that Bomb within the first five years after it was dropped, and more than two-thirds of those who died within five years after Nagasaki, had survived the blast and fire.              

A Generation of Lies

Although radioactive fallout from the first Bomb test in 1945 contaminated cattle, the effects were kept secret, along with everything else about the test.  But even after the war, the secrecy continued.  In “Bombs in the Backyard”, a self-described balanced account of nuclear testing, A. Costandina Titus writes that “Even Congress has been denied access to information.”  

General Leslie Groves had ridden herd over the Manhattan Project that developed the Bomb, and he continued the policy of secrecy, which soon became a policy of denial.  When the first reports of radiation sickness in Hiroshima surfaced, he dismissed them as “Japanese propaganda.”  William Laurence, the only reporter permitted to follow the Bomb’s development, echoed the charge.

Later, when radioactive fallout entered the news, American officials  insisted that radiation exposure was painless to humans and test animals.  General Groves testified to Congress that radiation poisoning was “a very pleasant way to die.”

Few precautions were taken for service personnel involved in the first postwar Bomb tests in the South Pacific in 1946, nor for many subsequent tests there and in Nevada.  When military personnel and others exposed to test fallout either deliberately or accidentally later became ill, the government refused to consider that the nuclear explosions were related or responsible, and they maintained this heartless lie for decades.

  But one of the doctors involved in monitoring radiation and physical effects from those 1946 tests would be among the first to sound a public alarm.  David Bradley’s book,“No Place to Hide”, was published in 1948 and became an immediate best seller.  He later revised it to include further information as well as medical studies from later atomic and hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific. He reported for example that after 406 Pacific islanders were exposed to H-bomb fallout in 1954, nine children were born retarded, ten more with other abnormalities, and three were stillborn, including one reported to be “not recognizable as human.”  

But the first writing to bring some of the reality of radiation to Americans was John Hershey’s “Hiroshima”, published in the New Yorker in August 1946, and soon after as a best-selling book.  The stories of six Hiroshima survivors ended with riveting accounts of the ongoing effects of radiation.  This was the occasion for more stories (and more denials) about the effects of radioactivity.  

Still, Bomb testing went on, as necessary to the national defense, particularly when the Soviet Union unexpectedly exploded their first atomic Bomb in 1951. The U.S. returned to exploding atomic Bombs within its borders that same year, and radiation from a Nevada test was detected in the snow that fell on Rochester, New York.  By early 1953, there had been 20 tests in Nevada.  A seven year old boy 70 miles from Ground Zero in Nevada who died of leukemia “became possibly the first baby boom casualty of the atomic age.” (“Great Expectations” by Landon Y. Jones, p59.)

Them!

The undercurrent of news about radiation’s effects continued throughout the 1950s, as the U.S. and Soviet Union exploded hundreds of atomic bombs, including hydrogen bombs (which some say are to atom bombs what atom bombs are to conventional explosives.)  Testing and its effects became a campaign issue in the 1956 presidential election. Strontium 90, a radioactive isotope that lodges in bones and causes cancer, was discovered in cow’s milk across America.  Still, the official word was there was nothing to worry about.

The likelihood (since proven) that U.S. nuclear secrets were passed to the Russians, added fuel to what became McCarthyism in the 1950s.  Now dissent concerning the Bomb could be criminal treason as well as unpatriotic.  So much of the fear Americans had about nuclear radiation and the Bomb itself was driven underground, into the collective unconscious, and to the popular expression of that unconscious: the movies.

Monsters created or unleashed by nuclear explosions became the decade’s B-movie cliché.  But one of the first remained one of the best: “Them!” released in 1954.  The film is fascinating today partly because several relatively unknown actors became stars, mostly in the new medium of television: James Arness in “Gunsmoke,” James Whitmore in “The Law and Mr. Jones,” Leonard Nimoy (with a very small part) in “Star Trek,” and Fess Parker, a young actor Walt Disney saw in this movie and cast as Davy Crockett, the first TV hero to be a national phenomenon.

But the fact that these actors were unknowns in 1954 led credibility to the story, which was mostly a step by step investigation into a horrific phenomenon—radiation from atomic testing mutated a colony of ordinary ants into a race of giant ants, killing, breeding and preparing to swarm on Los Angeles and other cities, where they could begin their conquest of humanity.

The movie dealt with a number of themes related to the Cold War and the Bomb, but it was remarkably forthright about the source of the fears it symbolized. “If these monsters got started as a result of the first atomic bomb tests in 1945, what about all the others that have been exploded since then?” asks James Arness, the FBI man of action.  “I don’t know,” says the beautiful woman scientist.  “Nobody knows,” says her father, the elder scientist. “When man entered the atomic age, he opened the door into a new world.  What we eventually find in that new world nobody can predict.”

There would be many more Bomb-themed films (including the original Japanese version of Godzilla, which dealt more forthrightly with Bomb themes than the version Americans saw.  The original will be available on DVD for the first time in September.)  In his book, “Apocalypse Movies”, Kim Newman makes the valuable point that the B movie divisions of major studios tended to glorify the military in their Bomb-theme movies, while independent films were more questioning, and revealed more of the real horror.  They also tended to extend mutations to human beings, as in “The Incredible Shrinking Man.”  

  But as these eruptions from the unconscious became formulaic “bug-eyed monster” movies, a few filmmakers began to deal openly with the effects of nuclear war.  The most influential of the 1950s, and the one that dealt most directly with mass death by radioactive fallout as the ultimate outcome of nuclear war, was Stanley Kramer’s “On the Beach,” starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire.  Set in Australia after the U.S. and the Soviet Union have destroyed each other, the characters learn they are doomed from the fallout heading their way.   There are no explosions, no monsters, no gruesome deaths.  Yet Nobel Laureate and anti-Bomb activist Linus Pauling said, “It may be that some years from now can look back and say that `On the Beach’ is the movie that saved the world.”

Throughout the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, there were films and TV movies that tried to bring the horror into public consciousness.  “The War Game” by Peter Watkin, a docudrama about the effects of a nuclear war in one English village, was made for BBC-TV in 1967 but the BBC refused to show it until 1985.  It was seen in art houses in the U.S. and elsewhere as a feature in the 60s and 70s.  Also on British TV in the 1980s was “Threads,” which carried the effects of radiation past one generation.  While a survivor society struggles in a burnt-out and irradiated world, a 12 year old giving birth screams at the sight of her deformed stillborn baby.  It was a harrowing ending to a truly horrifying film.

There were two prominent TV films in the U.S in the 80s, which also showed survivors of nuclear war struggling valiantly and hopelessly.  The better known was “The Day After” directed by Nicholas Meyer, starring Jason Robards and Jobeth Williams.  Set in Lawrence, Kansas, it centers on a doctor (Robards) who deals with an impossible emergency over days and weeks as he and everyone else gradually succumbs to radiation poisoning.  The TV movie ends with the warning that as fatalistic as the story seemed, a full-scale nuclear war would have far worse effects.

“The Day After” had an effect on American consciousness in the 1980s similar to “On the Beach” in the late 1950s.  But another TV film brought the effects home. “Testament” by Lynne Littman, starring Jane Alexander, followed events in an isolated northern California town.  Without graphic images, it simply shows a family and a town living to the end of the world, as radiation poisons everyone and everything.

Radiation from hundreds of thermonuclear bombs is enough to destroy civilization.  But radiation from a single Bomb of relatively low yield killed hundreds of thousands in Japan.  It could happen in Iran and perhaps the surrounding region, with some dying in days, some in weeks, and some in years or even decades.  Yet no one is talking about this.  It is time to start.

Coming Attractions

All aspects of the Bomb have been a challenge to the human psyche as well as to human institutions.  Exploring the psychological aspects, expressed again in films like “Dr. Strangelove”, may help illuminate our current head-in-the-sand attitude about the prospect of unleashing nukes in Iran.  Exploring the institutional and political structures that have allowed humanity to live with the existence of the Bomb, may be instructive in exploring the possible geopolitical consequences of nuking Iran.  Those are subjects of forthcoming essays.

This is a story that is accelerating by the minute. A representative in the Illinois state legislature named Karen A. Yarbrough found an obscure rule of the US House of Representatives which says that a joint resolution of a state legislature can initiate federal impeachment proceedings. The U.S. House then has to take up the bill of impeachment.

She promptly put such a resolution forward in the Illinois legislature, charging George W. Bush with impeachable offenses. Now an impeachment resolution has been proposed in the California legislature, that includes not only Bush but Cheney.

When news of this hits Washington, lawyers are going to be scrambling to see if this interpretation of the House rule really works. Republicans in the House are going to be sweating and scrambling to find parliamentary ways of derailing this. And other legislatures are going to be debating articles of impeachment.

All kinds of questions arise.
If nine legislatures pass nine resolutions with different charges against Bush and/or Cheney, does the House have to consider them all? Is there anything like double jeopardy involved in impeachment? Or does that only apply to the Senate, if at all?

At the very least, the back and forth over the rule, and the legislatures vying to be the first to pass such a resolution, will put impeachment before the public in a way that not even a Neil Young song could. This is one of those unexpected and unforeseen possibilities that always seem to arise. In the past, a few good people in the right place at the right time, with the right procedures and rules, saved this Republic. So far it hasn’t looked like it would happen this time. But maybe…

Promoted by Steven D.

The prospect of a U.S. attack on Iran is unnerving. But the task of preventing that attack, and especially of preventing the use of nuclear weapons, is not helped by incorrect charges and information, such as yesterday’s panic in the blogosphere over a bomb test in Nevada long scheduled for early June. Unless everyone concerned is lying–which of course given this administration’s record, is entirely possible–it will be the biggest non-nuclear explosion ever seen. However big, and however related it may be to the effort to create a nuclear”bunker-buster” bomb, it is still non-nuclear. Calling it a “nuclear explosion” is not helpful. Because, well, it’s not. And the distinction matters.

Oppose it for any number of reasons, including its possible purpose, or the fact that it is being held on land long claimed by the Western Shoshones, a claim upheld by the UN. But please don’t call it nuclear.

Besides starting a dubious panic over an irradiated Yearly Kos,why it this important?  What does “nuclear” really mean in the context of Iran?  Please read on.
Not only does this feed the image of “wild speculation” that the Bushites would like to tar its opposition with, but in particular, the nature of so-called conventional weapons and of nuclear weapons should not be confused. That only plays into the strategy and perhaps even the beliefs of the Bushites.

As Senator Feinstein wrote last Sunday:

” There are some in this administration who have been pushing to make nuclear weapons more “usable.” They see nuclear weapons as an extension of conventional weapons. This is pure folly.”

Sy Hersh made the same point in his New Yorker piece. He quotes a former senior intelligence official:

He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout–we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”–remove the nuclear option–“they’re shouted down.”

Writing about the planning for an Iran attack, William Arkin in the Washington Post:

The new task force, sources have told me, mostly worries that if it were called upon to deliver “prompt” global strikes against certain targets in Iran under some emergency circumstances, the president might have to be told that the only option is a nuclear one.

The military understands the difference between nuclear and non-nuclear in terms of the physical effects and the geopolitical effects. The geopolitical effects have to do with the fact that no nation possessing a nuclear weapon has ever used it against an enemy, not in the 61 years since the U.S. bombed two cities in Japan, when it was the only nation in the world that had atomic weapons.

That nations have never used nuclear weapons has been perhaps the world’s only achievement in preventing civilization’s self-destruction.

That’s all I will say about the political difference in this post. I’ll also save the moral argument for another post. In this post I want to emphasize the physical difference of nuclear weapons. Even this won’t be complete in one go. So much of this is embedded in history. It will take some time to explain.

I am not a scientist. I am attempting to report as accurately as I can what has been written on this subject. First, on the nuclear attack on Iran. Then on a bit of early atomic history, to flesh out what this might mean.

Bunker Busting

The bomb in the US arsenal most often mentioned as the “bunker-buster” is the B61-11. There is some uncertainty about its yield. Some say it has a fixed yield of 10 kilotons. Others that it has a variable yield of up to 340 kilotons. Compared to other nuclear bombs the US possesses, this is relatively small. On the other hand, the yield of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were between 15 and 20 kilotons.

But the B61-11 can’t penetrate rock. To destroy a bunker 1,000 feet below the surface would require a larger bomb, on the order of 1.2 megatons, as in the proposed Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. According to the National Academy of Sciences, the blast from this weapon would create a crater 1,200 feet wide, and the explosion would send some 300,000 tons of radioactive debris 15 miles into the sky. They estimate the total casualities could exceed one million.

In a scenario developed by Physicians for Social Responsibility, an attack on a bunker in Iran with a 1.2 megaton weapon would kill over 3 million people, and expose some 35 million people in Iran, Pakistan, India and Afghanistan to significant radiation, including the 20,000 Americans deployed in the region for the war on terrorists.

As far as we know, a “bunker buster” weapon with this size yield does not yet exist. So the US is apparently considering using the smaller yield B61-11 even though it can’t penetrate to 1,000 feet. Supposing it is used, what would be its effects?

The Physicians for Social Responsibility point out the common misconception that sending an atom bomb into the ground—an Earth Penetrating Weapon (EPW) lessens the radioactive fallout. That’s not true. “A nuclear EPW would actually create more fallout than a ground-burst or airburst weapon, due to the increased distribution of radioactive debris from detonation at a shallow depth in soil or rock,” the report says.

The report quotes the congressional testimony of Ambassador Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration:

“I really must apologize for my lack of precision if we in the administration have suggested that it was possible to have a bomb that penetrated far enough to trap all fall-out. I don’t believe the laws of physics will ever let that be true. It is certainly not what we’re trying to do now. What we are trying is to get in the ground far enough so that the energy goes deep into the ground to hold at risk the deeply buried facilities. But it is very important for this committee to recognize what we on our side recognize… There is a nuclear weapon that is going to be hugely destructive over a large area. No sane person would use a weapon like that lightly… I do want to make it clear that any thought of …nuclear weapons that aren’t really destructive is just nuts.”

Probably the major physical difference of nuclear weapons, apart from sheer power–which vaporizes and incinerates people– is lethal radioactivity. The effects of radioactivity alone kills people within 60 seconds, then in days, and then in weeks and months. In those it doesn’t kill, it suppresses the immune system and can cause cancers and other diseases, and it may cause genetic abnormalities in the next generation.

Radioactive fallout from a bunker buster carrying even a one kiloton bomb is not contained beneath the ground. It rises in the soil to the surface and into the air. Winds disperse it farther.

Standardizing Catastrophe

Atomic bombs have been used directly on people only twice. There are no exact statistics, but the ones generally accepted (I take them from “The Bomb: A Life” by Gerard DeGroot) are these: Some 75,000 people died immediately in Hiroshima in the blast and fire. After five years, some 200,000 had died from the Bomb. (p.95). The Hiroshima bomb was approximately 15 kilotons.

In Nagasaki, some 40,000 people were killed in the blast, “70,000 by the end of the year and perhaps as many as 140,000 in total.” (p.101) The Nagasaki bomb was approximately 20 kilotons.

Please note that more than half of those who died in five years had survived the blast in Hiroshima. In Nagasaki, it was more than two-thirds. No one knows how many cancers and other illnesses resulted.

To repeat: some say the bunker busters now in the US arsenal have a yield of 10 kilotons, but most believe the yield goes up to 340 kilotons, more than 22 times the yield of the bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima, and reduced human beings to lumps of charcoal a half mile away. The first atom bomb ever exploded, in a New Mexico test, was about 17 kilotons. It killed every living creature for a mile radius, including insects.

In that summer of 1945, when Norman Cousins read the first detailed reports on the development of the atomic bomb in the same issue of the New York Times that told of that bomb’s first use in destroying Hiroshima, he wrote an essay that would be published within days in the magazine he edited, the Saturday Review of Literature. Though it may sound like a sedate and specialized publication now, it was widely read, with a circulation of over half a million. It became a well-known and much discussed essay, especially when Cousins expanded it into a small book, titled “Modern Man Is Obsolete”.

Cousins advanced several philosophical and political arguments in this essay, but he began with the most vital assertion: the dropping of the Bomb meant that humanity had entered an entirely new era. Total destruction of civilization and possibly of humankind, perhaps of most life on earth, was now possible. This fact had to brought into the consciousness of the species, so humanity could try to take control of its fate. “The power of the atomic bomb “must be dramatized and kept in the forefront of public opinion, ” he wrote. “The full dimension of the peril must be seen and recognized.”

But that task was always going to be difficult, as he learned just a year later. Cousins was one of the reporters who witnessed the first postwar atomic bomb test at Bikini island, in the summer of 1946. The bomb was dropped into the ocean, with numerous naval vessels in the vicinity to test the extent of its destructive power. But the observation ship was far away, and the bomb had missed the target so the devastation it caused was not immediately obvious. The first reports to the world gave the impression, Cousins wrote, “that the bomb had been `oversold’–that it was `merely’ another weapon.”

For at least the next 40 years, there were always people in government and the military who tried to minimize the Bomb, as just another weapon. At first they denied that radioactive fallout existed. Then they said it wasn’t very harmful. And then they said that death by radioactive poisoning was “pleasant.”

Then we were supposed to forget about the effects. Nuclear war was supposed to become normal. Cousins called it “the standardization of castastrophe.”

It soon became apparent, even in 1946, that the Bomb test Cousins witnessed had indeed been enormously destructive, and the second bomb exploded in this series surprised even the bomb-makers with its ferocious power, sending a half-mile wide column of water a mile into the sky in a single second, and spewing quantities of radiation farther than the military anticipated. These were the first tests at Bikini island, a place still too radioactive for human life today.

These first tests were called Operation Crossroads. I was born on the day of the first one. The atomic Bomb was a political and moral crossroads for humanity, because it was so powerful and so different. Today’s conventional bombs are themselves far more destructive than conventional weapons in the past. Depleted uranimum munitions and various chemical agents have long term effects. But even so, the Bomb is a difference in kind. It is the Bomb. We must never forget that. Never. And especially, not now.

Asked by a reporter on Tuesday if he would take the nuclear option off the table in what action he might take against Iran, President Bush said he would not. Within hours, the price of oil shot up to more than $72 a barrel, as a direct result of such threats.

Bush’s refusal to take nuclear attack “off the table” is received in different ways. But absolutely none of them has a positive outcome.

It is vital that we insist that the nuclear option be taken off the table, even as a tactic.  My arguments follow in this brief diary.  Please continue reading.      

Some believe Bush’s insistence on keeping the nuclear option is a sign of weakness—a signal that he has few options in dealing with Iran, having squandered his credibility, political capital and military flexibility on Iraq. Weakness in the face of a possible threat (more reasonable and more direct from North Korea, but in terms of the region, potentially from Iran) is not good.

Others insist it’s a bluff, an attempt to intimidate, or at least to keep Iran off-balance, not knowing what Bush might do. As a New York Times editorial pointed, this kind of threat is best made privately, as apparently the Clinton administration did (though it’s not known if the threat was ever nuclear.) But the uncertainty–the anxiety– now extends to America’s allies, and come to that, to Americans. Bush probably worries Iranians less than he worries the British and certainly the citizens of his own country. He’s got us scared to death.

Because at least some of us realize the enormity of the so-called nuclear option. Dropping atomic bombs–which is what these “bunker-busters” are–on a sovereign state with an elected leadership, that has no nuclear weapons and has committed no act of war, merely on little more than the suspicion that Iran intends someday to have nuclear weapons–would easily qualify as one of the most monstrous acts of at least the past several centuries.

Such an attack, which is likely to kill thousands and probably millions directly, and sicken even more millions in 3 or 4 countries (including Americans in Afghanistan) with serious radiation-caused illnesses, with other injuries, illnesses and genetic transgressions over years and generations, would be the first time in 60 years nuclear weapons would be used in war.  (I will back up these numbers in a future diary, but the information has been posted here before.)

The economic effects ($70 a barrel oil will look like Christmas), the likelihood of escalations and wider warfare, spreading death and pain and suffering across the world, make a list of possible horrors. But one thing is just about certain: the morning after such an attack, America will be a pariah, an outcast in the world. The name of America will be spoken with same inflection as Nazi Germany for generations. No American now alive, nor their children and grandchildren, will live down this disgrace.

That’s what we are justifiably afraid of. But even the act of keeping the nuclear option on the table makes nuclear warfare more likely. It has re-introduced nuclear weapons as thinkable. Which nation will threaten their use next? And which nation will feel compelled to use them, just to make their threat credible?

The use of nuclear weapons to attack Iran must be taken off the table. Or there will be no table.

There are a number of ongoing efforts to tell that Members of Congress and others that the nuclear option is unacceptable, and urge them to take action. One of these, a 14 day campaign called Off the Table, can be found here.

Steven D’s frontpage article analyzes the astounding Sy Hersh story which says that Bush is planning the extensive and sustained bombing of Iran, including nuclear bombs.

This diary adds a little emphasis, a bit more information, but its chief purpose is a plea: CONTACT CONGRESS NOW and get them to raise the alarm.  We can stop this, and if we do, there is nothing more important than any of us will have done in our lives.

It’s the weekend. There are so many other outrages clamoring for attention.  But there is nothing more important than stopping the use of nuclear weapons.  Nothing.  And we need to start right now.

   
In the comments to Steven D’s story, Jim S refers to a Popular Science article, Bombs Away.  It describes just what nuking a bunker entails, in four steps.  Here is the fourth:

The National Academy of Sciences estimates that the explosion will shoot some 300,000 tons of radioactive debris up to 15 miles into the air. The total number of casualties will vary but could exceed one million, depending on weather, wind velocity and the blast’s proximity to towns and cities.

And, by the way, if the bunker is deep enough, it can still survive.

A big red flag in Hersh’s story was this paragraph:

He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout–we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”–remove the nuclear option–“they’re shouted down.”

In other words, they don’t realize what they are doing.  The first use of nuclear weapons since World War II, against people who haven’t attacked a single American, would have catastrophic consequences even beyond the blast, the radiation, the fallout circling the world.

The Pandora’s box of nuclear war, kept shut all of those enormously dangerous years of the Cold War, will open.  Nukes will become usable weapons, and nothing but death, destruction and chaos could result.

Immediate consequences to the U.S.–we would be the outcast nation of the earth.  Oil prices would skyrocket, the economy could collapse.  Not just because of oil disruption in the Middle East, where the first nuke used may not be the last.  But because outraged nations like Venezeula may simply refuse to export oil to a nation of mass murderers.

The other very important paragraph of Hersh’s story is this one:

The House member said that no one in the meetings “is really objecting” to the talk of war. “The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?” (Iran is building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure from Congress” not to take military action, the House member added. “The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”

Congress has a Constitutional responsibility in matters of war.  The only way to stop the messianic Bush is with immediate, strong, sustained and massive Congressional pressure.  Members of Congress must go public with their alarm and demand to know what’s really going on.

The Democratic leadership must make this a priority.  What could possibly be more important than stopping nuclear holocaust?

So this is the most importance instance yet, in my view, for the blogosphere to demand that members of Congress pay attention, demand answers, and demand that the nuclear option is off the table.  Demand as well that no invasion take place without Congressional authorization.  

This is urgent.  The future of this country and of the world depends on Bush being stopped from launching a nuclear holocaust.      

Using a variation on a line from a science fiction movie (“Be Worried. Be Very Worried”) TIME Magazine’s cover story is about the reality of the Climate Crisis.

The story is currently on pay-per-view, but maybe the most interesting aspect of it is public : the Time/ABC/Stanford poll which is likely to lead ABC news broadcasts today (Monday.)

It starts out with this interesting little fact: almost 90% of Americans say global warming is probably happening, and nearly 70% say their government ought to be doing something about it. And when it gets down to politics, it demonstrates that the Democrats have a winning issue here, if they’d only wake up to it.      
 
Here are some basic findings of the poll (excerpted, paraphrased and partially quoted, but in blockquote for convenience:)

85% of Americans say global warming is probably happening.

88% believe global warming threatens the future, with 60% agreeing it threatens future generations a great deal.

49% say the issue of global warming is ‘extremely’ or ‘very important’ to them personally, up from 31% in 1998.

When asked about the causes of rise in the world’s temperatures, 49% feel it is a combination of the results of human activity and natural cycles.

68% believe their American government should do more to address global warming.

52% report that weather patterns in the county where they live have grown more unstable in the last three years.

70% thinks weather patterns globally have become more unstable in the last three years.

66% say Bush’s policies did little or nothing to help the environment this years.

75% want Bush and Congress, along with American businesses, to take action to help the environment.

62% believe much can be done to curb global warming.

61% would support government mandates on lowering power plant emissions.

The only finding contrary to mainstream science is that 68% believe scientists disagree on global heating, which essentially they don’t, except on details. But even swallowing this Bush mantra, more than two-thirds believe the government should do more to deal with the Climate Crisis, almost half say the issue is extremely important to them, and almost 90% believe that global heating is a real problem that will affect the future.

Finally, the Democrats have an issue they didn’t know they had. In a 1998 poll, the percentages of Democrat, Republican and Independent voters who were sure global heating is happening were not far apart—all between 30 and 40 percent. Now 46% of Democrats and 45% of Independents are certain, while 26% of Republicans are.

The TIME story follows a week of news prompted by an issue of Science devoted to global heating.  It prompted the following headline on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle last week:  

OCEANS RISING FAST

The story began:

Glaciers and ice sheets on opposite ends of the Earth are melting faster than previously thought and could cause sea levels around the world to rise as much as 13 to 20 feet by the end of the century, scientists are reporting today.

If the researchers’ estimates are correct, a rise in ocean waters projected by the new studies not only would drown many of the low-lying inhabited atolls and islands that are already endangered by rising ocean waters, it also would threaten coastal cities and harbors on every continent.

The study, which for the first time combines data from both polar regions, is significant enough.  But that headline is the kind seen in science fiction movies:that the camera fixes on, with dramatic music underneath.

But in a science fiction movie the next scene would have all the world leaders gathered to decide what to do about this crisis.

The TIME poll says it plainly: Americans now expect this to happen. They want their leaders to get serious about this.

The Climate Crisis is real, and it’s right now.  It’s a complex set of problems.  There are some we are facing and will face because of greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere in the past and present. We can recognize these manifestations as part of the same phenonmenon, and develop a strategy to deal with them.  Or we can be taken by surprise, and try to deal with them one by one, always behind, never getting the benefit of anticipating them or preparing for them.

There are other problems, like the rise in sea levels, that we may be able to limit or forestall if we limit  emissions of greenhouse gases seriously and severely.

This will take a national effort and a global effort.  It is the test of world civilization.  If we rise to the occasion, we perhaps can save life as we know it on this planet.  If we don’t, our civilization will not get another chance.  It’s that sci-fi simple.  

There are really two questions here: what good is protesting the war, and how can protest be effective?  My answer to the second question is likely to upset some people.  So I’ll start with the first.

My first protest march was in Washington in 1963, the famous Civil Rights march.  I’ve participated in many civil rights and peace marches since, along with vigils, sit-ins and a building occupation during Vietnam.   Saturday I marched again, as I have since before the Iraq war began.

There is no question: protesting does good.  An email I got on march day quoted George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” That’s what we were all doing–telling the world that we aren’t taken in by the Bush deceit.  We were symbolically linking hands and hearts with people around the world, and that’s not nothing.
I’ve also never understood the cliched dismissal, “preaching to the converted.”  Exactly how many preachers preach to anyone else?  There are multiple functions in strengthening emotional, communication and community ties, sharing information and learning.  

But how effective is protest?  In direct terms, protesting the Iraq war and other actions of the Bush administration have not been effective at all.  The war goes on.   One large protest a year in scattered cities has probably not done much to focus attention.  Perhaps the most effective protest was Cindy Sheehan’s when her encampment outside Bush’s ranch caught the Republicans flatfooted, with no good options.  Protest is theatre to some extent, and this show got attention.  

Protest tends to polarize at first, but eventually people take a look at what the protest was about.  Those who had private doubts about the war now had a means of expressing those doubts.  They saw a soldier’s mother as well as a protestor.    

 Anti-Iraq protest has been non-violent which is a prerequisite for being effective.  Only nonviolent protest is effective.  But nonviolence is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.  Protest hasn’t been effective and will not be, in my view, because it hasn’t exacted a cost.  And to exact a cost usually means it costs the protestors something as well.

Today’s marches are modeled after the early to mid 1970s marches–large gatherings with some festive spirit as well as earnest opposition to the war.  But earlier anti-Vietnam protests as well as Civil Rights protests were different.  Except for rogue incidents, they were also nonviolent, but they often involved civil disobedience.  People faced down police and tear gas, they sometimes tried to block access to some important place, or they did the equivalent of sit-down strikes, and often they expected to be arrested.  

Rogue elements use mass protests to commit politically pointed vandalism.  The vandalism gets attention.  The issues usually don’t.  Destruction is not protest.  It crosses that line into something else.

Another form of protest in the Vietnam era unrelated to marches was refusing to pay taxes, usually proportionate to the  military budget (for instance, people would pay half of their federal income tax but not the half that went to the Pentagon.) This was potentially the most potent form of protest, and it was the most dangerous to both protestors and the government.  Protestors faced prison and the collapse of their economic lives.  The government faced a number of real problems, including real challenges to its legitimacy, and therefore usually cracks down hard on this form of protest.

Were these protests really effective?  They were effective in getting attention, in focusing the nation on the conflict over the war.  They also made people angry, and that anger has lasted far longer than the war did.  These antiwar protests began in 1965, and the war went on well into the 1970s.

It could be argued that the polls show that Americans are just as angry about Iraq, and just as against continuing war there, as they were concerning Vietnam in the mid-1970s, after eight or ten years of protests.    

The Alan Shore Question

So maybe today’s symbolic protests are working just as well by not alienating people.  But lots of people were talking last week about the speech James Spader delivered on “Boston Legal.”  His character, lawyer Alan Shore, said that when Americans learned the rationale for invading Iraq was specious, he thought they would rise up but they didn’t.  And then when they learned of torture in their name, and then of illegal wiretapping, he expected them to finally rise up, but they didn’t.  

But why would he expect that?  Americans never “rise up.” It just doesn’t happen.  In terms of protest, the only kind that has demonstrated “rising up” has been by a very active minority, costing themselves something–jail time, injury, maybe screwing up their college year or their career.  Who exact some kind of price by their actions.   Then, eventually, there are large symbolic protests that show solidarity with those who paid the price.

 So I don’t think anyone should expect protest to be effective unless it involves massive, serious non-violent civil disobedience, and massive tax protest.

Even then it would take a long time.  Corporate media won’t cover it, not even as badly as they did in the 1960s.  

The Dionne Dilemma

People were also talking last week about the E.J. Dionne column that said the Democratic party doesn’t know how to work with its activist wing.  But there is very little in the way of an activist wing, in terms of protest: of organizing for active opposition expressed in real civil disobedience and tax protest.

Instead we get urged to show our “rage.”  There’s nothing more empty than rage.  

There is activism in the electoral realm certainly.  But those who live by electoral politics die by it as well.  Everything has to get solved in elections, or in acts within the government, like bills passed or defeated, filibusters and censure motions.  Of course, all of that is essential, but it is limited to that field of action.  Electoral defeat is defeat.  The next field of action is the next election.

Electoral activism, which is the chief activity of the blogs, properly has little if anything to do with protest.  I don’t believe in protest candidates.  I believe in trying to elect the best people, and in general elections, the better person for the office.  

The blogs play one definite role for protestors: as media of information.  The Dkos post of photos of police presence in my old haunts of Pittsburgh points the way to citizen journalism in covering protest.

But if people are not satisfied with electoral activism, and they wonder why people aren’t “rising up,” I believe one reason is because protest has become mostly symbolic.   And even the symbolism isn’t what it used to be.  Alan Shore spoke pointedly about silence on the campuses.  Campus protest always was a minority activity.  But for all the crap we Baby Boomers get from younger generations, and all the accusations that we only protested the war because we were being drafted (which certainly was a clear and present motivation), I see we’re still out there.  I saw more of us than of college students in the march where I was.  (To be fair, the local university was on spring break, though they’re officially back Monday.)        

The role of protest may be to stir people up, to assert an issue’s importance, to force its priority.  When it costs people something to protest on an issue, the public knows that at least some people think it’s pretty damn important.  And maybe they pay a little more attention.  All of that is independent of electoral politics, and no one can blame elected officials/ politicians for doing their jobs.  But once civil rights civil disobedience and protest reached a critical mass, JFK used it for political leverage to introduce civil rights legislation.   Eugene McCarthy and RFK used Vietnam protest as leverage in trying to end the Vietnam war as president.  

One reason that Cindy Sheehan remains an antiwar protest leader (though the blogs haven’t paid her as much attention)  is that she uses civil disobedience as part of the mix.  But we face other very clear and present dangers: the threats to constitutional government represented by illegal wiretapping and other acts; the need to deal with the Climate Crisis before it overwhelms us, and at the moment, the crucial necessity of making sure this president cannot attack Iran and plunge this country and the world into a sudden and devastating darkness.  

Can electoral activism handle it?  I wonder.  What do you think?  I’ll attach a poll, but I’m more interested in your thoughts.

Before I go off to my fourth annual march protesting the madness of the Iraqmire, I picked out some quotes from an article by Norman Solomon you might not have seen.  

The quotes are from Fearless Chickenhawk Pundits who, as Solomon observes, bear as much responsibility as our Fearless Chickenhawk Leaders for all of this.

These few quotes are so choice I thought they should be seen in isolation. Let them represent all the unholy bilgewater that passes for commentary, and all the moronic drone that is our media’s substitute for intelligent writing and talk.

Richard Cohen, columnist (still has his job, by the way) Washington Post, Feb. 6, 2003:

“The evidence he [Sec. of State Colin Powell] presented to the United Nations – some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail – had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them…Only a fool – or possibly a Frenchman – could conclude otherwise.”

—-MORE—
(crossposted at Daily Kos)

Jim Hoagland, Washington Post Feb. 2003:

“Colin Powell did more than present the world with a convincing and detailed X-ray of Iraq’s secret weapons and terrorism programs yesterday. He also exposed the enduring bad faith of several key members of the UN Security Council when it comes to Iraq and its ‘web of lies,’ in Powell’s phrase…To continue to say that the Bush administration has not made its case, you must now believe that Colin Powell lied in the most serious statement he will ever make, or was taken in by manufactured evidence. I don’t believe that. Today, neither should you.”

Christopher Hitchens, TV and print gasbag, Feb 13, 2003:

“Those who are calling for more time in this process should be aware that they are calling for more time for Saddam’s people to complete their humiliation and subversion of the inspectors.”

Chris Matthews, Hardgas, MSNBC April 2003:

“We’re all neo-cons now… “We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical, who’s not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who’s president. Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It’s simple.”

Alan Colmes, Hannity & Colmes, FAUX News, April 25, 2003:

“Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?”

To which I can only say: Good night, and Good Luck.