Looking Straight at the Bomb

By Roger Rosenblatt

By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space. --Democritus

Heedless of Zeus, Prometheus gave the secret of fire to mortals, and was punished by being bound to a cliff in the wastes of Scythia. There an eagle fed on his liver, which, once consumed, grew back, only to be devoured again. A harsh response, considering that Prometheus only sought to give man a little mastery over nature. But Zeus was notorious for overreacting. Who knows what punishment he would have devised for the modern enlightened nations that, in the interest of mastery over nature, have handed out nuclear power with such deliberate generosity these past few years? Or was Prometheus only Step One? Maybe Zeus has been withholding the final punishment all this while, waiting patiently for the day when that gift of fire, housed in the nuclear seed, might bloom like golden poppies above the cities of the world.

Such visions have blinked back to the public mind in recent weeks, since Israel buried Iraq's nuclear reactor and defended its action on the ground of "Never again." It referred to the Holocaust, which is Israel's frame of reference generally--the ghost of annihilation that shapes much of its foreign policy, temperament and attitude toward its neighbors. Two weeks ago, the Holocaust's survivors convened in Israel to keep the memory awake, in some cases to search for friends and relatives from whom they were torn away in places like Belsen, Auschwitz and the other stains on history's map. That was some 40 years ago, but to look at the survivors now, wandering and embracing in the open space of the memorial Yad vaShem, the Holocaust could have happened yesterday. Thus inadvertently the point is made: Israel has already witnessed the end of the world. When it attacks an incubative Holocaust, it does so because it has seen a future that has worked too well. Now its clarity forces clarity on everyone else: Shall we envision a future of pre-emptive wars or of nuclear wars?

The question is hardly startling. Israel may represent the only people who have actually viewed the Apocalypse, but on Aug. 6, 1945, the rest of the world saw something that might pass for the Apocalypse until the right thing comes along. Hiroshima occurred, after all. No one dreamed Harry Truman's Promethean explanation: "It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war." At that time the bomb was thought of solely as a weapon. Some hold the dark theory that the U.S. used it against Japan in order to intimidate the Soviets, but clearly its central mission was to win and end a war. After that, however, the bomb became an instrument of policy rather than deed--a great cocked fist that would show off its power in tests from time to time, but otherwise remain immobile and silent, looming ever larger in the world's imagination. In a sense, the world's imagination became its accomplice. For 36 years the mere thought of the bomb has shaped and troubled international diplomacy, the character of nations and everybody's nightmares.

What the world is dealing with, then, is not a problem of machines, but of the mind. And the mind has had a very odd relationship with the bomb from the moment it conceived it. Seeing what man had wrought, the people involved in the Manhattan Project almost immediately began to use language in order to deny what they saw, calling the Hiroshima bomb Little Boy, and sending a coded message to report the first successful test at Alamogordo that read, "Babies satisfactorily born"--as if to urge innocence on evil. After Hiroshima, the historical fact could not be expunged; still one could avoid looking at the weapon directly. Only its inventors never seemed to shrink from their creation. The day of the Alamogordo explosion, J. Robert Oppenheimer stared out at the New Mexico flats and recalled a Hindu text:

If the radiance of a thousand suns Were to burst at once into the sky, That would be like the splendor Of the Mighty One.

I am become Death The shatterer of worlds.

This refusal to face the bomb squarely might help explain why the attempts to control nuclear proliferation have been so ineffectual. On the one hand, the world has seen more than 30 major good-faith efforts at containing proliferation--a dogged series of pacts, treaties and conferences, extending from three months after Hiroshima through the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1957, the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1968, and the International Fuel Cycle Evaluation, the barely pronounceable INFCE, in 1977, that undertook the apparently futile task of dispersing the power without the danger. There now exist, theoretically, treaties keeping the peace on every continent, including Antarctica, and on the moon and the ocean floor. Yet these measures have failed either because the pacts have not been signed by all the nuclear nations, or because their terms were weak or limited, or because scattered throughout the nonproliferation efforts are test explosions of atomic and hydrogen bombs that give the chronology the sound of an anvil chorus.

At present, six nations definitely have the bomb, two probably have it, and by the end of the 1980s the prize will be within reach of some 40 other countries, not including roving mad-dog nations like the Red Brigades, which are panting to steal one readymade. For these gifts and expectations they may thank the current nuclear nations, some of which have been dispensing nuclear equipment as if there were no tomorrow.

Essentially, the efforts at nonproliferation have failed simply because the desire to see them succeed has not been as strong as national self-interest, or a sense of national sovereignty. But there seems to be a less prosaic impulse at work here as well. France, to its shame, has simply played Lady Bountiful with a profit motive. But Canada, which has refrained from building a bomb of its own, nevertheless gave India the wherewithal to do so. West Germany, the site of roaring antinuclear demonstrations, has been busy sending the power to Brazil. The U.S. finds customers for its technology practically everywhere. It is as if the world, for whatever reasons, has felt subconsciously obliged to give equal opportunity to life and death, to make room for the best and worst of chain reactions. At last: Blake's "fearful symmetry" brought up to date. This is carelessness, but not literally. Rather it seems the action of people who while formally taking the bomb with deadly seriousness have, in fact, averted their gaze from it, convincing themselves that as a mere diplomatic instrument the thing is not quite real.

As a result the world seems to have created not only a series of political diversions but an entire culture of diversion as well, one based on the chimerical principle that if you refuse to look squarely at a monster, it will likewise refuse to look at you. From one viewpoint it may be argued that the world has done nothing but look squarely at monsters since 1945: the literature of violence and madness; the blaring assertions of Pop art and rock music; the brutal candor, and the explicitness of it all (explicit murder, explicit sex); the facing of the monster of oneself and even of science, as the world embraces the source of its discomfiture. Yet it also may be argued that these confrontations are insincere, that in their false decisiveness they represent an avoidance of the real terrors of the world. If so, it is hard to tell whether what is being avoided is the bomb specifically or some analogous destructive mass like modern bureaucracies or city life. Either way, the air is full of a fear too large to grasp.

Thus people turn to particularities that they can deal with, and at the same time accelerate their lives in order to get everything in before the fall. The fall itself is rarely contemplated, but it may be faced indirectly through science fiction, which has come into its own since 1945 and now provides the only moral literature of our times. In science fiction all unthinkables may be met and realized: the zombies that cannot be killed, the vacant metropolis, the visitors from other planets who warn us against our own destruction and, worst of all, the idea of living while not living, of losing one's humanity to an invasion of the body snatchers.

These images of holocausts past and future are terrible things, so in terms of normal revulsion it makes sense not to face them head on. There are those who never wish to hear about the Holocaust again, contending that it was too horrible even for language. Then there is the matter of avoiding guilt--Why suffer it?--the guilt of not being among the victims in Hiroshima, and the guilt of identifying with the victors as well, the knowledge that the destroyers of the world never came from any planet but our own. Better to hold all that destructiveness at one remove. The U.S. keeps a plane in the air with the capacity to trigger the missile system if ground controls are destroyed. It calls the aircraft Looking Glass. And the power of the nation's weaponry is disguised in initials (MX) or mythology (Titan), where even the Titan Prometheus must be having second thoughts.

Meanwhile, on another front entirely, national leaders have sprung up who seem incapable of second thoughts. Rather than divert their gaze from the silent toy within their reach, they muse and wonder what the thing might actually accomplish. These bombs have lain shelved for quite a while now, and a test is only a test, after all. Nor is such madness confined to the certifiable. Even the meekest citizen knows moments wherein he dreams of Armageddon. Whence otherwise could come such colliding terms as "population explosion" and "baby boom" but the amazing bicameral mind? It is a two-pole world, all right. It spins between those who refuse to see the bomb and those who can almost taste it. When suddenly a noise erupts in Baghdad, both heads turn, one envisaging a burst of glory and the other trying to decide where one crawls from here.

There seem to be but three ways to go. One is the road already set upon: to mend and strengthen existing international political and technological agreements. It would seem sensible to call for an immediate review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, had not the last review taken place less than a year ago, accomplishing essentially nothing. No final declaration was agreed upon. Still, yet another review of the NPT might work if it included an agreement among some of the nations that supply nuclear materials to cool their avarice and adopt binding commercial practices. If those that did not sign the NPT were excluded from a tight nuclear market, they might enroll after all. Of course, they might become dangerously isolated too. Nonetheless, a review is certainly worth a try.

Then there is a second way to proceed, which only involves the two giants who started it all, who now bestride a world whose lusts for power they both have teased and prodded for three long decades. The Soviet Union has been more cautious than the U.S. in handing out nuclear equipment, but has caused plenty of mischief by whipping up those who seek that equipment. Both the Soviets and Americans have continued to sell arms promiscuously; not one week after Iraq, the U.S. decided to bestow $2 billion worth of arms on Pakistan, from which the U.S. cut off supplies in 1979 because of its nuclear stirrings. (There is a fascinating theory abroad that a superabundance of conventional weapons quashes an appetite for nuclear weapons; it is not based in human nature.) Both the Soviets and Americans have continued to pile up their own arsenals, each trying to get ahead of the other permanently, which is impossible, and thus enticing newcomer nations to build up their armaments as well. And who are these nations? They are the unstable, the zealous, the military-controlled, the lunatic-led. They do not share the U.S.-Soviet diplomatic history. If the Americans and the Soviets were to cry "Enough!" then at least we might be spared the sight of Colonel Gaddafi grinning before a bouquet of microphones, about to make an important announcement on behalf of Libya. SALT II faltered; let us have SALT III.

Yet even if these things were to happen, how long would it be before individual fears overtook the collective, and still another agreement were broken? To avoid that, there would have to be a third way taken simultaneously, one that addressed the mind that brought us to the place we are. It is time to see the bomb as a real weapon again, and not an amorphous threat or a political lever. It is time to look straight at its drab snout and recall quite clearly what it once did and still can do. A new book of drawings by Hiroshima's survivors is called Unforgettable Fire. It is time to remember the fire. Whatever considerable use the bomb once served as a diplomatic instrument is passing very quickly now, at a speed directly proportional to the hope of stemming proliferation. But there is still the hope of stemming madness by invoking reality.

Of course, this all sounds extravagantly naive. Unfortunately, most proposed solutions to this problem sound naive, the sophisticated answers being either to take up arms or to give up entirely. Yet as of now no one is even talking; neither the Soviets, Americans, Israelis nor Arabs. Generals glower, missiles are rolled into place, and the silence in the world is like the bomb's own--thus proving that people have achieved no mastery over nature that their stupidity has not neutralized. The mind made the bomb, the mind denied it, and the mind can stop it cold. If that should sound impossible, consider how impossible nuclear fission must have seemed at the start, or how impossible the Holocaust, or how impossible to the children of Hiroshima that Aug. 6, 1945, would turn out to be anything but another summer day.

--By Roger Rosenblatt

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