"A Republic of Insects and Grass"
Still, don't for a second think that terror isn't on the American agenda. You really want terror? Let me tell you about terror. And I'm not talking about 14 dead (San Bernardino) or 130 dead (Paris). What about up to 140,000 dead? (The toll from Hiroshima.) What about 285 million dead? (The official estimate of the dead, had the U.S. military's Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, of 1960 been carried out via more than 3,200 nuclear weapons delivered to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities -- and that didn't include casualty figures from whatever the Soviet Union might have been able to launch in response.)
Or what about -- to move from past slaughters and projected slaughters to future ones -- a billion dead? Despite the recent surprise visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to his Pakistani counterpart, that remains a perfectly "reasonable" possibility, were a nuclear war ever to develop in South Asia. India and Pakistan, after all, face each other across a heavily armed and fortified 1,800 mile border, having fought three major wars since 1947. Small armed incidents are commonplace. Imagine that -- to take just one possible scenario -- extreme elements in the Pakistani military (or other extremist elements) got their hands on some part of that country's ever-expanding nuclear arsenal, now believed to be at about 130 weapons, and loosed one or more of them on India, starting a nuclear exchange over issues that no one else on Earth gives a damn about.
Imagine that, in the course of the war that followed, each side released "only" 50 Hiroshima-sized weapons on the other's cities and industrial areas ("0.4% of the world's more than 25,000 warheads"). One study suggests that, along with the 20 million or so inhabitants of South Asia who would die in such an exchange, this "modest" local nuclear conflagration would send enough smoke and particulates into the stratosphere to cause a planetary "nuclear winter" lasting perhaps a decade. The ensuing failure of agricultural systems globally could, according to experts, lead a billion or more people to starve to death. (And once you're talking about a crisis of that magnitude, one humanity has never experienced, god knows what other systems might fail at the same time.)
I hope by now you're feeling a little shudder of fear or at least anxiety. Perhaps not, though, since we're remarkably well protected from thinking about the deeper terrors of our planet. And mind you, if you're talking terror, that South Asian war is penny ante compared to the sort of event that would be associated with the thousands of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the United States and Russia. Since the Cold War ended, they have more or less been hidden in plain sight. Call it an irony of sorts, then, that nuclear weapons have loomed large on the American landscape in these years, just not the ones that could truly harm us. Instead, Americans have largely focused in the usual semi-hysterical fashion on a nuclear weapon -- the Iranian bomb -- that never existed, while Russian and American arsenals undoubtedly capable of destroying more than one Earth-sized planet have remained in place, heavily funded and largely unnoted.
When you look at what might be posssible under unknown future conditions, there is no reason to stop with mere millions or even a billion dead human beings. A major nuclear exchange, it is believed, could lead to the shredding of the planetary environment and a literal liquidation of humanity: the wiping out, that is, of ourselves and the turning of this country into, in the phrase of Jonathan Schell, "a republic of insects and grass." As he explained so famously in his international bestseller of 1982, The Fate of the Earth, this became a genuine possibility in the post-Hiroshima decades and it remains so today, though given scant attention in a world in which tensions between the U.S. and Russia have been on the rise.
Apocalypses, Fast or Slow-Mo
It's not that we don't live on an increasingly terrifying planet. We do. It's that terror fears, at least in our American world, are regularly displaced onto relatively minor threats.
If you want to be scared, consider this unlikelihood: in the course of just a few centuries, humanity has stumbled upon two uniquely different ways of unleashing energy -- the burning of fossil fuels and the splitting of the atom -- that have made the sort of apocalypse that was once the property of the gods into a human possession. The splitting of the atom and its application to war was, of course, a conscious scientific discovery. Its apocalyptic possibilities were grasped almost immediately by some of its own creators, including physicist Robert Oppenheimer who played a key role in the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb during World War II. As he witnessed its awesome power in its initial test in the New Mexican desert, this line from the Bhagavad Gita came to his mind: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
The destroyer of worlds indeed -- or at least, potentially, of the one world that matters to humanity.
The other method of wrecking the planet was developed without the intent to destroy: the discovery that coal, oil, and later natural gas could motor economies. It was not known until the final decades of the last century that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of such forms of energy could heat the planet in startling ways and undermine the very processes that promoted life as we had always experienced it. It's worth adding, however, that the executives of the giant oil companies knew a great deal about the dangers their products posed to Earth way before most of the rest of us did, suppressed that information for a surprisingly long time, and then invested prodigious sums in promoting the public denial of those very dangers. (In the process, they left the Republican Party wrapped in a straightjacket of climate change denial unique on the planet.) Someday, this will undoubtedly be seen as one of the great crimes of history, unless of course there are no historians left to write about it.
In other words, if enough fossil fuels continue to be burned in the many decades to come, another kind of potential extinction event can be imagined, a slow-motion apocalypse of extreme weather -- melting, burning, flooding, sea-level rise, storming, and who knows what else.
And if humanity has already managed to discover two such paths of utter destruction, what else, at present unimagined, might someday come into focus?
In this context, think of the Islamic State as the minor leagues of terror, though at the moment you wouldn't know it. If we are all now the children of the holocaust -- of, that is, our own possible extinction -- and if this is the inheritance we are to leave to our own children and grandchildren, perhaps it's understandable that it feels better to fear the Islamic State. Its evil is so specific, so "other," so utterly alien and strangely distant. It's almost comforting to focus on its depredations, ignoring, of course, the grotesquely large hand our country had in its creation and in the more general spread of terror movements across the Greater Middle East.
It's so much more comfortable to fear extreme Islamist movements than to take in two apocalyptic terrors that are clearly part of our own patrimony -- and, to make matters harder, one of which is likely to unfold over a time period that's hard to grasp, and the other under as yet difficult to imagine political circumstances.
It's clear that neither of these true terrors of our planet and our age has to happen (or at least, in the case of climate change, come to full fruition). To ensure that, however, we and our children and grandchildren would have to decide that the fate of our Earth was indeed at stake and act accordingly. We would have to change the world.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
