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A Duck-and-Cover World?
Welcome to the Ukraine Moment
Face it, we're living in a world that, while anything but exceptional, is increasingly the exception to every rule. Only the other day, 93-year-old Noam Chomsky had something to say about that. Mind you, he's seen a bit of our world since, in 1939, he wrote his first article for his elementary school newspaper on the fall of the Spanish city of Barcelona amid a "grim cloud" of advancing fascism. His comment on our present situation: "We're approaching the most dangerous point in human history."
And don't try to deny it! What a mess! (And yes, I do think this moment is worth more than a few exclamation points!)
Admittedly, I'm not an active, thoughtful 93 year old. I'm a mere 77 and feel like I'm floundering in this mad world of ours. Still, like my generation, like anyone alive after August 6, 1945, when the city of Hiroshima was obliterated by a single American atomic bomb, I'm an end-of-the-worlder by nature. And that's true whether any of us like it or not, admit it or not.
In fact, I've lived with that reality or perhaps I mean the surreality of it all both consciously (on occasion) and unconsciously (the rest of the time) since my childhood. No one my age is likely to forget the duck-and-cover drills we all performed, diving under our school desks, hands over heads, to prepare for, in my case, the Soviet Union's attempted atomic destruction of New York City. We followed the advice, then, of the cartoon character Bert the Turtle in a brief film I remember seeing in our school cafeteria who "never got hurt because he knew just what we all must do: he ducked and covered."
As the sonorous male narrator of that film then put it:
"The atomic bomb flash could burn you worse than a terrible sunburn, especially where you're not covered. Now, you and I don't have shells to crawl into like Bert the Turtle, so we have to cover up in our own way" Duck and cover underneath a table or a desk or anything else close by" Always remember, the flash of an atomic bomb can come at any time, wherever you may be."
That was life in 1950s New York City. On my way to school, I would pass the S-signs for "safe places to go" (as that cartoon put it) or later the bright orange-yellow and black fallout-shelter signs (millions of which were produced and used nationally). And like so many other young people of that era, I let The Twilight Zone nuke me on TV, went to world-ending films in my high-school years, and read similar sci-fi.
I was only 18 and in my first semester of college when, on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy went on national TV, not the norm then, to address us all (though I heard his speech on the radio). He warned us of a
"secret, swift, and extraordinary buildup of Communist missiles in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere, in violation of Soviet assurances, and in defiance of American and hemispheric policy this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country."
Now, mind you, I didn't know then that the U.S. military already had a Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, to deliver more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world. That included at least 130 cities which would, if all went according to plan, cease to exist. Official estimates of casualties ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (which probably underestimated the effects of radiation). Nor did I know then that, in the 1950s, American officials, at the highest levels, focused endlessly on what was known as the "unthinkable," all the while preparing to plunge us into a planetary charnel house.
Military and civilian policymakers then found themselves writing obsessive sci-fi-style scenarios, not for public consumption but for one another, about a possible "global war of annihilation." In those new combat scenarios, they found themselves and their country on the horns of an unbearable dilemma. They could either forswear meaningful victory or strike first, taking on an uncivilized and treacherous role long reserved in our history books (if not in reality) for the enemy.
Still, as the Cuban Missile Crisis began, for Americans like me, everything for which we had long been preparing to duck-and-cover suddenly seemed to loom all too large and in a potentially unduckable fashion. And believe me, I was anything but unique when, as the U.S. Navy launched its blockade of the island of Cuba, I wondered whether the "unthinkable" was now in the cards.
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