[BRIEF NOTE] On Apocalypses Averted
May. 9th, 2004 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldMonday evening, I was having dinner with James B. when the topic of the conversation switched to NATO-Warsaw Pact nuclear wars.
There is a sensible explanation for this. Honestly. The topic of the 2300AD role-playing game setting came up, and I mentioned Canada in the context of that setting. 2300AD is the extension of the Twilight 2000 wargame setting three centuries into the future, following a relatively mild NATO-Warsaw Pact nuclear war which devastated the Northern Hemisphere but largely bypassed a neutral France. Canada suffered some 30 nuclear explosions of note, including a two-megaton warhead directed against port facilities in Toronto.
James mentioned that barring some miracle (perhaps conscription into the military) he'd be dead, along with most of the inhabitants of downtown Toronto. Not that this wouldn't have surprised him before die Wende, given the sheer number of nuclear warheads extant in the world at that time--forty thousand nuclear warheads available to the United States and the Soviet Union, with another couple of thousand available to Britain, France, Israel, and China--and the deployment of vast conventional NATO and Warsaw Pact military forces along the inter-German frontier. Escaping death for anyone unfortunate enough to live in the Northern Hemisphere in the context of these bombs and their consequences--irradiation of vast territories directly through the blasts and indirectly through fallout, the certainty of a nasty nuclear winter indeed, the destruction of the fundamentals of civilization over tens of millions of square kilometers--would be a feat. Perhaps it would be one that no one in their right mind would have wanted to accomplish.
When I was six, I remember being faintly disturbed by the failure of the Reykjavik arms control talks, as depicted on television; I'd absorbed something of the atmosphere of the time from the television, I guess. By the time I was 12 or 13, I'd discovered the film WarGames and found myself interested by the atmosphere of imminent doom, later expanded for me by Gwynne Dyer's War and Carl Sagan's writings on nuclear winter. I explored the idea of nuclear war and its consequences in my alternate history Tripartite Alliance Earth, which included a nasty nuclear world war. And then, of course, there are the writings I've done for the 2300AD RPG setting.
I never really understood, though, at a visceral level. The idea of the wholesale obliteration of the world, and hopefully of myself with it, has never seemed like any kind of realistic (or even unrealistic) possibility. That's odd, I suppose, considering that Prince Edward Island would likely have received at least two nuclear bombs in a general nuclear war: One would directed at Charlottetown, after all a provincial capital despite its size, another at CFB Summerside, perhaps another at the Charlottetown airport. The question of whether I'd have survived the bombs is open, I suppose, depending on the kilotonnage (not megatonnage) of the Soviet warheads in question and the debatable accuracy of their delivery systems. The idea that, if I had somehow managed to survive the bombs and the fallout and the winter and the other sequelae, the world that I take for granted--one of cheap food, ready medical care, rapid transportation, mass media, the Internet and consumer electronics, social liberalism--would literally be ash is somehow terrifying at a level I'd never been aware of before
I remember reading a book in 1990 or so, published in 1989 and written by one Kevin Featherstone, that purported to examine the implications of the establishment of a single European market for the then-EC. Tacked onto the back, after a chapter examining the prospects for the accession of Cyprus and Malta (reasonably good) and Turkey (not good at all), was one chapter examining the question of the EC's relationship with its eastern communist neighbours. It took note of the fact that since Gorbachev's accession in 1985, relations between the EC and Comecon were steadily improving, culminating in a recent mutual recognition. Events in Hungary and Poland--the transition away from single-party Communist rule towards greater political and economic pluralism--were noted by Featherstone, who suggested that perhaps, sometime in the 1990s, these countries might serve as interfaces between western European capitalism and eastern European Communism.
This past weekend, I was in Toronto at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
talktooloose's place. Unfortunately, while I was in New York State, I missed the celebrations of the accession of eight formerly Communist states into the European Union, and the extension of Europe's frontiers a thousand kilometres or so to the east, to make the Baltic Sea an internal EU sea, bringing up Europe's frontiers to touch the Narva River and the Carpathian mountains of western Ukraine. A pity--I'm sure that the celebratory scenes would have made excellent television had I been watching.
James and I had both read General Sir John Hackett's The Third World War. This book, and its sequel, put forward a relatively rosy scenario for the end of a massive NATO-Warsaw Pact global war, with massive tank battles in West Germany and surrounding countries and a gruesome trade of cities (the Soviets nuke Manchester, the Americans and British nuke Minsk) which ends by utterly destabilizing the Soviet Union and laying the foundations for the extension of the European Community to the Russian frontier. Only several hundred billion dollars worth of damage and a couple million civilian dead would be needed to produce a united Europe? Preposterous.
Things have turned out miraculously well for the world. It's truly miraculous the way in which the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union, dissolved without significant bloodshed or human suffering. The game of nuclear chicken played by Ronald Reagan against a paranoid and unhealthy Soviet gerontocracy didn't lead to the annhilation of Western civilization; miraculously, it simply preceded the decision of the Soviet regime to first let the satellites withdraw from the game, and then to allow for the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet state. Certainly there's been suffering, and a marked deterioration of living standards--the situation in Ukraine comes particularly to mind. But then, in the event of a 1980s Third World War, the 48 million people now living in Ukraine would surely have been sharply reduced in numbers; that population figure might well have represented the total number of survivors in the Soviet Union, or even in the whole of the Warsaw Pact.
We are lucky bastards indeed.
In the 1980s, we Westerners, living in our civilization's two major ideological blocs, had the power to exterminate ourselves entirely and take many of our unfortunate neighbours with us. Human life would have survived in the Northern Hemsiphere, no matter how sadly reduced. I doubt, though, that the traditions and cultures that we all relate to would have survived. It would all be ash.
We live, now, in an age of hyperterrorism, as events in New York City and Bali and Madrid have demonstrated to us. These terrorists can certainly kill large numbers of people and inspire fear. What they can't do, though, is destroy civilization. Even if, as Norman Geras suggests, some Islamic terrorist uses weapons of mass destruction against a major Western city and precipitates a positively Huntingtonian civilizational war, Western civilization would--"merely"--be distorted. Once the war was over, it would still be around. It survived Nazi Germany, after all; it's made of pretty sturdy stuff.
We Westerners--whatever that term means, if it means anything at all--can be hurt. We're the only ones, though, who can destroy ourselves. We should try to remember that.
UPDATE (5:46 PM) : Crossposted to Bonoboland.
There is a sensible explanation for this. Honestly. The topic of the 2300AD role-playing game setting came up, and I mentioned Canada in the context of that setting. 2300AD is the extension of the Twilight 2000 wargame setting three centuries into the future, following a relatively mild NATO-Warsaw Pact nuclear war which devastated the Northern Hemisphere but largely bypassed a neutral France. Canada suffered some 30 nuclear explosions of note, including a two-megaton warhead directed against port facilities in Toronto.
James mentioned that barring some miracle (perhaps conscription into the military) he'd be dead, along with most of the inhabitants of downtown Toronto. Not that this wouldn't have surprised him before die Wende, given the sheer number of nuclear warheads extant in the world at that time--forty thousand nuclear warheads available to the United States and the Soviet Union, with another couple of thousand available to Britain, France, Israel, and China--and the deployment of vast conventional NATO and Warsaw Pact military forces along the inter-German frontier. Escaping death for anyone unfortunate enough to live in the Northern Hemisphere in the context of these bombs and their consequences--irradiation of vast territories directly through the blasts and indirectly through fallout, the certainty of a nasty nuclear winter indeed, the destruction of the fundamentals of civilization over tens of millions of square kilometers--would be a feat. Perhaps it would be one that no one in their right mind would have wanted to accomplish.
When I was six, I remember being faintly disturbed by the failure of the Reykjavik arms control talks, as depicted on television; I'd absorbed something of the atmosphere of the time from the television, I guess. By the time I was 12 or 13, I'd discovered the film WarGames and found myself interested by the atmosphere of imminent doom, later expanded for me by Gwynne Dyer's War and Carl Sagan's writings on nuclear winter. I explored the idea of nuclear war and its consequences in my alternate history Tripartite Alliance Earth, which included a nasty nuclear world war. And then, of course, there are the writings I've done for the 2300AD RPG setting.
I never really understood, though, at a visceral level. The idea of the wholesale obliteration of the world, and hopefully of myself with it, has never seemed like any kind of realistic (or even unrealistic) possibility. That's odd, I suppose, considering that Prince Edward Island would likely have received at least two nuclear bombs in a general nuclear war: One would directed at Charlottetown, after all a provincial capital despite its size, another at CFB Summerside, perhaps another at the Charlottetown airport. The question of whether I'd have survived the bombs is open, I suppose, depending on the kilotonnage (not megatonnage) of the Soviet warheads in question and the debatable accuracy of their delivery systems. The idea that, if I had somehow managed to survive the bombs and the fallout and the winter and the other sequelae, the world that I take for granted--one of cheap food, ready medical care, rapid transportation, mass media, the Internet and consumer electronics, social liberalism--would literally be ash is somehow terrifying at a level I'd never been aware of before
I remember reading a book in 1990 or so, published in 1989 and written by one Kevin Featherstone, that purported to examine the implications of the establishment of a single European market for the then-EC. Tacked onto the back, after a chapter examining the prospects for the accession of Cyprus and Malta (reasonably good) and Turkey (not good at all), was one chapter examining the question of the EC's relationship with its eastern communist neighbours. It took note of the fact that since Gorbachev's accession in 1985, relations between the EC and Comecon were steadily improving, culminating in a recent mutual recognition. Events in Hungary and Poland--the transition away from single-party Communist rule towards greater political and economic pluralism--were noted by Featherstone, who suggested that perhaps, sometime in the 1990s, these countries might serve as interfaces between western European capitalism and eastern European Communism.
This past weekend, I was in Toronto at
talktooloose's place. Unfortunately, while I was in New York State, I missed the celebrations of the accession of eight formerly Communist states into the European Union, and the extension of Europe's frontiers a thousand kilometres or so to the east, to make the Baltic Sea an internal EU sea, bringing up Europe's frontiers to touch the Narva River and the Carpathian mountains of western Ukraine. A pity--I'm sure that the celebratory scenes would have made excellent television had I been watching.James and I had both read General Sir John Hackett's The Third World War. This book, and its sequel, put forward a relatively rosy scenario for the end of a massive NATO-Warsaw Pact global war, with massive tank battles in West Germany and surrounding countries and a gruesome trade of cities (the Soviets nuke Manchester, the Americans and British nuke Minsk) which ends by utterly destabilizing the Soviet Union and laying the foundations for the extension of the European Community to the Russian frontier. Only several hundred billion dollars worth of damage and a couple million civilian dead would be needed to produce a united Europe? Preposterous.
Things have turned out miraculously well for the world. It's truly miraculous the way in which the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union, dissolved without significant bloodshed or human suffering. The game of nuclear chicken played by Ronald Reagan against a paranoid and unhealthy Soviet gerontocracy didn't lead to the annhilation of Western civilization; miraculously, it simply preceded the decision of the Soviet regime to first let the satellites withdraw from the game, and then to allow for the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet state. Certainly there's been suffering, and a marked deterioration of living standards--the situation in Ukraine comes particularly to mind. But then, in the event of a 1980s Third World War, the 48 million people now living in Ukraine would surely have been sharply reduced in numbers; that population figure might well have represented the total number of survivors in the Soviet Union, or even in the whole of the Warsaw Pact.
We are lucky bastards indeed.
In the 1980s, we Westerners, living in our civilization's two major ideological blocs, had the power to exterminate ourselves entirely and take many of our unfortunate neighbours with us. Human life would have survived in the Northern Hemsiphere, no matter how sadly reduced. I doubt, though, that the traditions and cultures that we all relate to would have survived. It would all be ash.
We live, now, in an age of hyperterrorism, as events in New York City and Bali and Madrid have demonstrated to us. These terrorists can certainly kill large numbers of people and inspire fear. What they can't do, though, is destroy civilization. Even if, as Norman Geras suggests, some Islamic terrorist uses weapons of mass destruction against a major Western city and precipitates a positively Huntingtonian civilizational war, Western civilization would--"merely"--be distorted. Once the war was over, it would still be around. It survived Nazi Germany, after all; it's made of pretty sturdy stuff.
We Westerners--whatever that term means, if it means anything at all--can be hurt. We're the only ones, though, who can destroy ourselves. We should try to remember that.
UPDATE (5:46 PM) : Crossposted to Bonoboland.
