I grew up believing that human life would be extinguished by nuclear weapons. When I say “believing,” I don’t mean it was a scary possibility; I mean I truly thought it would happen.
My childhood took place with the presumption of mass destruction in the background. I can remember the television advertisements that the British government ran in the early 1980s, telling us what to do in the event of an atomic attack. A few leftists complained that Margaret Thatcher was using the Cold War for domestic political advantage, but I don’t recall anyone arguing that the scenario was intrinsically unlikely.
The mushroom cloud was a familiar icon in those days. We’d see it on book covers and cassettes and comics. Nuclear apocalypse was a staple of popular culture: “Judge Dredd,” “Star Trek,” “Planet of the Apes.”
Popular culture was following the intellectual lead of the previous generation. Albert Einstein, C.P. Snow and Carl Sagan, among others, had proclaimed nuclear extirpation to be likely.
Here’s a curious thing, though. As nuclear weapons proliferate, and their use becomes objectively more probable than in the past, our attention has wandered. We can, it seems, handle only one cataclysmic scenario at a time. Global warming has taken over as our catastrophe of choice. Nuclear war? Meh.
The change is especially striking in Europe which, unlike the United States, is at least partially within the reach of Iranian missiles. You would think that Europeans would be earnestly debating the details of the recent deal: Does the likelihood of the ayatollahs putting their nuclear ambitions aside outweigh the possibility of Iran, as Benjamin Netanyahu keeps putting it, legally acquiring a nuclear capacity?
I can see a case either way, to be honest. But hardly anyone on my side of the Atlantic is having the argument at all. In the U.S., the merits of the deal are being keenly debated; but Europe seems to have withdrawn from the conversation.
My 13-year-old daughter just finished Nevil Shute’s classic novel On the Beach, published in 1957 and set in a post-nuclear 1963. When I asked her what she got from the story, she talked about the ways the characters dealt with their impending deaths. But the whole fallout sickness thing? That was just something people used to worry about in a different epoch.
Last week saw the 70th anniversary of the world’s only nuclear strikes, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is clear from the coverage that those events have now been elevated to totemic status. They are no longer seen as episodes within a bloody but (from the West’s point of view) justified war. Rather, they have acquired an almost religious importance.
As nuclear weapons pass from memory into symbolism, we find the thought of anyone actually using them increasingly difficult. No one truly imagines that Vladimir Putin would risk a tactical strike on Lviv, any more than Richard Nixon would have nuked Saigon, or Margaret Thatcher Buenos Aires.
Still, can we say the same, with confidence, about Tehran’s mullahs? Or the various militias and terror cells they sponsor, not only in the Middle East, but as far afield as the Balkans and Central Asia?
Steven Pinker argues in The Better Angels of Our Nature that a taboo has grown up around nuclear weapons, illustrated by the quasi-biblical language that describes their putative use: End of Days, Armageddon, Apocalypse. But what about when we’re dealing with people from whom the Apocalypse is both certain and desirable?
A Millenarian mullah, convinced that he is bringing Judgment Day about, might not be subject to the same tactical considerations as a Soviet apparatchik. In Nevil Shute’s novel, it was Albania and Egypt, rather than the superpowers, that triggered the annihilation.
Don’t get me wrong: I hope Obama’s Iran deal works. He might well be privy to information which the rest of us can’t see. Perhaps there is cause to be hopeful.
But there is no reason whatever to be blasé. What worries me is that, rather than weighing the pros and cons of the Iran deal, we have simply stopped fretting about the use of nuclear weapons because more fashionable End of Days scenarios have taken their place: asteroid strikes, drug-resistant superbugs and, of course, climate change. This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but with a whimper.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
