nuclear nightmares – Wis[s]e Words

Cover of Nuclear Nightmares

Nuclear Nightmares: an Investigation into Possible Wars
Nigel Calder
168 pages including index
published in 1979

To distract myself from the current state of the covid-19 ravaged world, I read this cheery little treatise on the machinery for nuclear war. Many many years ago, sometime in the early eighties, I bought the Dutch edition for a guilder at a church fair. And boy was it worth it: I had nightmares for years. Not that you needed much to have nuclear nightmares in the early eighties; if you ever wonder why late Gen-Xers and early millennials are so cynical, it’s because we grew up with the idea that the nuclear holocaust could happen every minute just because some world leader was a bit too gung ho. Or some seemingly small mistake makes the Soviets think an American missile barage is on its way and this time there isn’t a junior officer brave enough to wait for confirmation before he launches a counterstrike…

But that is not the nightmare that Nigel Calder sketches in this book. His is a technocratic world, a world of rational men tending carefully balanced machinery designed to deliver megadeath on the enemy. Men who do not want to murder millions of people, but who will do so if and when it is asked of them. A world full of acronym littered dry, bureaucratic language that conceals the existentialist horror at the heart of it. An orderly world that calmly makes plan to destory or cripple the enemy’s ability to wage nuclear war, that worries about the vulnerability of MIRVED Minutemen III and whether they were safe enough and good enough to hit back at the Soviets after a first strike. Can we depend on the survivability of our systesm to give our leaders time enough to think about whether they want to strike back?

This sub-blog on atomic and nuclear weapons and the preparations for atomic holocaust on Longstreet. The author, John F. Ptak, has a good nose for finding now declassified US plans for and reports on nuclear warfare, then finding the most embarassing phrases in them. Ptak has a good sense of moral outrage, not tempered by the distance in time from when these documents were written, or by the technocratic language of these documents. It’s a goldmine for nuclear war “enthusiasts”, those who like me, grew up during the Cold War and have been obsessed with it since.

I was just old enough in the early eighties to understand how dangerous the world had become, how close we were to nuclear war, much closer than any other time during the Cold War except perhaps the Cuban Missile Crisis. A belligerent senile fool in charge of one nuclear power, a succession of senile, paranoid walking corpses in charge of the other and while the first was busy pumping up the threat of the second, they in turn were terrified that all this talk about a winnable nuclear war was genuine. It was a time when a NATO exercise was interpreted by the USSR as the preparations for a first strike and it was pure luck that they didn’t panic. Even ten year old school girls knew enough to be scared shitless and write to the USSR president about why he wanted to blow up the world.

No wonder I had regular nightmares. Some people can watch films like Threads or The Day After as escapism; I can’t even read the Wikipedia pages about them… There are only two things I’m really, genuinely scared shitless about and one of them is nuclear war. So I can’t really read this blog, but don’t let that stop you.

Articles with the Tag nuclear nightmares

Nuclear Nightmares — Nigel Calder

A blog that will give me nightmares