Last week I read with my students an essay by Lewis Thomas called “On Medicine and the Bomb,” which was first published in 1981. It has been a long time since I taught it — probably 20 years — and a lot has changed since Thomas wrote it, including the structure of global politics and most of the numbers he uses.
It is a strikingly simple essay. Thomas surveys the state of research and practice in several medical fields, including bone marrow transplants, burn therapy and the treatment of what he calls “overwhelming trauma.” And then he considers the good of all these resources against the prospect of a nuclear missile falling on New York City or Moscow. Which is to say no good at all.
This is a useful essay for young writers. It reminds them of the importance of dwelling wholly in each sentence they make. It teaches them to trust the reader. Thomas never hints where he is going. His prose is plain. He never exaggerates. He presents facts, one by one. But reading the essay is like watching a great magician perform a simple card trick. One card, two cards, three cards. But then he lays down the last card, and it’s the one you’ve been having nightmares about your entire life.
My entire life, I should say. At the end of our discussion, I asked my students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, whether they had grown up with any fear of nuclear holocaust. The answer was no. My students are so very old that I always forget how young they are. The youngest were born in 1988. If they came to some embryonic political awareness about the same age I did — I was 11 when Kennedy was killed — then it happened about 1999. After we finished with Lewis Thomas, I went home in the night feeling as though I were carrying a precious relic of memory inside me.
The answer my students gave — that utterly unhesitating “no” — brought back to mind a few of the landmarks in the coming of age of my own nuclear fears. They include Pat Frank’s “Alas, Babylon,” Peter Watkins’s “War Game,” John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” Jonathan Schell’s “The Fate of the Earth,” to which one might now add Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”
I remember — and it seems very strange to have to “remember” — the way these books and films seemed to stimulate and desolate me, the way they led me to a point from which I always had to find a way to turn back. The problem wasn’t trying to imagine the unimaginable. The problem was trying to realize that it had been carefully planned, as Thomas says, by “so many people with the outward appearance of steadiness and authority.”
And yet somehow that was also the point of balance, the small consolation. It was possible to have at least a little faith that even the amount of cold, rational will it would take to start a nuclear war would almost surely prevent it from starting. This masked the fundamental insanity of it all, and it was a reminder — in case you ever forgot it — that the only possible recourse we could have was to elect the most rational, and the most human, leaders we could. Everyone else was simply out of the loop.
In class, it occurred to me — and to my students — that Thomas’s piece could be rewritten about global warming. You could show how little we have done, and how far we have to go, to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, survey the technology that would allow us to hold back the rising oceans or cope with increasingly violent storms or provide us with alternative sources of energy. You could argue, as Thomas does in the case of the bomb, that “we need, in a hurry, some professionals who can tell us what has gone wrong in the minds of statesmen in this generation.”
Except, of course, that climate change is not just about statesmen, not about the men with secret access codes and red telephones on their desks. It is about all of us, in every choice we make every day. I had the false but unspeakable luxury to grow up in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was possible to believe in the very otherness of the nuclear insanity that threatened the world.
I look at my students and realize that they are in the first generation to grow up knowing that there is no otherness to the insanity that threatens us now. The insanity is what we call normal, and it is all our own. My students are better prepared for this than I am, because they have never been allowed to believe that the problem of climate change is merely a matter of politics at the highest level. They know it is their problem.
We got this far in our seminar that night, possessed by the quiet outrage that Thomas so perfectly expresses and a little puzzled by the different burdens our generations seem to have assumed. And what I said, of course, is that for all the familiarity with which we turn to the problem of global warming and the responsibilities it thrusts upon us, the nuclear arsenal Thomas was talking about still exists. The numbers and the global politics have changed, and the capacity to handle radiation sickness and burns and trauma has grown. But too many weapons still stand, waiting.
What it still comes down to, in Thomas’s words, is simply this. “Get a computer running somewhere in a cave, to estimate the likely number of the lucky dead.” This is a fear my students will have to grow into.