Apocalypse Never

1. Apocalypse Soon?

Chapter 1 Apocalypse Soon? A nuclear war broke out in the northwest suburbs of Chicago when I was a child there at the end of the 1960s. The area was growing rapidly: every year thousands of acres of venerable Illinois farmland, some tilled by young Lincoln’s contemporaries a century and a half earlier, simply disappeared. In its stead arose sprawling new housing developments. The new houses were soon filled with new children, who needed new schools. And the new schools needed new names. Many of these schools received banal and predictable designations , such as Olive School on Olive Street, Forest View High School on the edge of a forest preserve, Ivy Hill School in the massive new Ivy Hill subdivision. Two, however, acquired names that, in the politically supercharged atmosphere of the day, were like lightning in a bottle. Most of the children’s parents were politically quite conservative— electing a rising young Republican star named Donald Rumsfeld to Congress in the mid-1960s, and later dispatching paleoconservative Phil Crane to represent them throughout the last third of the twentieth century . Consequently, during the sixties, one faction on the school board chose to engage in a bit of political mischief at a moment when slogans such as “I ain’t got no beef with no Viet Cong,” “Ban the Bomb,” and “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” were stirring up the nation. So they decided to launch a nuclear strike. How? By arranging to name a high school after James B. Conant, the Harvard president whom President Roosevelt had asked to chair a new National Defense Research Committee to oversee all atomic research, the same committee that later advised President Truman to drop the new atomic bomb on a “vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ homes.”1 1 CH001.qxd 2/4/10 10:48 AM Page 1 But there was another school board faction that included, apparently , some of the few people in the area who did not make a habit of voting for Don Rumsfeld or Phil Crane every two years. These members , it seems, took umbrage at naming a high school after a man who had played a key role in creating what Conant’s own granddaughter, writer Jennet Conant, later called “the most diabolical weapon in the history of mankind.”2 So they decided to launch a nuclear counterstrike. How? By arranging to name another area high school, just a dozen or so old alfalfa fields away, after the first great antinuclear writer: John Hersey, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorker correspondent who reported on life, death, and misery in Hiroshima just weeks after America’s incineration of the city on August 6, 1945. (New York University later named his reporting there as the top work of journalism in the twentieth century.)3 Some years later, I myself graduated from this very high school. James B. Conant High School in Hoffman Estates and John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights are still in business today, possibly competing against each other in girls’ gymnastics or boys’ wrestling or girls’ cross-country at this very moment. Whether the larger nuclear truth of James B. Conant or John Hersey will ultimately prevail beyond Chicago’s northwest suburbs is a question that has not yet been resolved. It is hardly hyperbole, however, to suggest that the fate of the human race may depend upon the answer. Apocalypse Never reveals why we must abolish nuclear weapons, how we can, and what the world will look like after we do. I insist that if humanity hangs on to nuclear weapons indefinitely, some kind of nuclear catastrophe will ensue almost certainly. I illuminate the towering hypocrisy behind the nuclear double standard (according to which our nation possesses thousands of nuclear weapons but insists that others cannot aspire even to one) and contend that such a standard is not only morally indefensible, but also politically unsustainable. I confront humanity’s fundamental long-term choice, bleak but inescapable: zero nuclear weapon states and zero nuclear weapons, or dozens of nuclear weapon states, thousands more nuclear weapons, and nuclear cataclysm only a matter of time.4 Apocalypse Never also demonstrates that the United States and other nuclear weapon states absolutely committed themselves, both politically A p o c a l y p s e N e v e r 2 CH001.qxd 2/4/10 10:48 AM Page 2 [3.17...