In our time
I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.
(J Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita upon the successful testing, in New Mexico in July 1945, of the first atom bomb)
Now we are all sons of bitches.
(Test director Richard Bainbridge)
It’s already clear that, down the future annals of history, the 20th century will be remembered for a handful of events: the collapse of the European empires, the Holocaust and the two World Wars, the discovery of antibiotics, and the beginning of spaceflight, including the first moon landing. But trumping even these milestones of good and evil, one fears, the 20th century will be remembered primarily for the splitting of the atom, and what followed directly from that: the pell-mell development of nuclear weapons, the means by which, for the first time in human history, mankind acquired the ability to destroy all life on Earth.
The Cold War that followed — and in particular, the collapse of the republican nature of the United States, rapidly transformed in the Truman-Eisenhower years into an increasingly fearsome National Security State — led by the ’60s to an epidemic of ‘Ban the Bomb’ protests whose natural locus was Britain, still struggling to come to terms with its post-imperial diminution to the rank of a second-tier world power; but the latter were of course of no use. The genie was out of the bottle, and humankind, with all its newly acquired awareness of its capacity for evil, would just have to live with its new role as custodian of ‘Death, the destroyer of worlds.’
To the surprise of many, the ‘nuclear umbrella,’ the philosophy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), held. Between them, the US and the Soviet Union played nuclear chicken more than once (during the Cuban Missile crisis, and, perhaps even more memorably, one night in the early ’50s, when a newly deployed American radar system picked up a lone missile coming at the US from over the eastern horizon — a ‘missile’ that was identified just in time to be the full moon rising); and by the early ’70s there was talk of détente.
The collapse of the Soviet Union some 20 years later put an end to that nervy equipoise. But the subsequent rush of the two Bush presidents, father and son, to extend America’s now theoretically unimpeded-able military reach into the lands of Islam (the goal was both oil and the choking off of sufficient oil from reaching China to prevent that ancient and now fast-modernizing nation from becoming a new global superpower) led to ‘9/11’ and vast new tensions between militant Islam and the now imperial West.
In particular, the aggressive foreign policy of the younger Bush radically destabilized both the oil-rich Middle East and nuclear-armed Pakistan, the chief Islamic state power, where secular and fundamentalist forces were (and are) struggling for dominance against the background of a failing economy and a weak central government.
And if one were to look for the likely ground of a nuclear ‘exchange’ in the foreseeable future, one would naturally look to those theatres. Iran is currently hurrying to acquire nuclear weapons, an enterprise which the small but nuclear-armed (and militantly governed) Israel swears it will not permit to reach fruition. And the Taliban are threatening to overrun both Afghanistan (where, it is feared, it is likely again to play host to al Qaeda while the latter plans its next attacks on the US) and, even more dangerously, Pakistan, whose nuclear arsenal it might then be in a position to deploy against either Israel or Pakistan’s traditional enemy, India.
The geopolitical fallout from any of the above would be severe for the world in general — severe to catastrophic, in fact — yet any such ‘exchange,’ for all its widespread destruction and unimaginable toll in lives, would still likely fall far short of the doomsday scenario wherein the world’s major cities are destroyed, water sources are polluted, and the ensuing nuclear winter threatens the existence of all life on the planet. The latter prospect would almost certainly require the old paradigm of a nuclear war between leading nuclear states; and that in turn suggests the real danger may yet be some decades off.
This, of course, doesn’t mean it’s inconceivable. War has always been the result of human error (usually on the part of the eventual losers), and there are surely more games of nuclear chicken to be endured (and hopefully sidestepped) down the road.
The first flashpoint is likely to be a resurgent Russia, still the world’s second-largest proprietor of nuclear weapons, newly re-financed by the recent staggering rise in the price of oil and natural gas: Russia has huge deposits of both, which it already exports (or withholds) as part of a newly aggressive foreign policy aimed at reclaiming, or at least neutering, the peripheral breakaway nations that till recently were part of the Soviet Union.
The little, premonitory war between Georgia and South Ossetia a year ago — which proved the impotence of even so war-inclined a US regime as Bush-Cheney’s to come to the rescue of a small ally on the border of Russia — may well serve as prologue to that tale.
Currently, Russia appears to have a much more resource-important nation, Ukraine, in its sights. And the real tensions will arise if and when (and where) America makes the fateful decision to draw a line in the sand vis-à-vis Russia’s revisionist designs.
The imperatives of realpolitik mean, however, that America may not. In the past 60 years the US has often been only too ready to attack what its leaders considered ‘barefoot nations’ (Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq); but half-a-century of confronting the Soviet Union may well have instilled in it a proper caution when it comes to starting a war it knows in advance it cannot win.
But we have left for last the greatest threat to the West’s hegemony, China: a nuclear power currently arming itself as fast as its exploding economy will allow it to; China, whose meteoric rise to becoming a world power has been occurring almost in lockstep with the economic and military over-extension of late-imperial America; China, which now holds the fate of the US dollar in the palm of its hand; and China which, many analysts predict, will surpass the US as the global superpower by the middle of this century.
There’s a reckoning coming between the US and China, one that cannot be avoided. History offers no examples, as far as this columnist knows, of global domination being ceded without a fight. And yet the likelihood of a nuclear Armageddon occurring at that point remains indecipherable; for it will depend entirely on the judgment of the leadership of the two nations at that point. Optimists hold that mankind will always stop short of annihilating itself; pessimists say the only reason it has not done that so far is that it has lacked the means to.
A vertiginous aspect of all-out war between major powers in our time is how fast it will be over. The world may well go to sleep one night expecting to wake to business as usual next morning — only to discover that, ‘while it slept,’ there occurred the full-fledged nuclear war that has already doomed it to extinction. When, between the rising sun of the East and the setting sun of the West, crunch time comes (and it will come), it will be up to a fearfully small leadership on opposite sides of the world to decide which one blinks — or whether neither blinks — in time.