This is an excerpt from With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War, by Robert Scheer, New York: Random House, Inc., 1982, London: Martin Secker and Warburg, Ltd., 1983, excerpted in In a Dark Time (Images for Survival), edited by Robert Jay Lifton and Nicholas Humphrey, Harvard University Press, 1984 (pages 75-76).
An account from a "U.S. atom test observer, Christmas Island:"
"The birds were the things we could see all the time. They were superb specimens of life...really quite exquisite...phenomenal creatures. Albatrosses will fly for days, skimming a few inches above the surface of the water. These birds have tremendously long wings and tails, and beaks that are as if fashioned for another purpose. You don't see what these birds are about from their design, they are just beautiful creatures. Watching them is a wonder. That is what I didn't expect...
We were standing around waiting for this bomb to go off, which we had been told was a very small one, so no one was particularly upset. Even though I'd never seen one, I figured, well, these guys know what is going to happen. They know what the dangers are and we've been adequately briefed and we all have our radiation meters on... No worry....
Anyway, we were standing around, and the countdown comes in over the radio. And we knew roughly where the designated ground zero would be and about how high.
And suddenly I could see all these birds, I could see the birds that I'd been watching for days before. They were now suddenly visible through the opaque visor of my helmet. And they were smoking. Their feathers were on fire. And they were doing cartwheels. And the light persisted for some time. It was instantaneously bright, but wasn't instantaneous, because it stayed and it changed its composition slightly. Several seconds, it seemed like, long enough for me to see birds crash into the water. They were sizzling, smoking. They weren't vaporized, it's just that they were absorbing such intense radiation that they were being consumed by the heat. Their feathers were on fire. They were blinded. And so far there was no shock, none of the blast damage we talk about when we discuss the effects of nuclear weapons. Instead there were just these smoking, twisting, hideously contorted birds crashing into things. And then I could see vapor rising from the inner lagoon as the surface of the water was heated by this intense flash."
I also have possibly misremembered images in my mind of blackened but hopping sparrows in Hiroshima (depicted in Barefoot Gen / Hadashi no Gen?) and one or more blinded eagles after a Soviet (?) nuclear test that survived the explosions but would probably die anyway 'off camera.' It seems like the albatrosses were dying or injured dangerously close to the observers. Were they actually killed by the nuclear flash and/or radiation in the immediate explosion, or only burned and blinded, presumably dying from their injuries or radiation poisoning later? Maybe it's like an oil spill. There might be predatory fish, but there is also the image of river fish swimming into the ruins of Hiroshima around August 1945 and immediately turning over dead [dramatization?][an autobiographical work, but there could be artistic license]. I've wondered how radiation in the water could kill that fast. I think other Pacific nuclear tests threw up bits of radioactive sea life, but this one evidently exploded in the air. One or more albatross species, though probably different from those in the Pacific Ocean, forage in the Atlantic off of North Carolina.
How far do Biden, Putin, and Xi intend to go? In a Dark Time, a book of excerpts relating to nuclear war, shows how much people both here and in Europe feared and expected nuclear war in the early 80's, under Reagan, and now it is very much out of mind, but the weapons still exist and are being updated and improved, though there have been the recent scandals with US personnel and Britain's hardware. Are nuclear weapons just for theatre, so the government and the military-industrial complex can scare the American public and other countries, though with extreme expense and danger, or have people foolishly looked away for three decades? The book quotes Mao saying to Anna Louise Strong in August 1960 that "The atomic bomb is a paper tiger which the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't." The Cuban government is supposed to have been ready, like the US, to go nuclear in late October 1962. NATO might have wanted to send a message to the world in the 80's, and today, that nuclear war can be limited and "winnable," and the "West" is preparing for a direct war with Russia and/or China today and is already fighting a proxy war with Russia and preparing the ground around China. There are also other disputes that could become nuclear wars, in theory without US input. Governments often bring up the threat of their nuclear weapons, recently in Israel and Russia. We might find out the degree of terribleness in the 21st century. I would like to have a bomb shelter, though it might not be of much use in an actual nuclear war. There are or were at least two historic public fallout shelters with radiation signs in downtown Durham, and an abandoned communication facility hardened for nuclear war in Chatham County. How sure are we about what would happen to the environment in a nuclear war?
I thought of this passage with the anniversary of Castle Bravo, the largest US nuclear test, March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll (in the Republic of the Marshall Islands), unexpectedly large and resulting in one human death outright and illnesses later on, but this incident seems to be from Kritimati (Christmas Island) in the Republic of Kiribati, where the UK and US conducted nuclear tests (November 8, 1957 to September 23, 1958 and April 25 to July 11, 1962 respectively). Perhaps this incident is from one of the US tests in the spring or summer of 1962 [See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiritimati and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo ]. There is an apparently unrelated Australian Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean [ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Island ].
[Patrick Blackett, president of the Royal Society (UK?) in 1956 (?) claimed that "Once a nation bases its security on an absolute weapon, such as the atom bomb, it becomes psychologically necessary to believe in an absolute enemy." (page 27)
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Speaking to the war in Palestine – Philip Payne, County Inspector of Schools, wrote to the The Times of London, May 22, 1981: "Even if the worst does not happen, at least until our present children are grown up, we must still take into account the effect of living one's most formative years under the "protection" of the nuclear deterrent"...
"What may our children learn from this? They learn that a community may call itself civilised and yet possess weapons which would once have been regarded as barbarous beyond belief. The middle-aged and old can perhaps preserve their innate sense of what it means to be civilised, having been brought up at a time when an attack on a field ambulance or an unarmed village provoked feelings of indignation. How will it be for our children, brought up to regard the infliction of widespread devastation on civilians as something we, in certain circumstances, may be forced to do? Surely, in deploying such weapons, we erode the moral base of what we are out to defend.
On several occasions I have sat in on discussions lessons when school children have brought up the question of the Bomb. Many have come to accept that they may not live out their lives in full; they have also learned (from their elders) that nothing can be done. Some, quite literally, smile about it. Perhaps they confuse..." (page 87)
This life is not a joke
You must take it seriously,
Seriously enough to find yourself
Up against a wall, maybe, with your wrists bound.
(page 120)
Quotes from Erich Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1974), regarding life without life; Martin EP Seligman's Helplessness (1975), regarding US POWs held during the Vietnam War; US poet Robert Lowell on an Ahab? Churchill's July 6, 1944 secret memorandum on the possible use of chemical weapons against Germany; the 1950 Report of the US Hoover Commission, "Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply" (and in 2024); Stanley Loomis on the September Massacres in Paris in 1792 (accurate?), Orwell in the Spanish Civil War, Galway Kinnell, Rose Shapiro, Franz Jaggerstatter (an Austrian farmer executed for refusing to serve in the German military in 1943), Joel Kovel, Ernest Crosby, Thomas Merton, the 1939 "Ballad for Americans" by Robeson and Robinson, Alia Johnson "Why We Should Drop the Bombs" (1981 poem), historical examples of war, descriptions of nuclear explosions, literature, poets, [futurism, Revelation, William Blake, Milton, Shakespeare, Omar Bradley,] etc.
TE Lawrence once wrote to someone that "Perhaps in determinism complete lies the perfect peace I have so longed for. Free-will, I've tried, and rejected it."
Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, in 1914: "Even if we are destroyed, England will at least lose India."
NSC-68 in 1950: "The only deterrent we can present"..."is evidence that we can make any of the critical points which we cannot hold the occasion for a global war of annihilation."
A US soldier who killed a soldier of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, with a knife, speaking in 1974 (?): "I felt sorry. I don't know why I felt sorry. John Wayne never felt sorry."
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