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Chapter One

THE NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE

The territory of the nuclear nightmare is real to us because we inhabit it; indeed, we create it. Yet we seem to prefer to deal with this kind of area in largely unconscious ways, either because we think that the territory has no coherent shape, or because we would rather not recognize where we are. This image is about our individual and collective relationship with our world, from the perspective afforded by sober and credible accounts of the level of death and destruction that an all-out use of nuclear weapons would cause. It deals with our responses, and therefore with the inner, human and personal side of this relationship. The image comprises three major areas.

I see a huge juggernaut¹ lumbering inexorably across a field towards a blank wall. In the field are many workers, who mostly try to ignore or avoid the juggernaut, apart from a few who try, frantically and ineffectively, to stop it. There are also some people driving the juggernaut forward, with obvious conflict for control of its course. In the wall, there is an entrance surrounded by people, one of whom is standing on a soapbox and speaking with the aid of a loudhailer.

On the other side of the wall is a vast, grey space, which is illuminated by the flash of repeated nuclear explosions. In the distance, a few half-crazed survivors trek off in search of food, water and shelter. The sun, which is shining brightly on the field, is totally obscured in this grey space.

The dense clouds that obscure the sun do thin out to a light mist in their upper levels, where many things become visible, such as an enormous and intricate working model of planet earth. It is also possible to see the field from these upper levels, and people up there are flying around (with or without the assistance of planes and helicopters), searching for an alternative plan for the juggernaut and the field.

The three spaces are the field, the desolated landscape behind the wall, and the sky. For me, these spaces correspond to our three main options in the face of the threat of nuclear holocaust, which I would characterize respectively as denial, despair and hope. I assume that most people are like myself in wanting our world to survive, and that, given sufficient inner and outer freedom, our choices will reflect this, whether in the mode of denial, despair or hope.

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Denial

We start in the field, with the workers who are hoping that the juggernaut will not run over them, and that it will not crash into the wall. These people have varying degrees of knowledge about the effects of nuclear weapons, ranging from ignorance of their existence to a generalized knowledge that they are very destructive. I identify in myself a strong link with these workers, in a wish to turn away from the juggernaut and the wall. I wish, ineffectively, that the whole situation will simply go away so that I can get on with business as usual.

The people driving the juggernaut alternate between fighting .each other and seeing that a little control is somehow exercised on the speed of the juggernaut, though its overall direction remains essentially unchanged. The people in the field want to believe that those on the juggernaut are really in control, and that there is no need for any action by those not on the juggernaut. Nevertheless, this threatening situation occasions much anxiety for everyone in the field, including those on the juggernaut. I can identify in myself the sense of dependence upon traditional forms of power, and a lack of confidence in untried alternatives, particularly those that render me vulnerable to the ill-will and aggression of others. I can also identify in myself a desire for power, either for its own sake, or for the achievement of some worthwhile end, such as nuclear disarmament.

There are a large number of titles written over the entrance in the wall, such as The Fate of the Earth, Taking Australia Off the Map, Unforgettable Fire, War Game, Threads and The Day After. These books and films introduce us to the grey space, as imaginative projections of the consequences of nuclear war. There are countless other possible points of entry, less detailed but more easily encountered, such as news items, casual conversation, and even poignantly happy experiences. The pervasive anxiety of the field arises from the partially repressed knowledge of many horrors, of which nuclear holocaust is but one. Here, the wall symbolizes the defence mechanisms that protect us from having to know horror; the juggernaut threatens to breach this protective boundary and land us inescapably and literally in the nuclear holocaust.

The people around the entrance are there because they recognize the importance of learning to deal more adequately with our actual situation. I identify myself with them as a member of the peace movement, and as one who is actively inviting others to take on the burden of a conscious knowledge of our nightmarish situation. I also recognize the ambiguous quality of this invitation, when the questions are clear, but good and realistic answers are not.

The speaker on the podium by the entrance is exhorting the people in the field to do at least two things at once." Hurry, hurry, stop that juggernaut before it is too late! You doubt that it is necessary? One look at the nuclear nightmare right behind this wall will show you

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just how necessary it is. This nightmare is absolutely horrible, and nothing is more important than knowing just how horrible it is, so that you can see the urgency of stopping the juggernaut. There will be no future if this nightmare becomes reality."

The workers are confused about how to go about stopping the juggernaut, and they don't like the sound of what lies on the other side of the wall, so some keep on at their work with increased concentration, as do some of those on the juggernaut. Others begin signalling their concern and distress, while the speaker shouts louder. I identify with this anxious sense that we are expending a lot of energy, and going nowhere.

At this stage, it seems to me that we have a situation typical of a repressed fear; while there may seem to be an infinity of possibilities for change, the energy that is going into our repression and denial of what we refuse to face is paradoxically binding us ever more tightly to its reality. Along with this fixation of our imaginations, I find a dramatically lowered self-image, in that we think of ourselves as people who cannot cope, because we can see no way in which we might hope to remove this particular threat. This leaves us with nothing but business as usual, built on a foundation of despair. At this point, the grey space behind the wall has done its work, even if we never consciously go there. It is on this basis that I identify a clear need to go through the entrance in the wall, and consciously assess our resources for avoiding despair.

Despair

Some people, with whom I do not identify closely, choose to go through this entrance from a morbid interest in destruction, or from a mad kind of practicality that seeks post-holocaust survival through bomb shelters and supplies. I prefer to identify with efforts to steer our world to a safer and better future. Whatever our motivation, I can identify in myself a degree of reluctance to learn what the precise shape of the threat might be.

On entry, we come into a vast, hazy grey space, in which future possibilities are carefully and credibly presented to our horrified attention, radiating outward from the bomb craters and desolated landscapes that used to be our cities. So riveting is the effect of this information, that it is very hard to get a clear picture of the more distant vistas in this grey space. The impression is of a limitless, grey horizon that constantly recedes in front of us, with the light getting steadily darker as we move away from the brightness of the explosions. There is here a quite dreadful pall of extinction, not merely of the life of individual people, animals and plants, but of the life-sustaining systems, social and biological, of planet earth. There is here the looming threat of the extinction of civilization, of all human life, of all higher animal species, and even, though much less certainly,

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of life on earth. There is here the threat of complete meaninglessness, and of the despair to which this lack of meaning compels us.

There are various primary effects caused by the detonation of each nuclear warhead.² These effects include the initial nuclear radiation, the electromagnetic pulse, the thermal pulse, the blast wave, and the local fallout. There are the cataclysmic fires, a firestorm or a "wall of fire" conflagration, depending on wind and fuel conditions. There is the difference between an air burst, and a ground burst, both immensely destructive. There is blindness for exposed eyes. Then there are the longer-term effects, particularly the radio-active poisoning of the ground and water, rendering habitation hazardous. With a number of nuclear explosions, there is the" nuclear winter" effect, in which dust and debris in the upper atmosphere obscure the sun, dramatically lowering the temperature at the surface of the earth, making food very much more difficult to grow. When the sun returns, there is the increase in harmful radiation because of damage to the ozone layer.

Most commentators assume that millions will die in an extensive nuclear war, and that there are grounds for serious concern about the habitability of the landscape that would be left. There must also be doubts about the viability of a nation composed entirely of a coterie of leaders who survive in some deep bunker. The idea that a nation thus constituted could be deemed to have won anything shows the irrelevance of nationalism as a credible guide to nuclear policy.

The destructive potential of the more direct effects of nuclear weapons is known with a fair degree of certainty. There is less certainty concerning the incidence of more remote effects, but that provides no justification for a sanguine disbelief in the general validity of this information. The most straightforward response to this scene is to deny its reality. This can take the form of a trust in world leaders, who "surely won't allow it to happen", or the clearly irrational form of denying the evidence. This denial relies upon the fact that this is a projection, a scenario, an act of imagination. We cannot know, nor can we reliably imagine, the precise outline of the post-holocaust landscape, because our present total of human experience does not, fortunately, provide this knowledge.

Unfortunately for this attempt at denial, scenarios are made from the experience at Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the various bomb tests, together with whatever political, social, meteorological and ecological assumptions the scenario builder chooses to make. Plausible scenarios are scrupulous in listing their assumptions, and in allowing for subjective bias. As the assumptions used in making these projections tend to be conservative, for reasons of maintaining scientific credibility, we have to recognize that the actual post-holocaust situation could be even worse than our scenarios suggest. It is therefore little comfort that it might also prove to be better. I conclude that we need to ensure that this holocaust does not happen, and that we are vulnerable to despair if we cannot achieve this.

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Nuclear war is not one of the natural hazards of life that must be prepared for like any other.

One essential quality of nightmare is that we encounter some threatening reality that we are powerless to control, destroy, or otherwise annul, and that we lack all contact with anything else that can deal with the threat for us. The nature of the threat can be things such as monsters, human attackers, ideas of death, betrayal or rejection by friends, actions that transgress our own values or a sense of an absence of meaning. In the scenarios of the effects of nuclear war, all of these fears, and many more, can be realistically involved. What each of us encounters in the nuclear nightmare is therefore our own worst fears made possible as an outward experience, with the added burden of a sense of powerlessness to ensure that it does not happen. Once again, we can see the good sense of denial. We can also see how it is possible for us to experience both denial and despair at once, when we arrive at the perception of ourselves as powerless to forestall the catastrophe, and therefore as worthless people; but because this self-perception is unacceptable, we deny, repress and forget the whole picture.

Despair may find expression in many ways, such as listless or even catatonic withdrawal from life, suicide, a kind of drooling interest in exactly how big a bang these bombs can make, an alienated willingness to launch the bombs when ordered to do so, a willingness to justify the use of nuclear weapons, or in a kind of "Chicken Little" activism. (I remember Chicken Little as the chicken who was unhinged from ordinary coping behaviour by the overwhelming fear that the sky was going to fall on his head; he ran around in a quite crazy way, and fell easy victim to a fox, who ate him.) Despair can lead to madness and to all kinds of ineffective or destructive actions.

It does seem to me that there is a link between this despair and a crisis in the value commitments of some dominant groups in our world. Where scientific and technological reason set aside all questions of value as part of a method for acquiring objective knowledge, it is pertinent to ask whether this nihilism of values does not surreptitiously become a fixed metaphysical assumption. Where scientists can imply that any conceivable experiment is legitimate because it will add to our stock of knowledge, there is a denial of any other value. The image of the mad scientist who is dedicated only to the pursuit of knowledge is one of the more significant nightmares of our western culture. Where factual knowledge is truly value-free, it is also value-empty, and the meaning-destroying wind of nihilism flows freely through it. The deeply entrenched alliance between scientists and military planners who create diabolical weapon systems shows how the moral vacuum of science has been balefully co-opted by the military agenda. The human architects of the nuclear nightmare are an integral part of the nightmare.

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Hope

In this map, people fly by using their imagination, with or without technological assistance; and not all imagining is positive. If our imagination offers us nothing more than a choice between a craven collusion with those who threaten nuclear terror, and a challenge to these titans in which we see no possibility of success, I can identify with despair as a conclusion. Yet no picture of reality is sufficiently complete to compel despair; reality is more rich and diverse than any of our pictures of it. Despair requires a covert choice for mental closure against new information and fresh vision, as well as the denial of anything currently hopeful. In despair, we forget that we are connected to wider reality, and that we can seek resources for overcoming the nightmare from this source.³ In fear, we run from the threat, and so confirm both its power over us and our separation from it. When we connect with the wider reality in which all our experience is somehow contained, we cease to experience ourselves as separate from the threat, and so begin to learn how to deal with it.

In despair, we feel that our response is compelled by the facts of the case; but this is so only because of our pre-existing beliefs about, and attitudes towards, the way the world is. Even if we can't change the facts (and in some cases we can), we can look for changes in our beliefs and attitudes; and these changes can allow us to make quite different responses to the same facts. We can choose to resist the conclusion of despair, and to recognize that we need not remain stuck in this grey and annihilating space. The first step in such a choice for hope is an honest accounting of our situation, particularly of the precise ways in which we are stuck. Just as in denial we know more than we can allow into our conscious awareness, so in despair we know more than we can allow into our conscious awareness. Denial refuses to know horror, while despair refuses to allow any value to the more positive visions that our creative imagination can offer. Both reactions involve a sense of personal unfreedom, and constraint by a malignant external power. Both reactions fail to recognize the range of possibilities available to us as human beings.

There is a kind of hope that may merely mask our denial; we wistfully hope, without really being able to face the nightmare, that nothing terrible will happen. This kind of hope will not carry us far. When we place our hope in somebody like the leader of a nation, we are very vulnerable to specific disappointment when the leader lets us down. In this disappointment, we learn again the lesson of our own powerlessness, and we are tempted to despair. We need a hope that can give us courage to face whatever is there to be faced, and which will not evaporate in the disappointment over setbacks.

I identify hope with the sky and the sun; the human abuse of nuclear forces is challenged by that safe nuclear reactor in the sky. As we remember things that were blotted out of our awareness in the grey space, and so re-connect with wider reality, we begin to move upwards;

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the murk grows thinner, and we eventually come to where the visibility improves. Here we encounter the large, working model of planet earth, which reminds us of our dependence on this fragile and threatened niche in the cosmic bubble. We might also remember that the word "economics" comes from the Greek words oikos, meaning "household" and nomos, meaning "law'; and that it cannot be good economics to destroy our home because we have failed to learn how to share it with other family members.

In moving to the level of creative imagination, there are suddenly a myriad of possibilities. In imagination, we are released from our immersion in the constraints of practicality, even though we do want to discover practical pathways to a less threatened future. In imagination, we can seek a perspective on the nuclear nightmare that allows us to see it for what it is, to see how its apparent necessities are maintained, and to see how an alternative and more hopeful future might be achieved. In imagination, we live the questions that eventually guide us towards possible answers. As long as the questions can be asked, we can have hope that answers will emerge. Visions and dreams lead us on, not because they are answers, but because the suggestions that they contain point beyond present necessities.

I was recently in a conversation in which the idea of living in the present moment was used as an indication of a nihilistic despair. Yet it is only in the present moment that our creative imagination can work, and that we have choices. In the present moment, I can remember that I am still alive, that the bombs have not yet gone off, and that we can plan towards becoming an effective world community. Our quest is for a future in which this grey space can appear, and really be, as harmless as a storm in a teacup.

What we believe about life beyond death, and about the actions in our history of a transcendent God, will also have a major bearing on how we view the significance of a nuclear holocaust. Death is the end of significance for those who do not believe in any form of after-life. This is mitigated only by the significance created in the memory of survivors, which also ends when there are no survivors. For those who do believe in some form of life after death, the experiences of life and of death retain significance. Such believers are more able to contemplate the possibility of a nuclear war, as death, even omni-death, is not the final reality with which we have to deal.

There is a part of me that can identify with the fatalism with which some believers hand the whole problem over to God. I identify it as a childish trust in benevolent parents, and to me it has a measure of cosmic validity as a resource for coping with forces that are too vast for us to confront directly. I do not accept that such a trust can be a legitimate excuse for shirking those responsibilities that come to us at a human level; I believe that God makes space for our questions, our choices and our creativity, and thus confirms the meaningfulness of our life and our death.

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Any kind of transcendent perspective is potentially a resource for the maintenance of hope, although some perspectives seem perverse. Where we feel able to identify God with our nation's values, it can seem that challenges to our nation are challenges to God. This is a fatal confusion that cannot be sustained on the basis of the Judeo-Christian tradition. I would argue that the confusion arises on the basis of a misunderstanding of stories of God's choice of the Jewish people for service, and of stories of victory in battle after prayer. The idea that the sovereign Lord witnessed to in the bible could be a tame deity blessing whatever my nation may choose to do is an excellent example of what the Jewish prophets called idolatry.

I recently heard a radio broadcast in which a conservative Christian speaker was arguing that the world is so bad that nuclear war will be God's just judgement upon the nations, and that Christians need not worry because we, unlike the non-believers, will all be caught up in the rapture of the saints. I reject the view that God's love is uniquely restricted to those who join the right holy clubs. I reject any view that asserts that Christians are not involved in the evils for which the nations deserve divine judgement, and I am scandalized that Christians can feel able to be happy in a rapture that co-exists with the awful suffering and death of a world devastated by nuclear war. This picture of the future seems to encourage Christian people to want a nuclear holocaust so that they can experience the rapture of the saints, which seems morally equivalent to wanting your parents to die so that you can inherit their estate. The danger I see is that some groups do not seem to take a clear responsibility concerning the actions that their beliefs might reasonably be expected to prompt.

Christian groups are not the only ones that pervert visionary hope into other-worldly escapism. Where inner peace is conceived of merely as beautiful feelings in myself as an individual, or where reality is postulated as lying in some realm quite apart from our present physical world, we miss the challenge of bringing our inner peace into creative contact with the conflicts of our outer world. I identify strongly with the need to cultivate harmonious feelings, and with the exploration of our consciousness. My questions are about how these elements of inner peace can contribute to outer peace, and how transcendent perspectives and experiences can contribute to visionary and hopeful living.

Our everyday lives are deeply shaped by socially constructed patterns of interaction with others, and these institutionalized patterns of behavior may appear as a fixed fact of nature. This fixity is illusory, as it depends upon our choice to conform, a choice we are free not to make. I may have internalized a community norm that people fight when they are insulted, so that when I feel insulted, I feel compelled to fight. This compulsion depends upon my choice, conscious or unconscious, to want to be a person of this type. Also, there are different ways of fighting. Societies have much power to influence the self-images of their members, and they need to be

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challenged to use this influence for world peace, and not merely for ensuring subservience to their own commands. Also, we are personally capable of recognizing our habitual and deeply ingrained choices and of taking responsibility for who we are.

There is a common-sense understanding that powerful groups will not allow themselves to be persuaded to make such changes against their perceived group interests, and that substantial social and political change will always be opposed and suppressed by the powerful. Countervailing power is generated when powerless people find their own power to challenge the definitions imposed upon them by the powerful. This will involve increased overt conflict, which will not always achieve positive results, particularly where the conflict is merely for dominance. Yet xenophobic and selfish attitudes and practices are unlikely to be changed without challenge and conflict. Our present narrowly conceived identities are based on the experience and the choices of the past; our world situation requires a fresh construction of our various identities. While such revisioning offers hope, it is also deeply disturbing, as it questions and undermines what we had taken to be the secure foundations of our lives.

Buckminster Fuller4 argues that we are all potential billionaires by virtue of the ongoing design revolution which provides us with the technology to do more with less. In his view, we have no objective need to maintain attitudes and policies appropriate when resources were scarce, and that it is only the maintenance of these outdated competitive attitudes and practices that prevents us from establishing ourselves as a prosperous and just global civilization. Yet we need to recognize how very far we are from the requirements of a peaceful world when whole communities starve while the world produces more food than can be sold. Our technology is increasingly capable of ensuring the physical survival of all human communities, though this may not yet be possible without curtailing the greeds of the powerful. Such injustice requires oppressive force for its protection, which brings us back to the continuing diversion of national resources into military power, including nuclear weapons. We need to release the world's scientists from their bondage to socially catastrophic weapon research programmes, so that they can create the technological developments necessary to a prosperous and ecologically sustainable world peace.

In terms of my image, what we require as a basis for a sustainable future is a system-wide change which will allow us to cooperate in doing something sensible with the juggernaut, and so become a more integrated and competent world community. My question here is how to resolve the paradox that in order to make global political choices that can establish world community, we need an existing coherent world community. Fortunately, there are already fragmentary elements of coherence in our existing ambiguous world community. Communication systems can now link us all up into one global village, which makes it possible for us to work at understanding

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and valuing our differences. Changes in individual awareness are important, but we also need specific changes in the social, political and cultural practices of our existing societies before effective world community becomes a possibility. The questions that seem most relevant for peace educators include issues of the enhancement of world community, the development of appropriately powerful alternatives to violence, particularly in the resolution of situations of entrenched injustice, and the discovery of visionary and realistic resources for the maintenance of hope in the face of all that seems to dictate despair.