Nuclear War and the Terrifying Stupidity of Humankind

When I was a child, I thought about nuclear war a lot. I wore CND paraphernalia and hoped to grow up to be a hippy. When my dad mentioned that a CND demonstration was marching through Norwich, I begged to go along. We did. It was my first march of many. For my Dad it was a one off.

I was eight or nine back then. I did grow up to be a hippy. I spent my childhood stubbornly clutching flower-filled guns, with the strong belief that I, and not the majority, was right. I attended a very rural school and world politics existed in a very different paradigm. I saw no point in being liked for being someone that wasn't me. When the idiots told me that I should conform in the name of popularity, and not doing so equalled being stupid on my part, I was prepared to stand by my personality and my beliefs.

The young me would never have had the self-confidence to believe that I might end up with a Masters Degree in Environmental Policy and a job in academia researching adaptation to climate change. Stubbornness and self-confidence are not the same. The young me would never have believed that I would eventually secure a place to study for a doctorate in European Environmental Policy. The adult version of me didn’t either. I left it all behind to become a charity administrator. Is it a comfort to amount to the nothing that people expect of you? It took me seven years to rise up out of the position of being an 'all singing, all dancing' answer phone. It seemed that few people had any great confidence in me. Was it a rejection of the path that I found myself on, or did I bottle it? It was probably a bit of both.

My childhood fascination with nuclear destruction was long-lived, and in 1992, just before leaving for University, I collected excerpts from writings about the Hiroshima bombing. I didn’t maintain the book of excerpts for long, but mixed in with quotes about bands, nuclear war featured highly. Sometimes I managed to combine both.

Reading Watchmen reminded me of those quotes. It seems that my fascination with nuclear destruction is not dead. By searching Scroogle for the excerpts neatly copied by my own hand, I now find them repeated online. The same passages find themselves in later publications. The words resonate as much today as they did back then. It seems that I’m not the only person to think so. Entangled within the sprawling mass of World Wide Web, someone else has thought to upload them.

The internet is a thinkers dream. In 1992, in Norwich library, I could read just two paragraphs of Nicholas Humphrey’s ‘Four Minutes to Midnight’, as quoted in another book. In the comfort of my own home, I can now read 'The Bronowski Memorial Lecture (1981)' in full.

Below, I have copied the exact parts of the lecture included in my book of excerpts. Sixteen years ago, I handwrote these words:

“Nuclear weapons are not comprehensible: neither you nor I have any hope of understanding just what they are and what they do. In saying that, I mean to belittle none of us; it is almost a compliment. For I do not see how any human being whose intelligence and sensitivities have been shaped by traditional facts and values could possibly understand the nature of these unnatural, other-worldly weapons. So-called `facts' about the Bomb are not facts in the ordinary sense at all: they are not facts we can relate to, get our minds round. Mere numbers, words.

Let me repeat a fact. The Bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima killed 140,000 people. The uranium it contained weighed about twenty-five pounds; it would have packed into a cricket-ball. 140,000 people is about equal to the total population of Cambridge.

I, for one, cannot grasp that kind of fact. I cannot make the connection between a cricket-ball and the deaths of everyone who lives in Cambridge. I cannot picture the 140,000 bodies, let alone feel sympathy for each individual as they died.”


Here are some quotes that I didn’t read in 1992, but can now:

“The Bomb's first makers, the physicists who put it together in 1945, themselves treated their creation with almost mystical reverence. When Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the earliest test explosion in the New Mexico desert at Alamogordo, the words which came to him were from the holy book, the Bhagavad Gita:
If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendour of the Mighty One .. .
I am become Death,
The shatterer of worlds.”

...

“When I was a child we had an old pet tortoise we called Ajax. One autumn Ajax, looking for a winter home, crawled unnoticed into the pile of wood and bracken my father was making for Guy Fawkes' Day. As days passed and more and more pieces of tinder were added to the pile, Ajax must have felt more and more secure; every day he was getting greater protection from the frost and rain. On 5 November bonfire and tortoise were reduced to ashes. Are there some of us who still believe that the piling up of weapon upon weapon adds to our security – that the dangers are nothing compared to the assurance they provide?”

...

“A County Inspector of Schools writes in a letter to The Times: `I have sat in on discussion lessons when children have brought up the question of the Bomb. Many have come to accept that they may not live out their lives in full . . . Some smile about it . . .’”


Perhaps, I wasn't the only child that thought about nuclear destruction. It was at the age of seven, in my final year of primary school, that I became transfixed by the concept of war, national insecurity and nuclear weapons. It was in 1979, the year that Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. 1979 was the year that I truly became aware of politics.

While Thatcher had stolen my ‘aged seven and above’ entitlement to milk the year before I was born, and would take it away from those older than five in 1980, I had little interest in national politics. It was the global that scared me. The fact that nuclear bombs existed, led me to conclude that there are as many stupid adults as there are children. It fascinated me that humankind could be so terrifyingly stupid.

As I watched playground fights, I realised that adults are just big children with more power and weaponry at their disposal. Adults are not the all-knowing, insightful beings that they wanted me to believe they were. They are no better than the seven year old me. Now I am adult, I probably have less insight into aspects of the world than some seven year olds do. I am fully aware of that. At seven, I found myself bereft of words that might articulate my thoughts. At thirty-six, I am a poor verbal communicator. I am often confused by grammar.

I believe that the words of others - as copied into my old quote book - are worth sharing. In this light, I will run a short series of posts from its dusty pages. Where possible, I will include links to places where the quotes exist in the online world today. For now, you can read the The Bronowski Memorial Lecture in full:
Nicholas Humphrey’s ‘Four Minutes to Midnight’
It says something about the way the world was in 1981. It says something about the world that I grew up in.

Fabpants Recommends: Seeing Bonde do Rolê live. They are charmingly fun, with one DJ/MC and three MCs. The MCs primarily shout and dance about with erratic glee. They are Brazilian band, with a New Zealander interloper. I have no idea what they shout about, but enthusiasm goes along way. Two of the MCs were recruited in February this year, following on a competition on Brazilian MTV. They may have been on television, but Ana Bernardino and Laura Taylor, still know how to conga. Yes, a Brazilian pop star, named Ana Bernardino, held my flesh. She also took a piece of meat out of her genitals to gain entry to the band. Should I be proud?