I can't think of many books I read with more obsessed attention as a teenager than Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth. At Salon, Tom Engelhardt's got an interview with the man himself.
A last topic. When we grew up there was one world-destroying thing, whether you were obsessed with it or not: the bomb, the nuclear arsenals. Today, for young people, there appear to be several paths to the end of the world, ranging from the fictional to pandemics to global warming. Nuclear weapons seem to be in a jostling queue of world-destroying possibilities. What kind of a mental landscape, especially for the young, goes with such a situation do you think?
Global warming, which is a whole new way of doing ourselves in, does create a radically new context. You know, when I wrote "The Fate of the Earth," back in 1982, I said that, first and foremost, nuclear weapons were an ecological danger. It wasn't that our species could be directly wiped out by nuclear war down to the last person. That would only happen through the destruction of the underpinnings of life, through nuclear winter, radiation, ozone loss. There has been an oddity of timing, because when the nuclear weapon was invented, people didn't even use the word "environment" or "ecosphere." The environmental movement was born later.
So, in a certain sense, the greatest -- or certainly the most urgent -- ecological threat of them all was born before the context in which you could understand it. The present larger ecological crisis is that context. In other words, global warming and nuclear war are two different ways that humanity, having grown powerful through science, through production, through population growth, threatens to undo the natural underpinnings of human, and all other, life. In a certain way, I think we may be in a better position today, because of global warming, to grasp the real import of nuclear danger.
The fact that the nuclear crisis grew out of war obscured this deeper significance. In truth, nuclear weapons effected a revolution in warfare that made it impossible, at least among the greatest powers. The bomb really isn't a military thing at all.
In a sense, the nuclear dilemma is the easy crisis to solve. It does not require us to change our physical way of life; it just requires a different sort of political resolve. Technically, ridding the planet of such weapons is very feasible. We've already gotten rid of half the ones that existed at the peak of the Cold War. So, it's almost as if it's a preliminary item, something to get out of the way as we try to save the Earth from the other, newer ecological dangers that threaten our existence.
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