DOOM: Part 2

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” —Albert Einstein

Where were you the morning of September 11, 2001? I know where I was. I was getting ready for work, buttoning up my shirt, tying my shoes, and drinking coffee. Then I was glued to the TV along with the rest of the world, watching towers fall and a plane ram the side of The Pentagon. My thoughts shifted to my father, who was at that moment somewhere in D.C., hopefully making his way out alive. For several agonizing hours I didn’t know where he was. I took the day off of work, unable and unwilling to focus on anything else. All I knew was that two great American cities were essentially on fire. Would there be more? Was this just the beginning? Then the call came. Dad was fine. The world started spinning again. I got lucky that day. Even after that call, though, the world was still smoking and holes in the ground in three separate states were proof that something had gone hideously wrong. The question everyone asked at that point was simple and primal, as an animal waiting to see if the predator had finally given up— Is that it?What if that wasn’t it? What would we have done if the world hadn’t started spinning again on that mild September morning?

To answer that question, we must first take a step back into the past.

In October of 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest nuclear weapon ever tested. At fifty megatons, Tzar Bomba was capable of causing third-degree burns at sixty miles away, and broke window panes at five hundred miles from ground zero. The seismic shock of the explosion was recorded in the United States, thousands of miles from the detonation site, and the shock wave was registered even on its third pass around the globe. The crater, created from a detonation altitude of 2.5 miles, can be seen from space.

In 1959, before the nuclear prowess of the Soviet hydrogen arsenal was so forcefully displayed, and before the Cuban Missile Crisis almost turned a very cold war searingly hot, Pat Frank took it upon himself to peer out past the culmination of years of saber rattling. Alas, Babylon, set in a small river town in central Florida, played out for the reader what it would be like if Tzar Bomba and the thousands of other nuclear weapons found their way to target. The book stars an everyman and everywoman, Randy and Lib. There are bankers and mechanics and librarians and opportunists. These characters are vehicles of exploration for what life would become, for anyone, after the Big Day—the day when the launch codes are entered and big red buttons pressed. Why the Big Day, or “The Day” as it is known in the book? It wouldn’t take that long to stop almost every clock on the planet. The Big Hour would be more like it, and what an hour that would be.

At first Randy thought someone was shaking the couch. Graf, nestled under his arm, whined and slipped to the floor. Randy opened his eyes and elevated himself on his elbow. He felt stiff and grimy from sleeping in his clothes. Except for the Daschund, tail and ears at attention, the room was empty. Again the couch shook. The world outside still slept, but he discerned movement in the room. His fishing rods, hanging by their tips from a length of pegboard, inexplicably swayed in rhythm. He had heard such phenomena accompanied earthquakes, but there had never been an earthquake in Florida. Graf lifted his nose and howled. 

Then the sound came, a long, deep, powerful rumble increasing in crescendo until the windows rattled, cups danced in their saucers, and the bar glasses rubbed rims and tinkled in terror. The sounds quickly ebbed, then boomed to a fiercer climax, closer.

We’re going to forgive Pat Frank for overlooking nuclear winter because our knowledge regarding the power of the atomic bombs was still quite limited and naive. Essentially, the spread of debris and radiation would blanket the planet in ways that would make life on Earth almost completely unlivable, save for the smallest of creatures. The atmospheric maps near the Fukushima reactors in the months after the melt down are a good example. Radiation spreads pretty quickly. Pat Frank allows us a glimpse at the paranoia leading up to the day, right on through the devastation of having the clocks turned back a hundred years. While you read, it’s hard not to take an inventory of the things you have in the house. How much food is in the cupboard? Do you have gas in the car? How will you protect yourself when the prisons can no longer hold the imprisoned? How will you survive?

Alas, Babylon is a human story set in an almost inhuman time of unimaginable tension by today’s standards. I’ve read it twice, the second time in preparation for this discussion, and still I got chills when the ground shakes and the lights go out. I knew it was coming, yet I could not stop from being involved to the core because the stakes were so high. That flash off to the west means everything, and the flash to the south means everything else. And then, just like that, Randy and Lib were alone to face the future with little more than faith.

Here’s the good news: the Cold War is over, and we don’t have to worry about the Soviet Union anymore. Here’s the bad news: most of those bombs are still there, and plenty of tension lingers, but for very different reasons.

Currently there are about five thousand nuclear weapons on hair trigger between the United States and Russia alone. In total, there are approximately twenty thousand functioning nuclear weapons available for warfare on the planet. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, pilfering of nuclear weapons and material became increasingly tempting to workers who had not been paid in months and needed to feed their families. And then there’s the massive amount of raw material that could be fashioned into even the most rudimentary bomb, capable of leveling a few city blocks. In short, the threat has only increased.

And then there’s the tensions of the post Cold War world. Iran, anyone? What about the looming water rights conflict between Pakistan and India over the run-off from Himalayan glacial melt, their primary source for drinking and irrigation? Both Pakistan and India are nuclear armed. What better reason to launch than water? Or what about the current squabble between the U.S. and Russia over missile defense silos in Eastern Europe? Or Al Qaeda?

About a month ago, because of everything I mentioned and a whole lot more, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 11:55, or five minutes to midnight, and midnight spells doom. The world, since the end of the Cold War and Pat Frank’s fantasy of post-apocalyptic survival, has not become a safe place, but a more turbulent one.

It’s time to come back to that mild September morning in 2001. What if that had been a nuclear 9/11? Osama Bin Laden certainly had nuclear ambitions, and there’s plenty of fissile material floating around. Why didn’t it happen that way? Who knows. Luck? Here, though, is the difference between the world Pat Frank so plainly spells out for us in Alas, Babylon and the world we live in now. Today, it would take only one mushroom cloud, not thousands. One carefully planted atomic bomb would change the face of the planet permanently. Remove D.C. or London or Bangladesh from the map and we would be on lock down. Life would change, for everyone, in ways that we can not yet imagine. Remember waterboarding? You know, torture? That was our reaction to a few planes and three thousand dead. Imagine what we would do if we lost a whole city, and what the instant police state would require of you and your rights in order to protect freedom and the American way.

Alas, Babylon is the first true examination of the age we entered when J. Robert Oppenheimer unlocked the secrets of the atom. Pat Frank knew something terrible was afoot and went to great lengths to warn everyone about it. He knew, as did everyone who built bomb shelters and stored food, or became a member of the local civil defense organization, that our chances of “winning” were grim at best. Read Alas, Babylon, so that you can get a glimpse of what the world will look like if someone decides to push that big red button and change the world forever. Then, after the shivers settle, pray that no one ever does. Pray that the world keeps spinning.

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