A Certain Idea of America, page 25
People died from three causes: the huge blast, the fires that followed, and something new, radiation poisoning, which no one understood. Somehow people seemed fine, then they expired.
“About a week after the bomb dropped, a vague, incomprehensible rumour reached Hiroshima—that the city had been destroyed by the energy released when atoms were somehow split in two.” There was no name for this weapon, but word of mouth yielded one whose root characters were translated, by Hersey, as “original child bomb.” (On my bookshelf is a book of meditations Thomas Merton later wrote using those words for his title.)
I don’t know if Robert Oppenheimer was a great man, but John Hersey was.
In the end, Hirohito, on August 15, spoke on the radio to tell his nation the war was over. Many of those listening in Hiroshima, at speakers set up on what had been public squares, wept, but not because of pro-war fervor. They wept because they had never heard the emperor’s voice. Truly a new age had begun.
I thought Oppenheimer would be more of a warning, and I wanted it to be because I think the world needs one. In fairness, the first two hours of the film signal a kind of warning, with a building sense of dread, but it dissipates in the last hour, which gets lost in a dense subplot. I wanted the director, Christopher Nolan, to be an artist picking up unseen vibrations in the air and sensing what most needed to be said.
The world needs to be more afraid of nuclear weapons. We’re too used to safety, to everything working. It’s been almost eighty years of no nuclear use, a triumph, and we just assume it will continue. Those who were healthily apprehensive fifty and twenty-five years ago aren’t so scared anymore; they think someone’s in charge, it’s OK. My sense is the world has grown less rigorously professional, the military of all countries included, and the leaders of the world aren’t as careful. I guess I wanted a movie that puts anxiety in the forefront of everyone’s mind.
It isn’t entirely fair to say “he didn’t make the movie I hoped would be made,” but yes, he didn’t make the movie I hoped would be made.
THE UKRAINE CRISIS: HANDLE WITH CARE
January 27, 2022
I don’t know what’s coming in Ukraine or what the U.S. should do beyond think first of its national interests. The trick is defining those interests for this moment and with these players. We have to get it right and the stakes feel high, but there seems a paucity of new thinking. I find myself impatient with confidently expressed declarations that we have no interest in a faraway border dispute, that Russia and Ukraine have a long and complicated history, and in any case the story of man is a tale of organized brutality, so get a grip. That’s not…right. A major land war in Europe? The first since World War II? We have no interest in what might be the beginning of a new era of brute-force violations of sovereignty? One involving our allies, with which we have treaties?
The arguments on the other side sound careless, rote: Get tough, push back, ship weapons, show Putin who’s boss. That sounds like politicians saying what they’ve said for seventy years, and at this point not out of conviction but because they have no new moves, barely a memory of new moves.
None of our political leaders are thinking seriously, or at least thinking aloud in a serious way.
It is hard not to be skeptical of sanctions as a deterrent to Russia. Aren’t we sort of sanctioned out? Does Vladimir Putin really fear them? Hasn’t he already factored them in? And wary of other responses: U.S. troops on heightened alert, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization reinforcing Eastern Europe with ships and fighter jets. Doesn’t this carry the potential of a spark that turns into a fire? This is the moment a writer would add “especially in the nuclear age.” I’d say “especially in this later and I fear less rigorous part of the nuclear age.” Forty-five-year-old field commanders are seventy-six years removed from Hiroshima and have likely never read John Hersey. They don’t carry a natural and fully absorbed horror about a launch caused by confusion, miscalculation, miscommunication. I sort of explain life to myself by assuming everyone’s drunk. That could literally be true of any given Russian general marching through the steppes.
So let me say at least one constructive thing: that we don’t worry enough about nuclear weapons. We have lost our preoccupation with them. For leaders who remembered World War II, it was always front of mind. Now, less so. Which is funny because such weapons are in more hands now than ever before. The world we live in, including the military one, seems more distracted than in the past, less rigorous and professional.
We’re used to being lucky. Luck is a bad thing to get used to.
If I read Mr. Putin right, he wants the fruits of war without the war, in line with the leaders of the Soviet system whose end he still mourns. A difference is those leaders were impressed by us and factored that into their calculations. Mr. Putin isn’t. A lot of people aren’t impressed by us anymore. The long-term answer to that is not to beat our breasts and shout “USA!” but to become more impressive in terms of our economic strength, political leaders, and character as a people. But we are in the short term.
Which gives rise to the question: Shouldn’t the United Nations be involved? “Major land war,” “violation of state sovereignty”—isn’t this what the Security Council is for? As I write I hear echoes of Adlai Stevenson in the Cuban missile crisis. Stevenson asked the Soviet ambassador to the council, Valerian Zorin, if Moscow had missiles in Cuba: “Don’t wait for the translation, yes or no?” Then his staff produced huge photos of the missiles, which convinced the world who was right and who was wrong.
If Mr. Putin is going to invade a sovereign nation, shouldn’t he at least be embarrassed and exposed in the eyes of the world? Shamed? Nikita Khrushchev was. The whole Soviet system was.
I want to close with something I’ve been thinking about. American presidents in crises always fear being called weak. They fear this more than they fear being called unwise. But recent years have given me a greater appreciation for a moment when a president in crisis didn’t fear it, or didn’t let his fear govern his actions, and it involves Ukraine.
It was August 1991. The Soviet Union was in its astounding day-by-day fall. George H. W. Bush had just met in summit with Mikhail Gorbachev and then went on to Kyiv, where he spoke to a session of what was still then the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine.
It was a great moment in the history of freedom. A totalitarian empire was falling; the Warsaw Pact nations had already broken free. Bush had some human sympathy for those like Mr. Gorbachev, who were seeing the system they’d known all their lives crash down around them. He had affection and respect for those reaching for democracy. But he had a deep and overriding concern: There were thousands of strategic nuclear warheads long ago placed by Moscow in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, and more than twenty thousand smaller tactical nuclear weapons. They had to be dealt with. So it was not only a joyous moment; it was a delicate, dangerous one.
In his speech, Bush said Ukraine was debating “the fundamental questions of liberty, self-rule, and free enterprise” and Americans followed this with “excitement and hope.” Become democratic, Bush said, and we will help and assist you. But don’t tear yourself apart with long-repressed internal resentments, or external ones. “President Gorbachev has achieved astonishing things, and his policies of glasnost and perestroika and democratization point towards the goals of freedom, democracy and economic liberty.” Bush urged Ukraine to appreciate what Russia was trying to do. Between the lines he was saying, History is already overcharged; don’t bust the circuit breakers, don’t further destabilize what is already unstable. Don’t let “suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred” take hold. He was also signaling to Mr. Gorbachev: We’ll do everything we can to keep your dissolution as peaceful as possible. Unspoken, he was saying, We’ll help you with the missiles.
It was a thoughtful speech, sophisticated and inherently balanced save for one too-hot phrase—“suicidal nationalism.”
It got a standing ovation. Then the dread pundits descended, chief among them New York Times bigfoot William Safire, who thought Bush missed the revolutionary moment. Bush sounded unexcited about freedom, even “anti-liberty,” Safire wrote in November 1991, calling it the “ ‘chicken Kiev’ speech.”
With that memorable phrase Safire did real damage to Bush, making him look…weak. Fussily prudent. Less than a year later, Bush lost his bid for reelection. People found him not of the moment, out of touch.
I thought my friend Safire right then. Now I think we were mostly wrong. The Soviet republics did break off and forge their own paths, and with Western help the nukes were deactivated and sent back to Russia, where they were dismantled. It was one of the great and still not sufficiently heralded moments of the Cold War, and it was done by a political class that was serious, and even took a chance on speaking seriously.
IT’S THE UNTHINKABLE. WE MUST THINK ABOUT IT.
April 28, 2022
Sometimes a thing keeps nagging around your brain and though you’ve said it before you have to say it again. We factor in but do not sufficiently appreciate the real possibility of nuclear-weapon use by Russia in Ukraine. This is the key and crucial historic possibility in the drama, and it really could come to pass.
And once it starts, it doesn’t stop. Once the taboo that has held since 1945 is broken, it’s broken. The door has been pushed open and we step through to the new age. We don’t want to step into that age.
The war is in its third month. Diplomatic solutions are less likely than ever; war crimes and atrocities have hardened the Ukrainians, and in any case they’re winning and the world is on their side. British intelligence this week reported Russia has lost around fifteen thousand troops, two thousand armored vehicles, and sixty aircraft. The ground invasion force has lost an estimated 25 percent of its combat strength. Russia is grinding through a disaster.
We aren’t worried enough about Russian nuclear use in part because we imagine such a thing as huge missiles with huge warheads launched from another continent and speeding through space. We think, That won’t happen! It has never happened! But the more likely use would be not of big strategic nuclear weapons but smaller tactical ones on the battlefield. Such weapons have a shorter range and carry lower-yield warheads. America and Russia have rough parity in the number of strategic nuclear weapons, but Russia has an estimated ten times as many tactical nuclear weapons as the U.S. and delivery systems that range from artillery shells to aircraft.
Why would Vladimir Putin use tactical nuclear weapons? Why would he make such a madman move?
To change the story. To shock and destabilize his adversaries. To scare the people of North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries so they’ll force their leaders to back away. To remind the world—and Russians—that he does have military power. To avoid a massive and public military defeat. To win.
Mr. Putin talks about nuclear weapons a lot. He did it again Wednesday: In a meeting with politicians in St. Petersburg, he said if anyone intervenes in Ukraine and “creates unacceptable threats for us that are strategic in nature,” the Russian response will be “lightning fast.” He said, “We have all the tools for this that no one else can boast of having. We won’t boast about it, we’ll use them, if needed.”
He’s talked like this since the invasion. It’s a tactic: He’s trying to scare everybody. That doesn’t mean the threat is empty.
There are signs the Russians are deliberately creating a historical paper trail, as if to say they warned us. On Monday Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the risk of nuclear conflict is “serious” and “should not be underestimated.” Earlier, Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, sent a formal diplomatic note to the U.S. saying it was inflaming the conflict. The Washington Post got a copy. It said shipments of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine were “adding fuel” to the conflict and could bring “unpredictable consequences.”
The U.S. at the same time has become rhetorically bolder. This month President Biden referred to Mr. Putin as a war criminal. In March Mr. Biden called for regime change; the White House walked it back. This week Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters the U.S. aim in Ukraine: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree it can’t do the kinds of things it’s done in Ukraine.” The original American aim was to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence. Has the U.S. strategy changed, or has its officials’ talk simply become looser? What larger strategic vision is the administration acting on?
In my experience with American diplomats, they are aware of but don’t always grasp the full implications of their opponents’ histories. Mr. Putin was a KGB spy who in 1991 saw the Soviet system in which he’d risen crash all around him. He called the fall of the Soviet Union a catastrophe because it left his country weakened, humiliated, and stripped of dominance and hegemony in Eastern Europe. He is a walking, talking cauldron of resentments, which he deploys for maximum manipulation. He isn’t secretive about his grievances. In his 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference he accused the U.S. of arrogance, hypocrisy, and having created a “unipolar world” with “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision making,” headed by “one master, one sovereign.” As for NATO, “we have the right to ask: Against whom is this expansion intended?”
Antagonism to the West has been the central intellectual organizing principle of his life. America is an object of his life’s obsession.
So let me make an argument for my anxieties: For this man, Russia can’t lose to the West. Ukraine isn’t the Mideast, a side show; it is the main event. I read him as someone who will do anything not to lose.
In October he will turn seventy, and whatever his physical and mental health his life is in its fourth act. I am dubious that he will accept the idea that the signal fact of its end will be his defeat by the West. He can’t, his psychology will not allow it.
It seems to me he has become more careless, operating with a different historical consciousness. He launched a world-historic military invasion that, whatever his geostrategic aims, was shambolic—fully aggressive and confident, yet not realistically thought through. His army wasn’t up to the task. It seemed thrown together, almost haphazard, certainly not professional.
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, often notes that Mr. Putin has killed all the institutions in his country, sucked the strength, independence, and respectability from them, as dictators do. They take out power centers that might threaten them but might also warn them of weaknesses in their own governments. All dictatorships are ultimately self-weakening in that way. But this means Mr. Putin has no collective leadership in Russia. It’s all him. And he’s Vladimir Putin.
When I look at him I see a new nihilistic edge, not the calculating and somewhat reptilian person of the past.
People who have known Mr. Putin have told me I am wrong in my concern about his potential nuclear use in that he knows if he makes one move with such a weapon, Moscow will in turn be reduced to a smoking ruin. But I am reading Mr. Putin as someone who’s grown bored of that threat, who believes he can more than match it, who maybe doesn’t even believe it anymore. In any case the Americans would not respond disproportionately.
No one since 1945, in spite of all the wars, has used nuclear weapons. We are in the habit, no matter what we acknowledge as a hypothetical possibility, of thinking, It still won’t happen, history will proceed as it has in the past.
But maybe not. History is full of swerves, of impossibilities that become inevitabilities.
For the administration’s leaders this should be front of mind every day. They should return to the admirable terseness of the early days of the invasion. They should wake up every day thinking, What can we do to lower the odds?
Think more, talk less. And when you think, think dark.
THE OCTOBER HORROR IS SOMETHING NEW
October 12, 2023
We are again in a new place. What has happened in Israel the past week is different. I have spent much of my life as you have, hearing regular reports of fighting in the Mideast, so when news broke last Saturday of what was happening near Gaza my mind started to process it as a continuation of the past. Within hours, as the facts of the October horror began to emerge, I understood no, wait, this is a wholly new thing. And I felt deep foreboding.
We must start with what was done. Terrorists calling themselves a resistance movement passed over the border from Gaza and murdered little children; they took infants hostage as they screamed. They murdered old women, tormented and raped young women, targeted an overnight music festival, and murdered the unarmed young people in cold blood or mowed them down as they ran screaming. They murdered whole families as they begged for their lives.
There is no cause on earth that justifies what these murderers did. There is no historical grievance that excuses or “gives greater context” to their actions. Spare me “this is the inevitable result when a people are long abused.” No, this is what happens when savages hold the day: They imperil the very idea of civilization. They killed a grandmother and uploaded pictures of her corpse to her Facebook page. They reportedly cut an unborn child from a mother’s body and murdered both.
