A Global Atomic War (Just in Slow Motion)

In February 1982, in the New Yorker, Jonathan Schell imagined and described what a Russian twenty-megaton nuclear bomb (1,600 times the yield of the bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the end of World War II) might do if it hit New York City (his hometown and mine), though its radioactive fallout would have reached significantly farther. That one bomb, he wrote, “would probably doom upward of twenty million people.” He then described just what that nightmare might be like in all too vivid detail. (”If the wind was blowing at 15 miles an hour, fallout of lethal intensity would descend in a plume about 150 miles long and as much as fifteen miles wide.”)

Given the nuclear arsenals that nine nations on this embattled planet of ours now possess (with undoubtedly more to come), god knows what a nuclear war might be like so many years later, other than a potentially world-ending experience. Of course, since he wrote that, it’s become all too clear that we humans have managed to come up with a second way to do in this world of ours, which we’ve all too mildly labeled “climate change.” (Unfortunately, it won’t just be “change,” but a long-term catastrophe of an almost unimaginable kind.)

In many ways, climate change might be considered the equivalent of nuclear weapons already going off around this planet of ours, just in remarkably slow motion. And by the way, to give Schell full credit, more than 40 years ago, he was already aware of that phenomenon, too, writing then: “Nuclear explosions are far from being the only perturbations in question; a heating of the global atmosphere through an increased greenhouse effect, which could be caused by the injection of vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the air (for instance, from the increased burning of coal), is another notable peril of this kind. But a nuclear holocaust would be unique in its suddenness.” And at that time, he was almost uniquely focused on the two ways we humans could do ourselves in and on what he then so strikingly called “the fate of the Earth,” which sadly couldn’t have been more accurate or potentially worse.

And yet so many years later, on a planet growing ever hotter ever faster and, in weather terms, ever more violent, we and our leaders still largely haven’t absorbed what’s happening, not truly. And because that potentially world-ending time frame is indeed proceeding in what might be considered slow motion (at least in comparison to the nuclear hell of atomic weaponry, although it’s happening far too fast for our world), it’s hard even to take in. Still, it’s important for us to start imagining that, in some strange sense, the equivalent of a slow-motion atomic war has already broken out on this planet of ours and the fallout (so to speak) is heat, heat, and more heat (and, of course, increasing weather chaos).

Unfortunately, even so many years after Schell wrote that passage, because climate change is relatively slow, it simply hasn’t gotten the end-of-world attention it deserves. And yet, so many years later, the devastation is indeed beginning to be felt. Only recently, for instance, as a British Guardian — a rare news outlet that actually has a “climate crisis” section — headline put it, “Heat killed ‘staggering’ 50,000 people in Europe’s cities this summer, scientists warn.” (”Hot weather marked by relentless heatwaves killed nearly twice as many people as it did in each of the two next most dangerous years.”) Yes, 50,000 deaths and, remember, that’s just in Europe (and it’s only going to get ever worse)!

And the major power that’s still pouring fossil fuels into the atmosphere in a stunning fashion without, in the age of Donald J. Trump, making the slightest effort to promote green energy, is, of course, my country, the (increasingly dis-)United States of America. (At least, that other great power China, while itself still pouring stunning amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, is also hard at work creating and controlling the global green-energy market.) And imagine that, at just such a moment, my countrymen (and women) reelected as president a guy who openly insists that climate change is a made-up and fraudulent phenomenon, or as he put it at the United Nations last year, “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

The Fate of the Earth Today

Someday, who will even believe how difficult it was for our version of humanity to take in the obvious disaster that was looming, even if (unlike the explosion of nuclear weapons) in slow motion? When, I wonder, will we indeed begin to think of climate change as a slow-motion version of atomic warfare?

Try as a start just to take in those 50,000 dead people in Europe’s cities and then consider the fact (and it is a fact!) that that’s just the beginning. As long as we humans continue to fight wars (which pour fossil fuels into the atmosphere in a stunning fashion) and burn vast quantities of oil, natural gas, and coal to power our everyday lives (not to speak of the huge Artificial Intelligence data centers now being set up globally), things are only going to get so much worse. And mind you, while those 50,000 deaths were certainly reported in places like the New York Times, they weren’t generally considered headline or front-page news (or the TV or online equivalent thereof). And count on this: no one in the mainstream would ever use a headline like: “50,000 dead in equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear catastrophe.”

But imagine this as well: those 50,000 dead are just the bare beginning of this nightmare, since we all know (or at least should know) that this planet, however slowly, is only going to get ever hotter, as our weather grows ever wilder and more brutal. That, of course, will be especially true if the major countries on this planet continue to be led by figures like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin who simply don’t give a — and it’s an appropriately hellish word — damn about climate change. After all, “my” president has gone out of his way to dismiss the phenomenon, while essentially doing anything he could to further the use of oil, coal, and natural gas. Not surprisingly, he’s also slashing the budget and staff of, and taking a wrecking ball to, the agency in the government that has focused on the climate, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In that sense, though he’s seldom portrayed this way, he’s quite literally the president from hell.

And (no surprise) climate change proved to generally be a hushed-up subject in the congressional races this time around. Likely as not, it won’t even be a significant issue in the next American presidential election either (especially, of course, if Donald Trump does run an unprecedented fourth time for an unprecedented and unconstitutional third term in office).

In truth, we now need the TV, movie, and online equivalents of George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for the climate. It’s as if — because it’s all happening in what passes for slow motion — we can’t fully (or in all too many cases, even partially) take in what’s happening to us and, worse yet, if you’re of a certain age (like me), what’s likely to happen in the undoubtedly far more violently overheating world that our children and grandchildren are likely to experience.

Face it (if only we could!), strange as it may seem, the equivalent of a global atomic war has indeed broken out on this planet, just in slow motion, and it’s time to pay significant attention to it before everything gets so much worse.

If only, back in 1982, readers had been paying more attention to Jonathan Schell when he began to focus on “the fate of the Earth,” we might indeed be in a far different situation today.