Nuclear war: The great before and after
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My Uncle Stew is five years older than I am which, in my mind at least, makes us more like brothers.
At least for the last 70-some years that’s how I’ve always thought of him, my older brother.
We have solved the world’s problems at a kitchen table hundreds of times in hard-fought debate over endless cups of tea. There is, I have realized, a gulf between us. It has nothing to do with personality or the care we have for one another but rather with the dates of our birth.
Stew was born in August of 1942, nine days after the Dieppe raid and I hit the atmosphere July 19, 1947 during the Berlin Airlift.
In between, the world changed irrevocably.
On July 16 1945, Col. Paul Tibbets was perhaps the best bomber pilot in the world. He would need to be when he dropped an object the size of my great aunt’s Steamer trunk on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and obliterated it.
Stew was born in a pre-nuclear time and five years later I arrived at the start of the atomic age.
Think about it. Stew’s war was one with boundaries, finite obstacles. The Nazis weren’t about to cross the Atlantic Ocean and invade North America. The Japanese did, but only a little. In the Aleutian Islands, they bombed Dutch Harbour, home to the crab fishermen of “Deadliest Catch” and occupied the island of Attu. It would cost the Yanks a couple of thousand casualties to retake the barren outpost in a battle long forgotten except for maybe half a dozen old men who were there.
Most North Americans were safe. You weren’t about to travel much; gas was rationed, tires were rationed and the government, knowing they could always count on the public’s collective guilt, put up signs like “Is this trip really necessary?”
The boys overseas would hear of them and ask themselves the same question.
And then, in a flash and an obscene mushroom shaped cloud, all that went away. For the first time since man first walked the Earth he was in constant, mortal danger.
The war fought by Stew’s father (my grandfather) was done over metres; his future brother-in-law (my father) measured his by the mile.
When I was born the front line became obsolete. By the time I was 15 John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were a gnat’s hair away from annihilating us all during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Fortunately, politicians were sane then and most of them had been through a war. Kennedy was “out there” as it was called in hushed tones, across the immense Pacific, and his PT boat would be cut in half by a Japanese destroyer in the middle of the night. Khrushchev had been posted to Stalingrad and knew better than most what a completely devastated city looked like. Now they both retained the means of reducing the world to ashes.
Warnings were issued, ultimatums delivered and still the Russian ships loaded with missiles sailed towards Castro’s island. Kennedy was a master poker player and called the Bear’s bluff, the ships turned back and the world could breathe again.
The monstrous consequences of a nuclear war had shaken both leaders to the core and backchannel talks were initiated in an effort to end, or at least limit the arms race.
Kennedy would be assassinated and Khrushchev replaced by hard-liners and both men’s efforts would go largely unnoticed by history. Had they succeeded, the world might be a vastly different place.
One without madmen and mushroom clouds.
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