The film was famously inspired by the Castle Bravo accident in March 1954, in which the first test of a deliverable hydrogen bomb at the Bikini atoll by the United States resulted in a radiological catastrophe, with a massive and intense fallout plume that required the evacuation of native Marshallese islands and American observers. A Japanese fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (“Fifth Lucky Dragon”), was also accidentally exposed to its fallout, and after returning to port in Tokyo, its crew began to suffer from the characteristic symptoms of radiation poisoning. One of the crew eventually perished. Prior to this, the tuna catch was released to the Japanese fish markets, leading to a public panic as authorities sought to identify the radioactive tuna. The consequence was a temporary boycott on the eating of tuna, a staple of Japanese food, across the country.

The Bravo accident was an important moment for the Japanese public, who were only two years independent of the American Occupation of Japan, under which discussions about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were seriously curtailed, out of fear that they would lead to anti-American or pro-Communist sentiments. Bravo re-opened the issue, centered around (rightly or wrongly) the notion of the Japanese status as atomic victims, a status now doubly implicated. And so Bravo is seen in retrospect as a turning point for the emerging Japanese political movement against nuclear weapons.1

This was, according to those who worked on it, part of the context of deciding to make Gojira, and to make the film and creature a complicated metaphor for nuclear weapons, Japan’s status as a nuclear victim, and even a reminder of Japanese civilian suffering during World War II. I had heard (and taught) this story many times, because it is always interesting in retrospect to see that something that is often dismissed as a rather trivial pop culture phenomena (giant radioactive monsters) be rooted in a much broader political and social movement that can be traced back to a specific event (an American hydrogen bomb test).

But I was recently digging around a bit more in the history of Gojira/Godzilla, and was surprised to discover that Bravo was only half of the equation. The other half was something quite different: another radioactive monster film. What became Gojira was conceived of by its producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, as a merging of the post-Bravo mindset with a now-forgotten American film that had come out the year before, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which has its own radioactive monster going on a rampage. I was also surprised to learn that the working title for Gojira was even The Giant Monster from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was directed by the Russian–French filmmaker Eugène Lourié, produced independently, and distributed by Warner Brothers. A decent quality scan is available to download or stream for free on Archive.org. Its title comes from a short story of the same name by none other than Ray Bradbury which ran in The Saturday Evening Post in 1951.

Bradbury’s story, later anthologized as “The Fog Horn,” has almost nothing to do with the film as made. It was apparently quite popular, and so the filmmakers decided to buy the rights to it for their already-in-production monster movie, but other than a vague similarities and a single scene (involving a light house), the influence of the story feels rather absent. I had gotten my hopes up that one could trace Godzilla back to Ray Bradbury, but it’s a stretch.

The plot of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is as follows (feel free to skip to “THE END” — you’ll see it — if you don’t care about the recap, and just want the analysis). It starts in the arctic (it is later implied to be somewhere near Greenland), where the military and the US Atomic Energy Commission are conducting a nuclear test detonation with the deeply uninspired codename of Operation Experiment. The details of the experiment are unclear, but we see some good stock mushroom cloud footage from the 1940s (one part of the sequence is even cribbed from the Trinity test).2

Afterwards, two AEC scientists go outside to take measurements. One of them sees a gigantic lizard creature, and is so shocked that he falls off of a ledge. The ledge only looks like it is 15 feet tall, and he falls onto snow, so it is perhaps a little silly that this results in an apparently fatal condition. While searching for him, his companion, a German-American physicist named Thomas Nesbitt, also catches sight of the creature, before he is himself injured in an avalanche. Nesbitt is found by others and brought back to the base in poor condition, and quickly relocated back to the United States for treatment.

Nesbitt heals physically over time from his traumatic event, but psychologically everyone thinks that he has perhaps lost his mind. Quite a lot of the film is Nesbitt attempting to convince others that he saw a gigantic lizard monster in the arctic, and them more or less politely suggesting that he must be delusional.

But, of course, we, the audience, know that Nesbitt is not delusional, because we are watching a monster movie. The creature, brought to life by the famed stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen, makes his way south through the water, causing havoc as he goes. He destroys a few boats, and later attacks a lighthouse — the latter being the only real connection to the Ray Bradbury story, which is about a lighthouse that gets attacked by a giant monster. Nesbitt hears of these attacks and connects them with his own story.

Nesbitt contacts Dr. Thurgood Elson, a world-esteemed paleontologist, to ask about whether the creature could have been some kind of dinosaur that had become frozen in the ice, in a state of suspended animation for millions of years, and was awoken by the nuclear testing. Elson points out the many, obvious flaws in this idea. Elson’s assistant, the comely Lee Hunter, however, is intrigued by Nesbitt. She later meets up with him to show him drawings of different dinosaurs, on the off-chance that he can identify his monster. He concludes it was a Rhedosaurus, a (fictional) dinosaur that looks to me like a wingless dragon.

In order to prove that he didn’t imagine the whole thing, Nesbitt and Hunter work to find survivors of the other attacks. Nesbitt eventually connects with one of the sailors, and convinces them to return with him to New York, where, in the presence of Dr. Elson, he looks over the same dinosaur drawings that Nesbitt had and picks out the Rhedosaurus. Elson is convinced and lobbies the military to take Nesbitt’s claims seriously. While briefing the military, Elson notes that plotting the Rhedosaurus attacks on a map shows a definite southern movement, perhaps towards a deep sea canyon where many Rhedosaurus fossils had been found — perhaps an old breeding grounds.

Elson convinces the military to allow him to descend in a diving bell to scout for the Rhedosaurus. After a pointless but extended sequence of a shark fighting an octopus that looks half-real and half-puppet (one wonders if this is recycled footage made for some other film), he finds the lost dinosaur, and is delighted. Of course, it eats him. This is about the 3/4ths of the way through the film — it has taken this long for Nesbitt to be conclusively validated.

The Rhedosaurus soon after surfaces in southern Manhattan and begins wrecking havoc. A police officer shoots it with a pistol and is eaten for his troubles. The Rhedosaurus destroys some cars and crashes through some buildings. Air-raid sirens scream. Crowds flee in a great panic. Somehow the police and military lose sight of the monster. We transition to a newscaster who tells of the lockdown in the city — visualized with news footage of a 1951 Civil Defense exercise in NYC, I would add — and are told that it is “what is already the worst disaster in New York’s history,” with 180 known dead, 1,500 injured, and, god forbid, $300 million dollars in property damage.

The Army mobilizes. When the creature is next spotted, they attack it with heavy weaponry, including a bazooka that actually injures it. It flees, again, and the soldiers pursue. But the creature’s blood makes them mysteriously sick, and it is theorized that it has some kind of prehistoric disease that has also hitched a ride in hibernation across the millions of years. The fear grows that if they kill the creature in some spectacular way, it will spread its plague along with it. Nesbitt proposes that they use a “radioactive isotope” to destroy the monster and “all that diseased tissue” it carries.

The creature next attacks Coney Island. Nesbitt and the army, including a sharpshooter, pursue. (Hunter, Dr. Elson’s attractive assistant, goes along with Nesbitt on most of this, but doesn’t do much other than serve as a growing love interest. He seems only moderately interested.) While the creature is inside a large wooden rollercoaster, Nesbitt (with the isotope) and the sharpshooter done radioactive protection gear and ascend in one of the coaster’s cars. Nesbitt loads the isotope weapon and the sharpshooter fires it into the wound on the creature. While this happens, the rollercoaster car they used to ascend gets out of their control and, somehow, starts a massive fire. Nesbitt and the sharpshooter precariously descend the burning rollercoaster structure.

The creature, although wounded by the isotope, escapes the fire and staggers around. Nesbitt gets a hug and a chaste kiss on the cheek from Hunter. The Rhedosaurus emits a Godzilla-like scream, and then dies. The words “THE END” appear over its corpse. That’s all, folks.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is not that great of a film. The stop-motion animation of the creature is really the only thing it has going for it, and it looks pretty good in the slightly-jerky, slightly-uncanny-valley way that all stop-motion creatures from this era looked.3 Almost all of the creature work is in the last 1/4th of the film, however, and the lead-up to that is rather tedious since we, the audience, know that Nesbitt is not insane and that the creature is real, and we are just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to him.

It is, however, interesting to compare the film with Gojira (meaning specifically the Japanese version from 1954, not the Americanized version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, from 1956). The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms exists in a very different thematic space as Gojira, and a very different relationship to nuclear technology.

Both Gojira and Rhedosaurus are awoken by nuclear testing. But other than one line spoken by Nesbitt right after the test — “What the cumulative effects of all these atomic explosions and tests will be, only time will tell” — there is no real depiction of nuclear weapons as “a problem” in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and Nesbitt is an active and willing contributor in the test experiment that wakes it up. The US has made its own monster, but nobody ever explicitly frames it that way.

By comparison, in Gojira, the nuclear testing is an external force that the Japanese are being subjected to, and nuclear weapons are explicitly invoked as a harmful, threatening aspect of the modern world. I re-watched Gojira after watching The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and it was very clear how overt Gojira is about this. There is a conversation on a Tokyo train later in the film (but before the attack on Tokyo) between several people that goes along these lines:

— “It’s terrible, huh? Atomic sea life, radioactive fallout, and now this Godzilla to top it all off!” […]

— “I guess I’ll have to find a shelter soon.”

—“ Find one for me, too!”

— “The shelters again? That stinks…”

Gojira ties the monster, the atomic testing, nuclear fallout, and the need for shelters together, and “the shelters again?” strikes me as a reference to the sheltering that was done during the firebombing campaign in World War II, less than a decade before. Similarly, later in Gojira someone asks: “Isn’t Godzilla a product of the atomic bomb that still haunts many of us Japanese?”

Gojira also has more subtle allusions. The earliest scenes are of a ship undergoing an unexpected (and at the moment, unexplained) catastrophe — something much closer to the Bravo accident than The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. The attack on the village on Odo Island has scenes from the inside of houses that are collapsing that are strongly evocative of victims’ descriptions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the monster attacks Tokyo, the capital city is set aflame, which to the Japanese at that time must have felt compelled to append the word “again.” Its imagery seems deliberately evocative of these past horrors, in other words, something entirely absent from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Nesbitt, the scientist in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, never renounces his life’s work in any way. He believes that nuclear technology is the future (there is much ado about paleontology being about the past, and nuclear work as being about the future, and this is even turned into flirtatious banter between him and Hunter), and he saves the day thanks to his “isotope.” Yes, the atomic test woke up the Rhedosaurus, but atomic science is also what put it in the ground.

The only “themes” I really detected in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms were about scientists themselves. In particular, Dr. Elson’s death is the result of his own naivety and scientific fascination, his unwillingness to take seriously the threat that he is trying to study. He encourages the military not to try and kill the beast, because of its value to science, and he believes he understands it, because he is studying it. After it eats him, Hunter tells Nesbitt that he really shouldn’t let it bother him too much: “Nobody is to blame. And everybody is to blame. We all did what we thought was right.” I don’t actually think this was meant to be an indictment of a particular mindset, but it feels like it ought to be considered one — the road to hell, and all that.

The death of Gojira is a very different kind of affair. Without getting into all of the details, a different scientist, working in secret, develops a new scientific weapon known as “the Oxygen Destroyer.” But he doesn’t want to use it, because he believes it will lead to a new arms race, to new destruction, and would be “a new super-weapon to throw upon us all!” He finally agrees to use it, but insists on using it himself, and ends up destroying Gojira, himself, and the secret to his new weapon, all in one go. Which is a very different attitude than Nesbitt exhibits towards his “isotope” (“WHICH ISOTOPE?” I mentally screamed every time someone invoked about “the isotope”) or the killing of the Rhedosaurus.

Gojira is also just a better film overall. The story’s pacing is better and clearly better thought-out. In Gojira, the identity and nature of the creature is not at all clear in the beginning of the film, making the investigations into it a collective understanding for both the characters and the audience. Whereas in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the audience pretty much knows what the creature is from the beginning, but there is a long, protracted sequence in which Nesbitt tries to convince others of this fact.

Nesbitt is also just not a very relatable character, and his “role” in Gojira is split into several different characters (including the always wonderful Takashi Shimura, recognizable even to Americans from his appearances in the films of Akira Kurosawa, including his role as the primary samurai in Seven Samurai, which came out the same year as Gojira) who are given far more emotional depth and thematic complexity than Nesbitt. (And nothing is ever done with the fact that Nesbitt is German, for example. Whose side were you on during zie war, Herr Doktor Nesbitt?)

The one place where The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms outshines Gojira, in my opinion, is the creature special effects. Gojira, the monster, does look like a guy in a rubber suit. It detracts from the seriousness of its endeavor. Rhedosaurus, for all of its clumsiness, looks and acts more like a wild animal. But I noticed that there seemed to be many more action shots of Gojira than there were of Rhedosaurus, and I suspect that’s the advantage of a guy in a rubber suit: it’s probably cheaper, and quicker, than having Ray Harryhausen do your special effects for you, and so you can have more of them.

Putting them side by side, it is clear where Gojira took inspiration from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. But it is also just as clear what the creators of Gojira did to turn their film into something much better, by infusing it with the complex cultural associations that the Japanese public had with nuclear weapons, turning a fairly schlocky idea (a monster is awoken by atomic bomb testing and goes on a rampage until put down by scientists) into something that also carries considerable thematic heft.

“Ready!” said the steersman.

The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter. Between its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he bent his head until his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in order to let the air in upon the inducive. Sure of its accessibility, he craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane and judged his pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the side.

“Round,” he whispered inaudibly.

The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a descending column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks, hurled high and sideways and the steersman, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, fought in great banking curves for a balance. The gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his nostrils dilated, his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped. . . .

When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater of a small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation. They were too high to distinguish people clearly, or mark the bomb’s effect upon the building until suddenly the façade tottered and crumbled before the flare as sugar dissolves in water. The man stared for a moment, showed all his long teeth, and then staggered into the cramped standing position his straps permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down after its fellow.

Wells’ “atomic bombs” were not like the fission or fusion explosives that would come in the future. It is somewhat difficult to imagine exactly what he had in mind, as the text is not always entirely clear on it.

The section quoted above mentions an explosion with the appearance of “the crater of a small volcano.” He describes the mechanism in a bit more detail shortly thereafter:

Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them. Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by which the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a blazing continual explosion. […]

[…]once [Carolinum’s] degenerative process had been induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing could arrest it. Of all Hyslop’s artificial elements, Carolinum was the most heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to make and handle. To this day it remains the most potent degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it poured out half of the huge store of energy in its great molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen days’ emission was a half of that first period’s outpouring, and so on. As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum, though every seventeen days its power is halved, though constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays. . . . […]

Once launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and blistering energy, were flung high and far.

And so on, with his faux-technical terms, describing something that is both radioactive and a “continuing explosive.” To me it invokes a mash-up between a radiological weapon (contaminating with radioactivity), an open and erupting volcano, inextinguishable incendiary warfare, and the Sun.

Wells’ ideas about the atomic bomb and atomic energy are traceable to the writings of Frederick Soddy (1877-1956), the easily-overlooked British chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921 for his work on nuclear transmutation with the (much more famous) physicist Ernest Rutherford. Soddy was the first major English-language popularizer of the idea of “atomic energy,” the notion that the newly-discovered phenomena of radioactivity implied that all matter contained huge amounts of latent energy locked into its structure. Whereas radioactive elements tend to leak away their energy steadily, and uncontrollably, Soddy, in popular lectures published as The Interpretation of Radium (1909), imagined a future in which that energy could be released on demand:

This bottle contains about one pound of uranium oxide, and therefore about fourteen ounces of uranium. Its value is about £1. Is it not wonderful to reflect that in this little bottle there lies asleep and waiting to be evolved the energy of about nine hundred tons of coal? The energy in a ton of uranium would be sufficient to light London for a year. The store of energy in uranium would be worth a thousand times as much as the uranium itself, if only it were under our control and could be harnessed to do the world’s work in the same way as the stored energy in coal has been harnessed and controlled. […]

As we have seen, we cannot yet artificially accelerate or influence the rate of disintegration of an element, and therefore the energy in uranium, which requires a thousand million years to be evolved, is practically valueless. On the other hand, to increase the natural rate, and to break down uranium or any other element artificially, is simply transmutation. If we could accomplish the one so we could the other. These two great problems, at once the oldest and the newest in science, are one. Transmutation of the elements carries with it the power to unlock the internal energy of matter, and the unlocking of the internal stores of energy in matter would, strangely enough, be infinitely the most important and valuable consequence of transmutation.

Soddy’s book did not speak of bombs, but its allusions to immense the power contained in the nuclei of atoms were frequent, and many of his examples of such, like the one above regarding the lighting of London, would quickly become standard clichés.1

He describes individual radioactive decay reactions as “explosive” in character, and does at one point make an unusual analogy about how much is unknown about the atomic realm at that point, comparing it to an architect being suddenly told that his everyday bricks could “could with effect be employed as an explosive incomparably more powerful in its activities than dynamite,” but he never warns of radioactivity or atomic energy as a fodder for weaponry. The jump from a new, inexhaustible source of energy to a dread weapon seems to have been Wells’ own.2

In the summer of 1922, various news syndication agencies ran a story that consisted of essentially one long quote from “one of the eminent English scientists” warning of similarly dire possibilities:

We are on the eve of scientific discoveries of so sensational and so far-reaching a character as to render Einstein’s theory, by comparison, child’s play. I predict that within the next five, ten, or at the outside twenty years, men will be able to say, “I have harnessed the atom.” […] The energy stored in such elements as thorium and uranium is stupendous. […] It only needs the knowledge of how to ignite it — how to cause the atoms to break up when we desire — to make this power immediately available. […]

It is conceivable, too, that such terrific force might eventually be liberated as to blow up the world.

Then consider the possibilities of war. The first nation to discover the secret will be in a position to wipe out all the other nations, literally, in a quarter of an hour. It could send over an aeroplane with a 2,000-pound bomb which would have as devastating an effect as that of a million aeroplanes carrying the 2,000-pound bombs in use today. […]

The question is: Which will that nation be?

This article circulated globally, at times accompanied by dramatic headlines, like “EARTH AS A BOMB.”3 Some of the accounts say it was an “eminent Oxford scientist” who provided the story. But who was the “eminent” scientist? It is quite unclear. That the article ran anonymously suggests that whomever the source was, they didn’t want their name publicly attached to the idea. To my knowledge, no one ever came forward later to claim their prescience as the source after the fact.4

In interwar September 1924, Winston Churchill tried his hand at writing about new technological futures in an article with the odd title, “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” Influenced by both H.G. Wells — Churchill claimed to have read all of Wells’ books since The Time Machine immediately as they came out, and multiple times — and his close scientific friend and advisor Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell, Oxford professor), Churchill laid out a his grim sense of coming conflict and the role that science and technology might play in it:

The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending. But up to the present time the means of destruction at the disposal of man have not kept pace with his ferocity. Reciprocal extermination was impossible in the Stone Age. One cannot do much with a clumsy club. […] It was not until the dawn of the twentieth century of the Christian era that War really began to enter into its kingdom as the potential destroyer of the human race. The organization of mankind into great States and Empires and the rise of nations to full collective consciousness enabled enterprises of slaughter to be planned and executed upon a scale and with a perseverance never before imagined.

Churchill warned that the peace of the Great War was likely a temporary one, as “two mighty branches of the European family will never rest content with their existing situation” — Russia and Germany. And just as surely as war will return, Churchill wrote, the technology of mass destruction will continue to evolve:

“Wars,” said a distinguished American to me some years ago, “are fought with Steel: weapons may change, but Steel remains the core of all modern warfare. France has got the Steel of Europe, and Germany has lost it. Here, at any rate, is an element of permanency.” “Are you sure,” I asked, “that the wars of the future will be fought with Steel?” A few weeks later I talked with a German. “What about Aluminium?” he replied. “Some think,” he said, “that the next war will be fought with Electricity.” And on this a vista opens out of electrical rays which could paralyse the engines of a motor-car, could claw down aeroplanes from the sky, and conceivably be made destructive of human life or human vision. Then there are Explosives. Have we reached the end? Has Science turned its last page on them? May there not be methods of using explosive energy incomparably more intense than anything heretofore discovered? Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings — nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp, or dockyard?

Churchill further worried that such weapons could allow “a base, degenerate, immoral race” of people to “make an enemy far above them in quality” their slaves on the basis of their possessing and being willing to use novel technological weapons.5

I don’t believe that Churchill’s article had a major public impact on the thinking about “atomic bombs,” but it doesn’t really need to have: it reflects that this discourse about science fiction weaponry had made it to what would very soon be the highest echelons of public policy in at least the United Kingdom (Churchill was on the political “outs” in 1924, but would soon come back), and joined into security debates. Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Adolf Hitler in particular shared a common belief in the value of “wonder weapons” produced by scientific research, a shared “lesson” of the Great War for all of them. It is part of the context of why each of these nations were willing, to differing degrees, entertain the possibilities of fantastical wartime research, including atomic research.

There were other minor references to “atomic bombs” across the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the discovery of nuclear fission. The most important and perhaps famous inspiration was that of the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who famously credited H.G. Wells for his development of the concept of the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, over five years before the discovery of nuclear fission. He later described it this way:6

In 1932, while I was still in Berlin, I read a book by H. G. Wells. It was called The World Set Free. This book was written in 1913, one year before the World War, and in it H.G. Wells describes the discovery of artificial radioactivity and puts it in the year of 1933, the year in which it actually occurred. He then proceeds to describe the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale for industrial purposes, the development of atomic bombs, and a world war which was apparently fought by an alliance of England, France, and perhaps including America, against Germany and Austria, the powers located in the central part of Europe. […] The book made a very great impression on me, but I didn’t regard it as anything but fiction.

I was no longer thinking about [H. G. Well’s book] until I found myself in London about the time of the British Association [meeting] in September 1933. I read in the newspapers a speech by Lord [Ernest] Rutherford. He was quoted as saying that he who talks about the liberation of atomic energy on an industrial scale is talking moonshine. This sort of set me pondering as I was walking the streets of London, and I remember that I stopped for a red light at the intersection of Southampton Row. As I was waiting for the light to change and as the light changed to green and I crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large a mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction. I didn’t see at the moment just how one would go about finding such an element, or what experiments would be needed, but the idea never left me. In certain circumstances it might become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs. The thought that this might in fact be possible became sort of an obsession with me. […]

In the spring of 1934 I had applied for a patent which described the laws governing such a chain reaction. This was the first time, I think, that the concept of critical mass was developed and that a chain reaction was seriously discussed. Knowing what this would mean—and I knew it because I had read H. G. Wells—I did not want this patent to become public.

It isn’t that Wells’ book gave Szilard any strong technical inspiration — Carolinum, it isn’t. Szilard’s neutron-based chain reaction is his own. But Wells did clearly provoke Szilard’s imagination about atomic bombs, and helped frame how he thought they might matter if they were possible. And thus Szilard’s first impulse was towards secrecy, towards believing that such a chain reaction would be vastly important development for humankind. And that impulse set off its own historical chain reaction, leading to Hiroshima, the H-bomb, and beyond.7

Szilard didn’t have a candidate reaction for his concept of the chain reaction, and while he did some research to search for one, he ended up essentially shelving the question for several years. Nuclear fission was discovered by Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Fritz Strassman, and Otto Frisch in late 1938, and became global news in early 1939. The moment that Szilard heard about the discovery, he was ready to understand what it might mean:8

[The physicist Eugene] Wigner told me of Hahn’s discovery. Hahn found that uranium breaks into two parts when it absorbs a neutron; this it the process which we call fission. When I heard this I saw immediately that these fragments, being heavier than corresponds to their charge, must emit neutrons, and if enough neutrons are emitted in this fission process, then it should be, of course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.

This is also one of the clearest examples we have of the complicated relationship between scientific research (radioactivity, transmutation), scientific popularization (Soddy), science fiction (Wells), a feedback loop back into scientific inspiration (Szilard), and broader policy decisions (Churchill).

The pre-fission history of atomic bombs is important, not just for Szilard, but for a vast number of other people, including scientists, statesmen, and the everyday public. It created a context for understanding what “atomic bomb” even meant prior to their invention, and towards thinking about the idea of a vastly powerful science-borne weapon as a possible concrete reality. It is why, in 1945, when the United States announced that it had invented an “atomic bomb,” people understood immediately that this meant a vastly powerful, possibly game-changing weapon, and not, say, a very tiny explosive.

The atomic bomb in Wells’ book may have been “strange even to the men who used them,” but Wells’ book made the concept considerably less strange than it might have otherwise been.

For post-nuclear apocalypses, the trope frequently takes the form of the survivors having only the dimmest or confused memories of what a nuclear weapon actually is. In Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), this manifests as a hidden, subterranean religion carried on by mutant human survivors who worship a massive Doomsday bomb emblazoned with the symbols for Alpha and Omega. In Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), the memory persists linguistically as the “Bad Time.”

One of the works that engages with this question of forgetting in a sustained way is Walker M. Miller, Jr.’s, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). The novel is a compilation of three short stories (written independently but then “fixed up” into a singular story) that looks at three distinct far-future periods after a nuclear war. As with the Roman Empire, some institutions have survived the fall: notably, the Catholic Church, that enduring institution.2 In the novel, the Church once again becomes a repository for old knowledge, which, over the course of many centuries, leads to the reinvention of a technological civilization — and to yet another nuclear war.

This cyclical (and perhaps cynical) message is at some intersection of a statement about human nature and technological inevitabilities: once invented, the bomb cannot be un-invented, and once they have the bomb, humans will inevitably use it again, it is just a matter of time. It would be an interesting variant to imagine the same story but without the Church’s role; is the problem that the knowledge was preserved, or would that rediscovery have been inevitable eventually anyway?

A relevant and provocative argument from the sociology of nuclear technology can be found in Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi’s “Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1995.3 The argument that MacKenzie and Spinardi make is about the nature of knowledge and forgetting, and its possible relevance to nuclear weapons.

The core of the argument revolves around an idea that was by then quite common in the sociology of science and technology known a tacit knowledge. They explain the distinction early on in the article:

Explicit knowledge is information or instructions that can be formulated in words or symbols and, therefore, can be stored, copied, and transferred by impersonal means, such as in written documents or computer files. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge that has not been (and perhaps cannot be) formulated explicitly and, therefore, cannot effectively be stored or transferred entirely by impersonal means. Motor skills supply a set of paradigmatic examples of tacit knowledge in everyday life. Most of us, for example, know perfectly well how to ride a bicycle yet would find it impossible to put into words how we do so. There are (to our knowledge) no textbooks of bicycle riding, and when children are taught to ride, they are not given long lists of written or verbal instructions. Instead, someone demonstrates what to do and encourages them in the inevitably slow and error-ridden process of learning for themselves.

Anything you can communicate by writing down is explicit: the Pythagorean theorem and instructions on how to use it, for example. Or a nuclear weapons blueprint. But not all knowledge is of this form. “Tacit” means wordless — it is knowledge that you feel in your hands, in your body, in your experience. Riding a bicycle, as above, is the paradigmatic example.

One could write down how to ride a bicycle, but reading that description would not make one capable of doing it. Indeed, the best text about how to ride a bicycle is essentially one that gives instruction as to how to teach oneself how to ride a bicycle:

1. Acquire a bicycle.

2. Understand that the goal will be to continually propel it forward while balancing on top of it and turning the pedals with your feet, in a forward “running” motion. Your hands will need to turn the front wheel to change direction. Observing someone else doing this first would help. You will be continually shifting your balance to maintain stability.

3. Attempt to do this over and over again until your brain figures out how to coordinate your movements and balance in a way that gives you control over the bicycle. You will fail frequently in the beginning. Wear a helmet.

This isn’t really a recipe that you can just follow, it is a program for education, and the actual acquisition of the understanding will come when some nebulous connections “click” in the brain. And like so many things involving tacit knowledge, you can’t really forget it either: if you go 10 years without riding a bicycle, you can still probably do it, you will not need to re-learn anything.

I think the above description gets at both the benefits and difficulties of this term. It does seem to describe certain kinds of knowledge well, although the barriers between it an explicit knowledge are not as iron-clad as they may at first seem. Just because something is tacit does not mean it cannot be learned or taught, it just means that the written word is insufficient for doing it by itself. A lot of what we call experience and know-how is tacit knowledge: the kinds of embodied understandings that one gets over time with close familiarity with any subject that goes well beyond what one can find in a textbook. And this is why, incidentally, “experience” matters so much more than formal knowledge in most contexts: because we recognize there is a difference between “mere book-learning” and “hands-on work.”

Ask anyone who has gotten a post-graduate higher degree and they will tell you that most of the “work” of that experience is essentially an apprenticeship where one “learns by doing.” This doesn’t negate the value of book learning — you need that, too, for a lot of things — but it emphasizes that true mastery isn’t just the book learning, it’s the tacit knowledge, too.

So what is the relevance to nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons are complex technical artifacts that require even more complex technical artifacts to produce the components that make them work. As a whole, “nuclear weapons” aren’t even just the weapons themselves, but the entire large technical system that is required for them to exist and be sustained. Obviously many of the technical details of these systems can be, and are, written down. But MacKenzie and Spinardi argue that much of their production must also be in the form of tacit knowledge, locked up in the heads and hands of the people who build and maintain them.

The article, written in that immediate post-Cold War glow, asks the question: what if nuclear weapons are never tested again? What if, after decades of not making them, the tacit knowledge is lost? It is not fanciful, as an idea. Indeed, MacKenzie and Spinardi base their argument itself on interviews with weapons laboratory scientists at the time who voiced exactly this kind of concern, fearing that the future generations of scientists would become increasingly distant from the hard-earned experience needed to even maintain nuclear weapons capabilities, much less imagine innovate in them.

Are there any examples of this happening? The most concrete example of this “forgetting” actually happening is with a mysterious substance known as Fogbank. Fogbank was a classified component used inside certain US thermonuclear weapons. As one weapons worker put it: “The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified.” It was later indicated that it is an “interstage material,” used in the transferring of energy from the fission primary to the thermonuclear secondary inside a multi-stage nuclear weapon. It is also clear that it is fairly exotic: it is not something used in many other contexts, or produced regularly, and has apparently rather unusual properties.

Whatever it is, the point of bringing up Fogbank is because the US government “forgot” how to produce it. As a Los Alamos publication put it:4

Produced by skilled hands during the 1980s, Fogbank is an essential material in the W76 warhead. During the mid-1990s, Fogbank production ceased and the manufacturing facility was dismantled. As time passed, the precise techniques used to manufacture Fogbank were forgotten.

When it came time to refurbish the W76, Fogbank had to be remanufactured or replaced. In 2000, [the National Nuclear Security Agency] decided to reestablish the manufacture of Fogbank. Officials chose to manufacture Fogbank instead of replacing it with an alternate material because Fogbank had been successfully manufactured and historical records of the production process were available. Moreover, Los Alamos computer simulations at that time were not sophisticated enough to determine conclusively that an alternate material would function as effectively as Fogbank.

Although Fogbank is a difficult material to manufacture, scientists soon discovered that restoring the manufacturing capability would prove an even greater challenge. Scientists faced two major challenges:

• most personnel involved with the original production process were no longer available, and

• a new facility had to be constructed, one that met modern health and safety requirements.

Despite efforts to ensure the new facility was equivalent to the original one, the resultant equipment and processing methods failed to produce equivalent Fogbank. The final product simply did not meet quality requirements.

The full article explains (in ever-elliptical descriptions) that the scientists went back into the archives to look at the historical data on Fogbank’s production, discovering that there were indications of similar problems in the past. They found that maintaining a specific level of “impurity” was partially responsible for the quality of the final product, but that the historical records gave no indication about how that was accomplished.

They ultimately discovered that it was actually their newer processes that were causing the issue: they were doing too good a job of removing impurities that would otherwise have been in the original material. The later scientists ultimately discovered that the earlier scientists who knew how to make Fogbank were not themselves totally aware of what it was that was contributing to its success: “The historical Fogbank production process was unknowingly based on this essential chemical being present in the feed material.” Which is an interesting wrinkle on the question of forgetting: the original “knowers” likely have incomplete knowledge themselves!

So can one un-invent the bomb? MacKenzie and Spinardi say, perhaps: one could deliberately un-invent the bomb, by eliminating them and destroying the records of how to make them, but one could also accidentally un-invent the bomb, by simply not making more of them and maintaining that store of tacit knowledge to adequate levels.

The authors try not to overstate the case, though. They acknowledge that there more-or-less simpler ways to make nuclear weapons than the most advanced varieties that make up the bulk of the warheads currently in the world, that there is considerable overlap in some aspects of weapons knowledge with other fields of knowledge, and would certainly not argue that even an “un-invented” technology could not be re-invented. We may not know exactly what the ancient recipe for Greek Fire was, but that has not stopped people from developing other kinds of incendiary weapons.

Still, the argument an interesting and provocative one, even as it raises some obvious objections. There are ways to reduce dependence on tacit knowledge, for instance: that is exactly what many instruments and machines are invented to do, it is the nature of automation.

As a very simple example, a 3D printer is a machine that reduces the tacit knowledge required to manufacture certain kinds of small components. Instead of learning how to sculpt a small figure out of plastic, I can instead take a data file (explicit knowledge) and command the printer to make me the figure. Even this will have some tacit component — I gather than using 3D printers well requires some hard-earned experience — but now we’ve shifted the tacit component from one domain (sculpting plastic) to another (maintaining the machine), and probably reduced it (becoming a competent sculptor takes years of specialized experience; learning to keep a printer functioning probably does not).

Are we locked into these technologies forever? Even after, as A Canticle for Leibowitz suggests, the technologies may have destroyed the civilization that produces them? It is a grim thought. One hopes not. The idea is what my colleague Benoît Pelopidas calls nuclear eternity, and is implicitly built into many discussions about nuclear weapons, even by those who argue against them, without being interrogated.5

One can imagine ways out of the bind. Despite widespread believe that technology has its own driving momentum, technologies do not exist for their own sake. Their creation and maintenance requires an immense about of work and effort. If you have doubt about that, you don’t have to trust the historians or sociologists, just look at the budget requests for “modernization” of American nuclear weapons: if the US does pledge billions, perhaps trillions, for ongoing maintenance and improvements, then its arsenal will wither away to nothingness. While presented as a problem to be (expensively) solved, it is actually a rather encouraging idea, restoring a much-needed sense of human agency to these conversations. As abstract as they seem, nuclear weapons are still just machines.

There are many variations of this conundrum that have been explored in well-known and often well-loved films. Some of these films have themselves come to embody these problems expertly: Dr. Strangelove (1964) evokes the mad generals and the Doomsday Machine; WarGames (1983) raises the problems of automation, cyberattacks, and artificial intelligence; it is too soon to know if House of Dynamite (2025) will have such a cultural relevance, but if it does, perhaps it will be about the problems of attribution, confusion, and the short time-scales for nuclear decision-making.

By Dawn’s Early Light (1990) is not a well-known or well-loved film. It was an HBO “original movie” — read: made-for-television film, before HBO got good at such things — about the conduct of nuclear war. In almost every respect it is a very Cold War film, having been adapted from William Prochnau’s Trinity’s Child (1983), with a little bit of Glastnost window-dressing adding to keep it slightly topical.

I recently tried to explain the plot to someone briefly, and he seemed outright skeptical that I was relating it correctly, as it is a bit over the top. The basics are thus: the US detects a nuclear missile launch from Turkey to the Soviet Union which it has not ordered. The Soviets launch a number of their own missiles in retaliation at the USA. The Soviet president tells the American president that they determined, belatedly, that the Turkish missiles were launched by anti-Soviet separatists, but that automated Soviet defensive systems assumed they were in a war with the United States. The President is encouraged to stand down, but the Soviets will also agree to accepting a retaliation in kind, and end the conflict thence. Should the United States engage a larger counterattack, then the Soviet Union will escalate as well.

Thus far, this is something of a reverse Fail-Safe (1964) situation, which is not a terrible concept. Things start to go off the rails soon after. The President (played by Martin Landau) is apparently incapable of basic self-preservation and allows himself to get both partially nuked at the White House and later apparently dies when his helicopter encounters another Soviet nuclear detonation.

This causes a search for the next legal successor, who is an utterly unqualified Secretary of the Interior, who is given the code-name “Condor.” Having assumed the President’s duties onboard TACAMO — a presidential airplane equipped for nuclear war fighting — Condor quickly shows himself to be obsessed with “winning” the nuclear war and with little interest in deescalation.

A belligerent Colonel Fargo (Rip Torne), who is clearly regarded as an extremist by his military contemporaries, feeds Condor’s paranoia and desire for ultimate justice, encouraging him to issue a strike on Soviet command and control. The head of the Strategic Air Command, code-named “Alice” (James Earl Jones), himself on board Looking Glass (another command and control airplane), believes this is madness, but passes on the orders anyway.

A large part of the film is focused on the crew of a particular B-52 bomber, code named Polar Bear 1, that is scrambled in the early part of the crisis. Its crew are surprisingly dysfunctional, apparently having not prepared much for the job of thermonuclear war, or unable to deal with the stress of it. The pilot (Powers Boothe) and his co-pilot (Rebecca De Mornay) are engaged in an illicit sexual relationship (“fraternization”).

Over the course of their part of the film, they are attacked by Soviet MiGs (which they defeat and evade) and penetrate Soviet airspace. They are given the orders to conduct the strike on Soviet command and control. The co-pilot refuses to carry them out, claiming that they are madness — if you kill their leaders, who will be able to stop the war? The pilot demands compliance, to the point of offering the co-pilot a cyanide tablet, but ultimately backs down and agrees to turn the bomber back.

This, in turn, leads to one of the crew members who had previously exhibited some mental instability to attempt to take over the plane (calling them cowards), a situation that resolves itself when he uses an ejector-seat to (presumably) commit suicide, which ejects the other crew as well. And thus the pilot and co-pilot find themselves the only people on the plane.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the original President has not died, but was just injured, and was taken to a FEMA bunker. He regains consciousness (but has lost his eyesight), and attempts to wrestle back control of the situation. Having seen Polar Bear 1 turn back, the Soviets turned back some of their own bombers as well, as a sign of mutual desire for deescalation. In several hours, however, US submarines will surface to receive their own launch orders, which the Secretary of the Interior has given.

The President contacts the Secretary of the Interior, but cannot convince him to relinquish control — because the Secretary of the Interior doesn’t want to, we understand — and as the President’s copy of the authentication codes was lost in the attack that took his eyesight he cannot simply override him. Ultimately. the President contrives a way to issue his own orders to the submarines, but if the submarines receive two sets of contradictory orders, they will default to orders for war. Still with me?

To resolve this, the SAC commander, “Alice,” agrees to ram Looking Glass into TACAMO. This, however, appears to be impossible, as the Secretary of the Interior’s aircraft is too far away for Looking Glass to catch up to it before the final deadline, but the pilot on TACAMO aircraft realizes what is happening and turns his plane so that Looking Glass can collide with it, giving a final salute to “Alice.”

Having destroyed the Secretary of the Interior, the President’s orders to cease hostilities (apparently, somehow) go into effect.

Meanwhile, Polar Bear 1 was confronted by US forces who had been ordered (by the Secretary of the Interior) to shoot it out of the sky, but circumstances conspire to spare them. They fly eastward into the sunrise.

As a film, this is not that great. It probably works better as a mass-market paperback of the Tom Clancy variety; it certainly has that feel to it, and, at least according to Wikipedia, it is a relatively faithful adaptation. The acting is adequate. The overall feel is fairly cheap: most of the action takes place in a few cramped rooms (a very limited number of sets), with the action shots being obviously model planes or limited to computer screen readouts that are narrated by the characters. There is one nuclear mushroom cloud, but it is clearly a matte painting with a model plane in front of it. It definitely feels like a made-for-TV movie of this era.

The question to ask, I think, is not “is this a good film” — no, not really — but rather, what are the anxieties that this particular take on nuclear war represent? And in this department, if you get away from the rather silly aspects (planes ramming other planes, etc.), it does end up probing some interesting issues.

The first and most obvious one is the initiating attack: a separatist group (non-state actor) somehow hijacking an existing nuclear weapon and using it to provoke a nuclear war between major powers. Similar plots exist, although I primarily associate these with the post-Cold War (e.g., Clancy’s Sum of All Fears, 1991). So neither the 1983 source material nor the 1990 HBO adaptation are really behind the times on that one. This particular plot combines the non-state-actor provocation with an attribution problem and an automated defense system, so that is wrapping up a few anxieties into one package.

But that isn’t really what the film is about; that is just what kicks it off, and it doesn’t get talked about much after it happens. What the film is really about is the psychological state of people involved with nuclear weapons choices. I appreciate that it focused on both a “high” and “low” aspect of this question. The “high” involves the people at the very top of the chain of the command, like the President, the Secretary of the Interior, the top generals and colonels. The “low” are the people in charge of actually dropping the bombs, the B-52 crew.

On the “high” end of the chain of command, the problem one of appropriate judgment (prudence), madness, and the problem of succession during time of war. A Secretary of the Interior is not chosen for that role on the basis of their ability to conduct a nuclear crisis, even though they are indeed eighth in the line of succession. It is bad enough, perhaps, that a single person — the President — has this responsibility (for any President, really), but to then contemplate how eighteen other people might handle suddenly being put into that situation is, well, rather heavy.

In the case of the film, jostling for authority among the high end of the chain of command provides much of the film’s dramatic material. And who is to say how anyone would react to such a situation? In the film, many millions of Americans have already been killed by the war in practically an instant — how would any of us react to that, given these terrible options?

On the “low” end of the chain of command, the problem is multiple. How will a bomber crew react to learning that its home base has been eliminated, and any family it had behind are likely dead? Will they continue to function as a cohesive unit? How will they react to opening up their orders and finding them to be something they judge as madness? And how will the personal relationships between these crewmembers affect these discussions, if they happen at all?

Wikipedia says that in the original book, the pilot and co-pilot, though of mixed sex, are not in a relationship, and that this was an alteration made for the film. It is an interesting choice, as it evokes another common anxiety about how men and women would interact in military situations generally. In this case, it is the female co-pilot who refuses to go through with the orders that she believes will lead to madness, and the male pilot who initially insists upon following them, but relents when faced with the possibility of his lover’s individual death. These are, of course, pretty stock gender roles, but the question they are trying to get at — that individual relations and states of mind may play a role in how these sorts of things work in practice — are interesting ones.

Ultimately, the plot feels too contrived, and the bomber drama feels, well, unrealistic. The bomber crew in particular do not feel much like actual military personnel to me: they seem barely prepared, at least mentally, for their mission, and I just do not find it very believable that they would refuse to follow out these kinds of orders. Millions of Americans have died by this point; they know this. As far as they know, the escalation has already occurred. At that point, even one of their own crewmembers has died from the fighting. What are the odds that they are going to get moralizing? Much less turn back? What are they even turning back to? Even they do not know.

Still, the value of centering that part of the “action” around a bomber crew is that they do have some time to deliberate, their actions are not wholly automatic, and they could, in principle, rebel. It’s much harder to imagine ICBM launch commanders doing that sort of thing. There is a decent exchange to this point between the pilot and the copilot: “You would have turned a Minuteman key without thinking!” “They gave me time to think.”

Could one imagine some kind of struggle for authority playing out at the higher levels, in the event of a contested succession? Could we imagine someone utterly unqualified for the job aligning him or herself with escalatory elements, and ignoring the suggestions from other military officers? Could we imagine those senior generals following such orders anyway? These are trickier questions, and perhaps the more interesting ones, ultimately. They are rendered a little ridiculous in the film by making both “Condor” and Fargo so over-the-top — you’re never really tempted to agree with them at all. When Fargo pushes to “cut off the head of the Soviet chicken,” you are not tempted to see that as the product of a rational mind.

By Dawn’s Early Light isn’t in the running to be considered a great nuclear crisis film, but it’s not the worst possible nuclear crisis film, either. It raises a few interesting issues and has its moments, if you are willing to overlook the plot contrivances and the very obvious budget limitations (which necessarily means that no sense of what is happening “on the ground” is possible).

The film was surprisingly well-received at the time (although the reviews seem to be cutting it quite a lot of slack given its relatively humble made-for-TV status), although it doesn’t seem to have had much of any lasting impact on the cultural zeitgeist. It has not aged particularly well, and comes off as cheaply-made and fairly hokey. Still, some of the issues it gestures at — if you can focus on them and not the “thriller” contrivances — are interesting ones.

It makes for a curious pairing when watched alongside House of Dynamite (2025), Fail-Safe (1964), and other films that have tried to capture the psychological aspects of a failure of nuclear deterrence and the horrible choices that they may require.

It’s not that Gibson’s work was uniquely dystopian, or the idea of “science fiction in a world full of dirt and decay” was so unheard of itself — the aesthetic of the original Star Wars is also a juxtaposition of the worn-out and the futuristic — but Gibson’s rendering of a future based around digital computation, urban sprawl and pollution, cybernetic humans, rogue artificial intelligences, and a political environment where faceless and shadowy corporate organizations matter more than nation states, still feels fresh.

What Gibson does so well, in his ice-cold prose, is the act of juxtaposition: it’s the intermingling of the high-tech and the low-world, globally distributed. It’s one generation’s marvels turning into the next generation’s normal, and eventually, their trash. It’s a world of in which the future and the past are intimately mingled, often glitchy, never quite as utopian as one might want to believe. It is an aesthetic that we see all around us, all the time, these days — intentional, and not.

(Above: Accidental cyberpunk in a Whole Foods parking lot, Edgewater, New Jersey.)

Most of Gibson’s books do not concern themselves with apocalypse, though. Neuromancer and the rest of his Sprawl trilogy — Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) —  are set in a world that one might not want to live in, but they’re hardly worlds that have ended, either in a positive “End of History” sense (in which the world has settled into generally positive a post-political state) or a negative “End of the World” sense. The wheel of history continues to grind on in the Sprawl, for better and worse — it is not static.

Gibson has two other trilogies after the Sprawl (Bridge and Blue Ant), neither of which are apocalyptic, either. If anything, Gibson’s work could be said to get progressive less dire, the further away one gets from Neuromancer.

But his current trilogy, known as the Jackpot, of which only two books have yet come out (the next is vaguely hinted to come out later this year), is of a very different nature. The Peripheral (2014) the first in the series (and perhaps the best so far), takes place in two interconnected time periods: a possible future only a few decades from the present one, and another future set some seventy years beyond the first, whose agents are capable (I am being deliberately vague here) of communicating and interacting with the past. Let us call these “future A” and “future B” to distinguish them.1

The jackpot is what happens between “future A” and “future B.” It is simply called “the jackpot” (uncapitalized) in the book, and of course it is only people in “future B” who are aware of it. It is the disaster — Gibson’s apocalypse, of sorts.

So what is the jackpot?

The term, taken literally, is of course associated with winning, and gambling. It conjures to mind the wheels of a slot machine, each spinning, spinning, spinning, until, by some lucky whim of chance, they all independently align for the big, noisy, exciting payout.

Except, of course, if one tells you that “jackpot” is a negative, horrific thing, then the meaning shifts: what was once lucky becomes unlucky, and the loud clamor of lights, bells, shouting, and the clink of coins transform into something else —  sirens and breaking glass, perhaps.

Gibson’s yet-unpublished third book may elaborate more on the nature of the jackpot in his fictional world — it is apparently going to be simply titled Jackpot — but the basic conceit of the idea as it appears in The Peripheral is that in between future A and future B, the world undergoes a dramatic change. It’s not a single event — no instant moment of horribleness, no monolithic threat, no singular moment of “payout.” It is, as a post-jackpot character describes it (via a plot device I am deliberately not-elaborating on) to a pre-jackpot character “it was no one thing”:

And first of all that it was no one thing. That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns […] or else were eaten alive by something caused by the big event. Not like that.

It was androgenic, he [post-jackpot] said, and she [pre-jackpot] knew from Ciencia Loca and National Geographic that that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late.

The jackpot is what scholars call a slow disaster. I really like how Scott Gabriel Knowles, a historian of disasters, talks about the concept slow disasters in this article of his from 2020:

The Anthropocene is also a disaster, but a slow one, moving according to a different temporal logic. The traditional definition of disaster describes an overwhelming event delimited by spatiotemporal limits that are tightly bounded with clear cause-and-effect relationships. “Slow disaster” is a way to think about disasters not as discrete events but as long-term processes linked across time.

The slow disaster stretches both back in time and forward across generations to indeterminate points, punctuated by moments we have traditionally conceptualized as “disaster,” but in fact claim much more life, health, and wealth across time than is generally calculated. The slow disaster is the time scale at which technological systems decay and posttraumatic stress grinds its victims; this is the scale at which deferred maintenance of infrastructure takes its steady toll, often in ways hard to sense or monetize until a disaster occurs in “event time.” The experience of war victims fits the concept well, as does the process of climate change, sea level rise, the intensification of coastal flooding, and heat waves.2

Slow disasters aren’t the ones that populate most disaster films or post-apocalyptic media. But the major catastrophe of our time — the Anthropocene generally, whatever this late-20th and early-21st century modernity is shaping into — is the slow disaster.

This isn’t to discount the possibilities of fast disasters. Nuclear war could still happen, along with a lot of other things that would produce disastrous effects over the course of days or hours. But what the idea of the slow disaster is getting at is that we should see many things that we tend to chalk up to just be “social or environmental problems” as being similarly devastating, just on a stretched-out timescale. This is, incidentally, how serious historians today think about some of the “major disasters” of the far past — the “fall of the Roman Empire,” inasmuch as historians are willing to talk about it as a “fall” at all (it’s a long story), was a slow disaster, a multi-causal transformation spread out over centuries, not just one night of Visigoths and fire in Rome.

So what does Gibson have in mind for specifics of the jackpot? He leaves it deliberately, and I think appropriately, vague:

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now [in future A], collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.

This is evocative and disturbing, more so than attributing it to any one cause. If you are being threatened by a singular force, you can imagine a singular response. If you’re being threatened by a non-linear world whose complexity has outstripped its capacity to handle it, who has for centuries taken for granted that its resources were infinitely exploitable when they were in fact plainly not, and a civilization that has created political and economic entities that are capable of destroying the world but not saving it… there’s no obvious solution there.

The character in future A who is hearing about Jackpot isn’t really surprised by it:

So now, in her day [future A], he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway.

And we’re not surprised by it either, really, are we? This is all the stuff that informed people today simultaneously worry about and ignore to varying degrees.

And how do we ignore it? Sometimes by just focusing on our day-to-day (what else can we do?), sometimes by hoping that somewhere, somehow, a fix will be found. The most common fix, of course, is the technological one — maybe we’ll discover something that makes these problems just go away. Gibson’s Jackpot has an interesting take on that, too:

But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before, nanotechnology that was more than just car paint that healed itself or camo crawling on a ball cap. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

The culmination of the jackpot, which unfolds over five decades or so, is a dramatically depopulated world: 80% of the human population dies off. Apocalyptic by any definition. And yet, those 20% of survivors live in a technologically-impressive, wealth-abundant future.

This is both necessary for the plot of the book (how else does “future B” have the technology to communicate and meddle with “future A”), but it also is a very direct argument for the idea that even if scientific and technological progress keeps going on, it will be insufficient in the face of such broad system collapse.

It is both a perversion of the faith in techno-salvation while also, in its own way, an embrace of it. And it is not without historical precedent: how many narratives about the Black Death are about how the transformed world afterwards ended up ultimately being much the better? What is not our narrative about World War II than one about how despite the horror and atrocity and tragedy, the survivors ended up being healthier, wealthier, and vastly more powerful? It is reminiscent of how economists sometimes talk about vast social disruptions, like those brought about by automation: yes, it’s pretty bad for you now, but don’t worry, on the aggregate, in the future, everyone will be much happier on average.

But Gibson’s post-jackpot is no utopia; the jackpot had lasting consequences to how people organized themselves. Human society was part of the cause of the jackpot, and it didn’t come out of it necessarily having learned the “right” lessons:

None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. The richest had gotten richer, there being fewer to own whatever there was. Constant crisis had provided constant opportunity. That was where his world had come from, he said. At the deepest point of everything going to shit, population radically reduced, the survivors saw less carbon being dumped into the system, with what was still being produced eaten by these towers they’d built […]. And seeing that, for them, the survivors, was like seeing the bullet dodged.

“The bullet was the eighty percent, who died?”

And he just nodded […] and went on, about how London, long since the natural home of everyone who owned the world but didn’t live in China, rose first, never entirely having fallen. […]

“Who runs it, then?”

“Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies provided conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal, according to its critics. Such as they are.”

In other words, as the world came apart, liberal democracy utterly failed. What rose in its place was “the klept,” oligarchical forces who were able, through graft and violence, to seize power in chaos. Where Gibson’s Sprawl books imagine centralized cyberpunk dystopian power as being along the pattern of Japanese zaibatsus, with a tinge of yakuza, “the klept” seems modeled on Putin’s Russia, and the model they have, with some success, managed to export Westward.

It must be said that Gibson’s work is definitely not an attempt to predict the future. It is self-consciously a commentary on our early 21st-century anxieties. What makes Gibson good at this is that he’s capable of diagnosing anxieties that the bulk of us feel but often haven’t quite gotten around to articulate. I find it very telling that Neuromancer, a book that has been vastly influential in how we think about the darker potentials of a deeply-digital future, and at times feels prophetic, was written on a mechanical typewriter, by someone who did not own a computer. As he later wrote:

Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they’re about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they’re actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer.

Similarly, the Jackpot books (so far) are not really about climate change, or a deeply-nuanced argument about the correlations between corruption, authoritarianism, and generalized collapse. It’s a book about that anxious, nagging feeling that many of us have had for the last decade and a half (or so) that perhaps the best days are not ahead for us as a civilization, but that the end of the world won’t be some obvious event, but a slow decline. Of a thousand little tragedies, all seemingly disconnected from any singular force, but linked by a shared context.

The fast disasters are terrifying enough, but one can imagine tackling them. Avoiding nuclear war, even in these dark days for arms control, still seems to me like an infinitely easier problem than solving the overlapping challenges of our unfolding slow disasters. Only a handful of states have nuclear weapons. They are governed, at least nationally, by laws. They are highly centralized, difficult to produce, and can be monitored from afar. They’re just machines, in the end, that can be taken apart. And there is some logic, however unreliable, mitigating against their use. All of these things make them much easier problems to tackle than climate change, poverty, ecological collapse, the rise of an oligarchical class, and so on.

So where does that leave us? Gibson’s Jackpot books, so far, are not unrelentingly dark at all. They contain within their plots the possibility for change, for course correction. Neither futures (A or B) are truly written in stone.

Knowles’ article on slow disasters concludes:

Or is there another option [beyond Anthropogenic collapse]? I don’t think any of us would be willing to work on slow disaster and Anthropocene research if we didn’t actually, maybe quietly, hold onto the idea that a course correction is possible, that a path away from the apocalypse is at hand, that we don’t have to die in the Anthropocene after all, that the field notes of the Anthropocenic DMZ excavation may indeed someday be collected by a person visiting a wildlife refuge.

To imagine such a thing, Knowles argues, it will at a minimum require us to think about these disasters correctly. If we only prepare for fast disasters, and do not understanding how systemic problems evolve into grand-if-slow disasters, then we will be lost. This is, I think, the social value of Gibson’s jackpot: not a prediction, but a warning.

My interest in Ing is the “Survivalist” novel he published in 1983, Pulling Through. This is, let us be clear, a bad book. But it is amazing as an historical artifact, in its own way. Let us just spend a moment luxuriating in this amazing cover that might seem like parody but is decisively not:

You might recognize the art — it is one of the banners I use for Doomsday Machines, because the moment I saw it, I thought, wow, this really encapsulates… something… about the post-apocalyptic imagination.

Pulling Through is a story told from the point of view of one Harve Rackham, described pithily on the back cover as:

HARVE RACKHAM, bounty hunter, race-car driver. His best friend is a hunting cheetah. Harve has turned his California home into a survival shelter. He intends to pull through.

So that’s Harve on the cover: tall, well-armed, with his pet cheetah (Spot), and his race car. I would note that this is not just any race car: it is a (fictional) Lotus Cellular, a super-lightweight, two-seater, high-performance race car that uses “air-cushion fans” to “hop” over fences, other cars, and barriers, and can even (briefly) hover over water. More on that, and the cheetah, in a minute.

What is Harve “pulling through”? Nuclear war, of course. Ing never says when the novel is set, but the context at times suggests we are talking about something that is meant to be “near future,” a world almost identical to the early 1980s, except for the presence of “hopping” race cars, a much larger degree of nuclear proliferation, and occasional mentions of things like “holovision.”

Harve lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, although not in the most urban parts of it. The fact that the cover shows Harve watching, without any apparent dismay, San Francisco getting nuked is, well, very telling about the overall ideology of this novel. Harve sheds no tears about true urbanites (much less effete San Franciscans) in this book; he has really nothing but scorn for them. The actual scene shown in the cover never happens in the book (Harve doesn’t see the nuclear detonations, because he’s already back at home when it happens), but it certainly captures something about the smug satisfaction that people who write under the “Survivalist” (and later “Prepper”) mindsets tend to have about cities and their inhabitants.

Harve comes off as a temperamental loner, but he’s not actually alone. With him on this journey are, as the back cover summarizes, his sister and brother-in-law:

SHAR McKAY, Harve’s little sister. Shar’s latest fad is nuclear survival. She intends for her husband and kids to all pull through.

ERNEST McKAY, engineer. He has the knowledge and skills to save his family. With his help they’ll all pull through.

Shar’s role in the story is mainly as the source of Harve’s knowledge about prepping, which is an interesting narrative choice. Ing could have just made Harve the prepper, right? But having the sister be the one who took a class in prepping appears to give Harve some “everyman” cover. Of course, the fact that he’s a bounty hunter with a cheetah and a flying race car undermines that a bit.

Ernest’s role in their “survival” is extremely substantial. Throughout the days after the attack, Ernest is the one who proposes all sorts of homemade engineering solutions to problems that arise, like a lack of sufficient air in the basement requiring a home-made air pump. Without Ernest, they’d all be dead — which begs the question of how survivable nuclear war is, if you don’t happen to have an engineer lying around. We’ll come back to this issue.

Shar and Ernest’s kids are Cammie and Lance. Cammie does pretty much nothing other than be cheery and helpful (like Shar and Ernest) and a model “survival” child. Oh, and she assumes, early on, that Kate is Harve’s girlfriend, and refers to Kate as his “little flesh,” which is treated as “high-school jargon.” Ick.

Lance, on the other hand, is a foil: he’s the spoiled modern child who has never been told “no” and thus lacks the discipline necessary to survive under life-or-death conditions. Shar and Harve talk about this, and how their parents were much harsher on rebel Harve, but it taught Harve character and resolve. So we get a little “these kids/parents today” moralizing in this book, too.

Since I do not recommend that you go out and read this book — and it is all just as obvious as it can be — I’ll spoil it for you and tell you that Lance’s lack of discipline results in him not “pulling through.” Sorry, Lance. This doesn’t seem to eat Harve up too much, though, and neither does the thought of millions of other people not “pulling through.”

How many millions? At the end of the book, Harve says that 80 million Americans survived the nuclear war. So assuming a pre-war population of around 230 million Americans, that means that around 150 million Americans died, a whopping 66% death toll.1

There are a few other characters who show up, the most important (and back-cover worthy) being Kate:

KATE GALLO, runaway, forger, a tough street survivor. She’s trouble—but when real troubles come down, Kate will always pull through.

I showed this to a colleague who immediately said, “Oh, I bet she’s good looking, too, right?” Right. A fact that Ing/Harve tells us every time she is mentioned. Kate “looked smaller than eighteen,” but “also older.” She was a former “teen model.” She got into Harve’s car “with a goodly flash of leg.” She was a “tough bimbo.”

Kate had been “raised in a strict household where females were expected to keep the Sabbath holy, the pasta tender, and the men on pedestals,” and “had learned too much about the rest of the world; had cast aside her illusions and her virginity before reflecting that both had their good points; had decided she would make the system pay.” More like Dean Ick, am I right? (I’ll be here all week, folks.)

Kate is the only character here who gets a character arc: she starts out as a criminal, a bounty that Harve is taking in, but when the war starts, in a fit of pure generosity Harve allows her to switch from being cargo to a bonafide family member. She is appropriately wary of this for about five minutes, and initially resists allowing Harve to boss her around, but after he mansplains to her that his bossing her around is just about what is necessary to survive, she immediately falls into line as a submissive survivalist.

By the end, of course, “kissable Kate” has fallen in love with brave ol’ Harve, and has become the “reward” (along with surviving) for all of his efforts. Gosh, who could have seen that coming? What writing!

Harve himself changes not one whit over the course of the book, except that he loses weight. You see, he had once been a tall, trim, fit man, but the excesses of modern society had caused him to gain some weight, and so he spends most of the novel fat-shaming himself and complaining at how out of shape he had become. But the apocalypse diet turns out to be just what he needs, and over a few days (!) he drops a few pant sizes. This allows Kate to tell him at the end that, yes, she appreciates that he looks great (of course), but that the real appeal is his survival instincts:2

"Very few men realize how much a woman will do for a man she can depend on. Long legs and a tight gut are nice, but give me a man I can depend on. Fortunately I can have it all unless you start eating too much again." And then she found my mouth and used it mercilessly, I'm happy to say.

If you’re suddenly struck by nausea, you might check your Geiger counter, but it’s probably the writing. I fully agree that “life goes on” even after major disasters, but jeez, does this feel like a tone-deaf way to talk about the aftermath of a nuclear war.

So, about that war. The exact circumstances are left somewhat murky and deliberately complicated and “near-futurish”:

Syria's cruise birds were Soviet-made; her nukes probably Libyan. It no longer mattered whether the Soviets had known that Syria could screw nuclear tips onto those weapons. Far more important was the battle raging between our Sixth Fleet and the fast Soviet hoverships we had engaged as they poured from the Black Sea into the Aegean. I figured the [USS] Nimitz for a supercasualty, and I was right; once the Navy lost that big vulnerable beauty they'd be shooting at everything that moved.

So some kind of Middle Eastern escalation leads to a slug-fest between the USA and the USSR, and the Bay Area where Harve lives gets a few direct hits from Soviet missiles. The book contains a map on the inside cover, showing the ground zeros, the fallout plumes, and Harve’s location:

I would note that this is a pretty optimistic targeting plan for 1983, one that assumes one-nuke per target, and not really that many targets. William M. Arkin and Richard W. Fieldhouse’s 1985 Nuclear Battlefields notes that at that time, California “ranks first in nuclear infrastructure with 80 locations and fourth in nuclear warheads… it has the largest number of military infrastructure of any state… every category of nuclear infrastructure is in the state.” And here’s what FEMA considered to be possible nuclear targets in the Bay Area by the late 1980s/early 1990s, as just a point of comparison:3

Now, Ing can write the nuclear scenario he wants to — it’s his book, and by not setting in “the present day,” he has a lot of latitude on these decisions. I just want to emphasize than in this narrow sense, he’s letting Harve off pretty easily with “only” four or five ground zeros in the Bay Area to contend with. The Soviet arsenal had nearly 7,000 ICBMs in the early 1980s, so it’s not like they had to be stingy about targeting.

At the same time, though, Ing makes other assumptions that make it much harder for Harve-and-co. than it otherwise ought to be. He doesn’t lay it out explicitly, but the chart of radiation dose rate he has at the front of the book implies, if you break it down technically, that he is assuming the Soviets were using weapons on the order of 10 megaton yield, as surface bursts, on basically every target that matters.4

The consequence of this is that the Rackam family are stuck with astoundingly high levels of radiation for the 36 hours that the book covers. Just nearly-unsurvivably high rates of radiation, even with all of Harve’s preparations. How high? The outside radiation dose rate at time of arrival for the first detonation is over 400 R/hr, and it jumps to around 600 R/hr with the arrival of the second wave of fallout. That means that over the course of 36 hours or so, the outside dose rate is well over 100 R/hr. To put that into perspective, a 100 R dose is considered the threshold for radiation sickness, whereas 400-600 R or so is likely to be fatal. So that means that the Rackam family are picking up significant dosages whenever they (occasionally) have to run outside, or spend any time in anything other than a very well-prepared, well-insulated space.

And Harve has in fact done quite a lot of preparation: he has modified his house over the years so that he has not just a basement, but a “tunnel” that provides very good protection against fallout, and he has better-than-most access to food and water. But even it makes for a near-miss in terms of survival, because the ventilation is poor, and so they spend half the book trying to make sure they don’t asphyxiate and also don’t pump in fallout while trying to get air.5

Why does this matter? It is part of the core contradiction of the book. It is a “survival” narrative at its heart, in which the protagonist is put up against horrible odds, and yet comes out on top. “Survival” books require the odds to be horrible, because otherwise, there’s no narrative payoff.

But it is also meant to be a “Survivalist” narrative, in the sense that it is a libertarian fantasy about how the well-prepared person can survive even the collapse of society, and is explicitly about how if you prepare adequately, you too can survive nuclear war. And therein is the problem: if nuclear survival is almost impossible for Harve, a fictional character with many qualities (and flying cars) that most of us don’t have, then how can this possibly make someone who is not a fictional character think that they have any chance of survival?

You might be wondering why I keep saying this is a “Survivalist” book, one that is explicitly posed to make you think that nuclear war is survivable. This is not some interpretation based on subtext on my part. It’s literally just the text. Of the book’s 260 pages, literally half of them are dedicated to non-fiction “how to survive nuclear war” articles, mostly ones that Ing wrote for other “Survivalist” publications and published in the years before Pulling Through came out. So it’s half novel, half “Survivalist” how-guide. Or as the back cover puts it:

Dean Ing has thought a lot about survival, and he wants as many as you as possible to pull through the inevitable disaster of nuclear war. That’s why he’s written this more-than-a-novel. Dean Ing lays all the cards on the table in this one. The story tells why. The articles and blue-prints tell how. PULLING THROUGH won’t save your hide all by itself, but it sure will give you a head start on pulling through by yourself.

Put aside whether nuclear war is “inevitable” or not, it’s not clear to me whether the book can really purport to do anything like this. Most of the articles in teh back are about things like, “how to rig up a hand-made ventilation pump to bring in air but not fallout,” which, frankly, is not something that almost anyone is likely to even try to do, much less be able to do. I’m not even sure it would really work — it’s not like Ing tested it with actual fallout!

Another, more mundane article is about how to rig up a bicycle so that it will power a small electric light, so you don’t have to sit in total darkness in your tunnel shelter. Someone could do that, I suppose, but… why, exactly? Is that really the best use of your time in that scenario? Or physical energy? This project in particular just feels like something meant to distract you from thinking about how probably everyone and everything you know and loved might be dead or dying horribly.

The discussion of how to rig up a simple chemical toilet is, by comparison, much more practical — and I admit that I always appreciate discussions of post-apocalyptic toilets, because they really serve to “ground” the basic problems of shelter survival in ways that more “clever” apparatus does not. This is your toilet for the next few days or even weeks. This is survival.

The last sixty pages of the book — one quarter of its total length — is a reprint of an article published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the late 1970s describing how to build a Kearny fallout meter, a home-made radiation detection device using household objects. The Kearny fallout meter, or KFM, is one of those ideas that is too clever for its own good. You can see why Cresson Kearny, an engineer, soldier, and think-tank guy, would be excited by it, and why people who were enthusiastic about Civil Defense would embrace it. “Anyone” could make and use one of these things, so the total cost for a population armed with radiation-detecting hardware is just the cost of distributing the instructions, right? Created at a time in which Civil Defense enthusiasm, and government funding, was low, this would solve a tricky problem, which was: even if people have fallout shelters, how do they know when to come out?

The problem with the KFM is that making a home-made radiation detector sounds pretty difficult for your average person. Even in Pulling Through, Ing has Harve’s engineer brother-in-law assemble it, and it takes time, and requires having the right materials on hand, and it requires some knack for following instructions and translating them into a physical reality. I think anyone who has tried to install IKEA furniture, especially with someone else, knows that none of this can exactly be taken for granted, and that’s for a bookcase or a cabinet, not a relatively sensitive scientific instrument on whose accuracy you are betting your life.

Reading the KFM is not easy, either. One must position one’s head at exactly the right distance, and note how much distance two pieces of aluminum foil change over time (measured by a ruler), and then plug that distance into a graph or equation that corresponds with a radiation measurement. Even in Pulling Through, the KFM is a pain to read, gives them inaccurate results at times and needs to be adjusted (or ignored), and takes up an inordinate amount of the time of the characters as they try to survive.

Again, I think that if the message of the book is, “you’ll die unless you can put together a radiation detector with household objects, get it working, and understand its output correctly,” then, well, I think most people are going to die.6

Which returns us to the “flying car” problem. As mentioned, Harve has a flying car:

My Lotus Cellular wasn’t tiny, but it weighed next to nothing; just the thing to drive when some bail jumper tried to sideswipe you, because the air-cushion fans could literally jump you over the big bad Buicks.

Ing was apparently obsessed with aerodynamics, and apparently in the 1960s built his own (non-flyinig) race car (the “Mayan Magnum”), so this seems like a very Ing-thing. The image on the cover looks to me like it is modeled off of the late 1970s editions of the Lotus Espirit, which, to my knowledge, could not fly, and did not have “air-cushion fans.”

It’s a cool idea, I guess? A car that has fans under it that can be used to allow it to jump? I believe I can imagine some of the reasons this doesn’t actually exist in reality, practical and social. And if it was just a strange thing in this “near-futurish” world, I would say, fine.

Harve having a cheetah, for example, is just a “strange thing.” Spot being a cheetah — and not, say, a dog — changes the plot very little, except to give Ing the opportunity to talk about how fast cheetahs are, how you might think twice before confronting a cheetah, and the fact that the cheetah prefers to defecate on raised surfaces. Spot really does very little in the entire story other than make newcomers uncomfortable, create an opportunity for the protagonist to have ample supplies of frozen horse meat, and occasionally allow the protagonist to make clear that he’d sacrifice Spot in a heartbeat if it was required for the survival of the group. OK, fine, sure, whatever.

But the fact that Harve’s car can “fly” is actually really important to the plot! Several times in the story, Harve’s survival relies on having a flying car, because he can hop over barriers, avoid car accidents, and twice he uses it to fly over water where bridges were off limits. It’s an important gimmick — the story would basically break, as written, without it.

And so, again, we have to ask: what is the point of this story? If the point of the story is, “you could survive nuclear war, just like Harve”… if Harve needs a flying car to survive, then we’re all dead, because nobody has flying cars.

The full plot of Pulling Through is about what you’d guess it to be. Harve picks up Kate as part of his bounty hunter job. While driving her to jail, they learn nuclear war is breaking out. They go to Harve’s place. His sister and her family meet them there. They try to reinforce his house before the nukes hit and the fallout arrives. They get in the shelter, they have one mishap after another (but they are clever and intrepid and educated and “pull through”). They have variously negative encounters with other people who, of course, did not prepare — some just sad, some that require “action” (Harve kills a few disposable baddies).

They wrestle with a couple mild moral dilemmas, but seem no more troubled by them than they do the question of whether Harve’s sister is a stern enough mother or not. Everyone is just so damned cheery and happy to be “surviving.” It’s the Survivalist ethos fulfilled: they finally found their “place” in the world.

Eventually they leave the shelter, have a bit more action, and end up living at Kate’s house. Harve eventually realizes that Kate has had the hots for him for ages, and now they’re together, hooray, curtain falls, they “pulled through.”

It’s not all fun, games, and smug commentary. Lance (Shar’s undisciplined son) dies. Some other (unprepared) people they try to help die. Neither of these are treated as particularly traumatic events, and the end of the book makes Harve out to be happy, healthy, and well-liked.

All of which adds up to, well, a bad book. Again, the only person who gets a character arc in the book is Kate, and that’s because she goes from a check-kiting “bimbo” to becoming a hardened survivor who comes to understand that Survivalism is hot, actually. Harve’s only transformation is that he loses some of the weight that a decadent society made him gain, and now is apocalypse-hot. Even Harve’s sister and brother-in-law seem to only barely mourn their dead kid, because, really, he did sort of deserve it because he was so undisciplined, right?

A hero’s journey, in the Cambellian sense (which I am not endorsing as an ur-myth), is one in which the hero is transformed by their experiences, often in ways that are irreversible. Frodo can’t stay in the Shire anymore after he wins the war, because his experiences fundamentally transformed him in ways that alienate him from his Hobbit peers. He saved the world, but at a high personal cost.

But Harve Rackam, as in the classic Survivalist/Prepper fantasy, seems to prefer the post-apocalyptic world to the one that came before. Sure, 66% of the United States population was killed, but he’s got a hot wife now, you know? Life is good, baby:

The chance of bone tumors, leukemia, and other long-term damage has leaped by an order of magnitude, which. means we have a small chance of dying that way within the next twenty years. Compared to life expectancy when this republic was young, those odds look bearable.

All of this is why this is thoroughly a “Survivalist” book and not really a “survival” book. It’s unvarnished fantasy. It’s moralizing and politicizing in the worst ways. It is about how a decadent society, especially an urban society, leads to fat, unprepared people. And how only the cleansing fire of total destruction will allow a new society to emerge. And what kind of society, you might ask? Oh, don’t worry, Ing tells us:

I suspect we’re through building beehive cities, those great complex organisms that proved so dreadfully vulnerable. … The federal gummint doesn’t interfere much with a state’s regional decisions now, and since the rural population pulled through in such good shape, the political climate is just what you’d guess: conservative.

It’s not the only place where Ing’s libertarian-conservative politics come through (at one point, Harve rants about how middle class kids today have it so easy, and that’s why they’re so into drugs, etc.), but it’s Survivalist lit, so one takes that as par for the course. It also isn’t the only time that Harve expresses disdain (or, at best, “pity”) for the city dwellers who didn’t prepare for, you know, the Soviets dropping 10 megaton warheads on top of them.

Anyway, it’s an amazing book, and I don’t mean that in a good way. It’s a perfect distillation of the Survivalist fantasy in some ways, even as it undercuts its own message by trying to show how clever Harve (and by extension, Ing) is. If surviving nuclear war requires being infinitely clever, with some rather exotic resources — a flying car!!! — then, well, I guess we’re all cooked.

In all seriousness, I find myself asking: what would a better book have looked like, even within Ing’s ideological (Survivalist) framing? If the goal was to showcase the value of preparation, it would require many fewer “close calls,” and rely less on clever hacks come up with in the moment (like the ventilation pump), or fantastical machines (the flying car), and more on things that Harve had quite reasonable done ahead of time. “Good thing I thought to equip my shelter with good ventilation, a filter, and a blower, just like The Family Fallout Shelter explained how to do,” Harve says, highlighting the problem but showing how careful preparation avoided it.

This would remove a lot of narrative tension, to be sure, but it’s not like there wouldn’t be opportunities to introduce tension in other ways, such as through the emotional development of the people inside of the shelter, who are coping with what the point of survival is if the entire world is destroyed. But that would have been a very different kind of book.

Of course, if Ing had any guts, he’d have had Harve crash the car into a tree in the end, and get eaten by his own cheetah. He survived the nukes, but he couldn’t survive his own ridiculous plot devices. Now that would have been a surprising, but satisfying, ending!

Perhaps this is why, at least in my experience, stories about “the end of the world” that are dramatically removed in time from the present read so oddly. The issue is not that the fiction is so different from what one might find now, or the ideas so alien, but that the presumed audience is, well, not us. It is someone from over 100 years ago, in this instance: a short story, entitled “The End of the World,” that appeared in McClure’s Magazine in May 1903.

The author of the story, as indicated above, was Simon Newcomb, “professor of mathematics and astronomy in John Hopkins University, author of Astronomy for Everybody (1902).

Newcomb (1835-1909) has quite a Wikipedia page. Among his many accomplishments, he helped discover Benford’s law, helped make precise measurements of the speed of light, and wrote an entire novel of science fiction, along with many works of popular science. He also wrote essays for McClure’s that we might classify as “futurist” — attempting to predict the future, on the basis of his technical acumen.

Newcomb’s “The End of the World” is obscure enough that it doesn’t appear on his Wikipedia page, but I found a reference to it while researching another topic, and thought, let’s give this a whirl. You can read the entire story here (care of Hathitrust). What follows is my own summary of it, as well as some modestly touched-up and colorized versions of the illustrations that accompanied it, originally drawn by the French illustrator Henri Lanos (1859-1929).

The first line jumps us into the vibe of the story: “Mars is signalling a dark star.”

This tale takes place in a world thousands of years in the future, where there is little new science to do, little new technology to make, and international law and its institutions are so developed that everything in human affairs “went on as by machinery.” War is something that only happened in antiquity. Newspapers only cover true news, and in post-historical fashion, they occasionally only deliver a note saying that “nothing worthy of note has happened since our last issue.”

But there are inhabitants on Mars, but they have been known and communicated with for 3,000 years. Communication, here, means flashing extremely large (one-square mile) areas with very bright lights, in sort of an interplanetary Morse code.

The Martians appear to have no ability to communicate other than about astronomy. The Martians, it turns out, were better at astronomy than Earthlings, and would communicate when comets and novae made their first appearance. The rarest of these observations were of “dark stars,” which were “dark bodies,” many times larger than Earth, moving through space, coming from “far distant regions among the stars.”

These were so rare that people had largely forgotten about them, before Mars signaled — via their flashing lights — a new one had emerged.

It took some time for the Earthlings to locate the “dark star,” but in the meantime, the Martians appeared to be signaling frantically in ways that could not be understood. Finally, the Earth astronomers tracked the orbit of the “dark star,” and discovered that it had no orbit: it was falling into the Sun, and would do so in 210 days.

The Professor of Physics — they only had one, as they had essentially hollowed out the potential of the field eons before, at the University of Hattan, their largest city — was the first to understood what this would mean. He swore his assistants to the strictest secrecy, and related his theory about what was behind the brief flaring of stars (novae) that had been observed by astronomers for millennia:

The scientific men know that these stars were not really new. They were simply commonplace stars which, through the action of some cause that no one has yet brought to light, suddenly increased their heat and light thousands of times. … Now, my theory is that if one of these [dark bodies] chances to strike a star it bursts through its outer envelope and sets free the enormous fires pent up within, which burst forth in all their fury.

If his theory was correct, he reasoned, then the Earth’s Sun would also have its heat and light increased “thousands of times,” which would expose the Earth “to a radiation as intense as that in the focus of a burning glass, which, you all know, will not only set fire to wood, but melt iron and crumble stone.” And thus a “flood of heat” would destroy “all the works of man and every living being that exists upon the earth.”

What could be done about this? He didn’t know, but suggested that his assistants be ready to bring their “wives and families” to the university “at the critical moment, so that we can all take refuge in our vaults.”

And so the Professor continued in the meantime, telling no one else, but wondering whether he ought to. Perhaps it would be better, he reasoned, if everyone went to their death blissfully ignorant, since there was nothing they could do about it. “Why make them suffer for no purpose?”

But the strange, desperate Martian signals kept coming. The Professor of Physics was thus asked to publicly comment on whether there was any threat from the “dark comet” falling into the Sun. He suggested there might be, but downplayed it and suggested that practical precautions could be taken to reduce any risk of people overheating. The Professor of Logic (again, only one), then announced that since the Sun hadn’t changed its output before, there was no logical reason to suspect it might do it in the future, but that perhaps precautions ought to be taken anyway.

For months, people watched the skies. The “dark body” became visible to regular telescopes, and then even to the naked eye.

Now, however, the very slowness of the increase inflicted a slow torture upon the whole human race, like that experienced by a Chinese prisoner whose shaved head is made to feel the slow dropping of water. What is hardly noticeable at first gets farther and farther beyond the limit of endurance. The slowness with which the light of the star increased only lengthened the torture. Men could scarcely pursue their daily vocations. Notes went to protest on a scale that threatened universal bankruptcy.

Eventually the object, as it got closer to the Sun, grew bright enough to see during the daytime.

Finally, it falls into the Sun. At first, it is an anti-climax. But then a bright spot appears — and it starts to get warmer and warmer. By the next day it is unbearably hot.

News came from Europe that fires were breaking out, and entire cities are engulfed in flames. “It would soon become impossible for a human being to live in the streets.” With the heat followed other extremities: hurricanes of terrible force, and floods. The Americans, spared this by several hours, attempted mitigation — with some success, but only for one day. No further communication came from Mars. The oceans boil.

When morning came:

[The Sun’s] rays struck the continent like a fiery flood. As they advanced from the Atlantic to the Pacific everything combustible which they struck burst into flame, stones were crumbled by the heat, towers and steeples fell as if shaken by an earthquake.

Men had to take refuge in caves or cellars or beneath any covering which could protect them from the fierce heat. Old and young, rich and poor, male and female, crowded together in the confusion of despair.

The Professor of Physics and his family (and assistants?) stay in their subterranean vault. The steel doors are hot to the touch. They despair:

The few survivors of the human race here huddled together could only envy their more fortunate fellow-men who, in the sleep of death, had escaped such an imprisonment as they now suffered. Had the question of continuing to survive been put to a vote, all would have answered it in the negative. Hope was gone, and speedy death was the best that could be prayed for. Only the conscience which had been implanted in the race through long ages prohibited their taking their own lives.

Still, they survive. They have two years of food and apparatus for producing oxygen for breathing. They despise the electric lighting, which they have in abundance, but understand is a lie: “They were in the regions of eternal night, except when they chose to turn on the current.”

Finally, after months, they venture out.

The first effect of the outer air was to produce an impression as of waking from a dream. But a glance over the landscape dispelled this impression in a moment. What they saw must be reality, though awful beyond conception. Vainly their eyes looked for the great city. No city, not even a ruin was there. They longed in vain for human help; not an animated being was in sight. Every vestige of man and his works—it might even be said every vestige of the work of Nature was gone. On three sides were what seemed great rivers of slime, while, toward the North, the region which had swarmed with the life and activity of the great world-center was a flat surface of dried clay, black sand, or steaming mud, in which not even an insect crawled. In the thick and vaporous air not a bird warbled its note.

And yet, they could not return to the vault, which they saw as a prison. But what to do? There was no one to contact. No where to go. No fields to sow. No way to repopulate the Earth.

Finally, the Professor gives a little speech:

“Such is the course of evolution. The sun, which for millions of years gave light and heat to our system and supported life on the earth, was about to sink into exhaustion and become a cold and inert mass. Its energy could not be revived, except by such a catastrophe as has occurred. The sun is restored to what it was before there was any earth upon which it could shed its rays, and will in time be ready to run its course anew. In order that a race may be renewed it must die like an individual. Unold ages must once more elapse while life is reappearing on earth and developing in higher forms. But to the Power which directs and controls the whole process the ages of humanity are but as days, and it will await in sublime patience the evolution of a new earth and a new order of animate nature, perhaps as far superior to that we have witnessed as ours was to that which preceded it.”

And with that — the end.

So what is this story about? The reference to a “flood of fire” feels like it is obviously meant to be Biblical in nature, but beyond that, it isn’t clear that there is any kind of moral here. There’s no message here, other than the idea that the universe might just contain some scary things. It’s more horror story than science parable, in that light.

Some of the themes in it are remarkably prescient for the rest of the twentieth century. Steel vaults where one might try to take refuge from global fire — but begin to feel like jail cells to those who are in them. The envying of the dead (more on that theme in my next post). The realization that a modern Ark with a modern Noah is going to be a hopeless idea. And the strange attempt at something like acceptance at the end, which feels surprisingly modern in its near nihilism.

There are two aspects of the scientific context in which it was written which are of some interest. One is that I don’t think Newcomb believed there were people living on Mars. His Astronomy for Everybody goes into some effort to debunk the idea that the “canals” on Mars (all the rage at the time) were extraterrestrial in origin, and he similarly throws cold water on the idea of anything living on the Moon:

If we supposed animals to walk about on the moon, it is difficult to imagine what they could eat. Our general conclusion must be that there is no life on the moon subject to the laws which govern life on the surface of this earth.

Separate from that, it seems noteworthy that the story postulates Martian life, but the Martians play very little role in it, other than sending a (hopeless, unhelpful) warning. This is not a story about alien war — it is a story about aliens who find themselves just as helpless as we are.

The other thing is the nature of the Sun, which plays a large role in “The End of the World.” Newcomb’s story was written well before the idea that the Sun was powered by nuclear fusion had been hypothesized (that would be in 1920, well after Newcomb had died), and his Astronomy for Everybody primarily discusses the Sun in terms of the Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism. The key thing here is that this implies that it is not that old, and that it will not last that long:

Therefore, if this view is correct, the life of the sun must have a limit. What its limit may be we cannot say with exactness, we only know that it is several millions of years, but not many millions.

This feels like the germ of the impulse to write an “end of the world” story, in a sense — the idea that the modern, 20th-century, scientific view of things is that life is finite, the universe is harsh, and there is no reason to think that we are a special set of creatures who will persist forever. Rather, as the Professor indicates at the end of the story, extinction is the rule.

So what’s the lesson, here? This story takes place after man has mastered all science, and all technology, that is there to master. He has found intelligent life. He has found a world in which there is essentially no news, because all is so well controlled. And then the universe, for no reason at all, throws him a curveball, and wipes him out. And that is the end of the story. Is there anything one can do about it? Only accept it.

It’s a grim tale — but perhaps Newcomb, only 5 years from his own death, was in a grim mood.

The stories themselves are their own things to be reckoned with — we’ll come back to them another time — but his introductory essay, titled “Thinkability,” is a fascinating polemic with which to introduce a collection of fiction. It is perhaps one of the most evocative and writerly polemics on nuclear weapons from the 1980s that I know of. One doesn’t have to agree with every argument Amis makes to be impressed at how he makes them, and to feel the urgency in his voice:

Now, in 1987, thirty-eight years later [from his birth in 1949], I still don’t know what to do about nuclear weapons. And neither does anybody else. If there are people who know, then I have not read them. The extreme alternatives are nuclear war and nuclear disarmament. Nuclear war is hard to imagine; but so is nuclear disarmament. (Nuclear war is certainly the more readily available.) One doesn’t really see nuclear disarmament, does one? Some of the blueprints for eventual abolition […] are wonderfully elegant and seductive; but these authors are envisioning a political world that is as subtle, as mature, and (above all) as concerted as their own solitary deliberations. Nuclear war is seven minutes away, and might be over in an afternoon. How far away is nuclear disarmament? We are waiting. And the weapons are waiting.

Amis is a master of the “kicker,” that final sentence of a paragraph that, if properly executed, kicks you right in the gut. I can say from experience that a good kicker is hard to write. Amis may, it could be argued, go a bit too far in ladening this essay with kickers — if every paragraph has a kicker, it dulls the effect over time. But it makes for some sharp quotes.

The ultimate thrust of the piece is about the difficulty about writing well about nuclear weapons. How does one write about a sword hanging above one’s head?

Soon after I realized I was writing about nuclear weapons […] I further realized that in a sense I had been writing about them all along. Our time is different. All times are different, but our time is different. A new fall, an infinite fall, underlies the usual—indeed traditional—presentiments of decline. […]

The “effects” of nuclear weapons have been exhaustively studied, though of course nobody will ever know their full extent. What are the psychological effects of nuclear weapons? As yet undetonated, the world’s arsenals are already waging psychological warfare; deterrence itself, for instance, is entirely psychological (and, for that reason, entirely inexact). The airbursts, the preemptive strikes, the massive retaliations, the uncontrollable escalations: it is already happening inside our heads. If you think about nuclear weapons, you feel sick. If you don’t think about them, you feel sick without knowing why. Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought. […]

Clearly a literary theme cannot be selected, cannot be willed; it must come along at its own pace. Younger writers, writers who have lived their lives on the other side of the firebreak, are beginning to write about nuclear weapons. My impression is that the subject resists frontal assault. For myself, I feel it as a background, a background which then insidiously foregrounds itself. Maybe the next generation will go further; maybe the next generation will be more at home with the end of the world. . . . Besides, it could be argued that all writing—all art, in all times—has a bearing on nuclear weapons, in two important respects. Art celebrates life and not the other thing, not the opposite of life. And art raises the stakes, increasing the store of what might be lost.

This is interesting stuff; this is a writer trying to engage with his context, and his context is thought-destroying. The 1980s were, in Western Europe and the United States, the peak of nuclear anxiety and nuclear fear, at least as reflected in public opinion surveys, mass mobilization, and fearful media (WarGames, The Day After, Threads, etc.). If you were going to be worried about nuclear war, the 1980s were the place to be — even the 1950s and 1960s tend not to rank as high in terms of public fear, at least according to the public opinion polling that is available.1

In the essay, Amis directly credits Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth (1982) as the “classic, awakening study” that got him consciously interested in nuclear weapons: “It woke me up. Until then, it seems, I had been out cold. I hadn’t really thought about nuclear weapons. I had just been tasting them. Now at last I knew what was making me feel so sick.”

He elaborates further:

I first became interested in nuclear weapons during the summer of 1984. Well, I say I “became” interested, but really I was interested all along. Everyone is interested in nuclear weapons, even those people who affirm and actually believe that they never give the question a moment’s thought. We are all interested parties. Is it possible never to think about nuclear weapons? If you give no thought to nuclear weapons, if you give no thought to the most momentous development in the history of the species, then what are you giving them? In that case the process, the seepage, is perhaps preconceptual, physiological, glandular. The man with the cocked gun in his mouth may boast that he never thinks about the cocked gun. But he tastes it, all the time.

There is something literally visceral here: nuclear weapons make you feel sick, they are something you can taste, they are a source of revulsion and physical horror. He repeats this theme of bodily sickness again and again:

I am sick of them—I am sick of nuclear weapons. And so is everybody else. When, in my dealings with this strange subject, I have read too much or thought too long—I experience nausea, clinical nausea.

This bodily fascination was Amis’ antidote, perhaps, to the problems he saw of nuclear writing. When discussing the works of so many other writers, he laments that they are either clinical to the point of abstraction, engaged in bizarre fantasies, or, even worse, trying to address it with bad attempts at humor. He finds E.P. Thomson’s attempts to use rough satire to argue against nuclear weapons (“Hallo! Mr. Reagan, is zat you? Tovarich Brezhnev here. Come on out with your hands up, or I put zis Bomb through the window!”) an utter defeat:

Everything in you recoils from this. You sit back and rub your eyes, wondering how much damage it has done. For in the nuclear debate, as in no other, the penalty for such lapses is incalculable.

Scorched earth, indeed. Amis regards Civil Defense as “another satirical voice,” one that is (unlike Thomson) actually funny. He is firmly in the camp of those who believe survival after a nuclear attack is pointless:

There are only two words to be said, and they are forget it. […] Dispel any interest in surviving, in lasting. Have no part of it. Be ready to turn in your hand. For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don’t want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound. There is only one defense against nuclear attack, and that is a cyanide pill.

This is one of those passages that I can’t bring myself to completely agree with, but I nonetheless an impressed by its rhetorical power.

In another passage, Amis uses repetition to hammer home the circular nature of nuclear deterrence:

What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can’t get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves. Nuclear weapons can kill a human being a dozen times over in a dozen different ways; and, before death—like certain spiders, like the headlights of cars—they seem to paralyze.

The weapons paralyze, the overwhelm, they hollow out. Amis hangs on nuclear weapons the moral failings of our times:

How do things go when morality bottoms out at the top? Our leaders maintain the means to perform the unthinkable. They contemplate the unthinkable, on our behalf. We hope, modestly enough, to get through life without being murdered; rather more confidently, we hope to get through life without murdering anybody ourselves. Nuclear weapons take such matters out of our hands: we may die, and die with butcher’s aprons around our waists. I believe that many of the deformations and perversities of the modern setting are related to—and are certainly dwarfed by—this massive preemption. Our moral contracts are inevitably weakened, and in unpredictable ways. After all, what acte gratuit, what vulgar outrage or moronic barbarity can compare with the black dream of nuclear exchange?

At times, he despairs, frustrated by a lack of ability to do anything about the situation: “What am I to do with thoughts like these? What is anyone to do with thoughts like these?” Even ignoring it is not an option for Amis, not really; aside from whatever civic duty might exist to worry about it, it is always there, in the backdrop, just outside of vision.

And even if deterrence is successful, what kind of success is it?

The A-bomb is a Z-bomb, and the arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves. It is them or us. What do nukes do? What are they for? Since when did we all want to kill each other? Nuclear weapons deter a nuclear holocaust by threatening a nuclear holocaust, and if things go wrong then that is what you get: a nuclear holocaust. If things don’t go wrong, and continue not going wrong for the next millennium of millennia (the boasted forty years being no more than forty winks in cosmic time), you get . . . What do you get? What are we getting?

In his essay, Amis says that he and his famous father, Kingsley Amis, did not see eye to eye on the matter, and that this divide is, he thinks, purely generational: “I argue with my father about nuclear weapons. In this debate, we are all arguing with our fathers. […] They got it hugely wrong.”

But in his 2000 memoir, Experience, Amis went into considerable depth about his father’s specific reaction after Einstein’s Monsters was published:2

Having read the Letters, I now know that Kingsley was genuinely — and, it seems to me, hilariously — infuriated by my taking up this position. […] At the end of the week that saw the publication of Einstein’s Monsters I took my three-year-old boy, as usual, to Sunday lunch at my father’s house; and Louis, I remember, was aghast at our opening exchange:

— I READ YOUR THING ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND IT’S GOT ABSOLUTELY BUGGER-ALL TO SAY ABOUT WHAT WE’RE SUPPOSED TO DO ABOUT THEM.

— WELL IT’S NOT SURPRISING IS IT BECAUSE AFTER FORTY YEARS NO ONE ELSE KNOWS WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM EITHER.

Come to think of it, he did look genuinely infuriated: as hostile as I ever saw him. My brother Philip does a flawless imitation of Kingsley in this state: the whole head vibrating, the eyes dangerously swollen, the tensed mouth in a violent false smile, and (most tellingly) the nails of the forefingers scrabbling, almost bloodily, at the cuticles of the thumbs …

One can imagine that Amis might have seen his father’s anger as, perhaps, as visceral a reaction as the nausea, paralysis, frustration, and general disgust that he himself reported feeling when he contemplated the vast killing machine that was the global nuclear arsenal.

For the spoiler-free part of my review, I will simply say: as a film, I found it riveting, with good pacing and great acting. I thought many of the choices made in how to tell this story, and depict its people, were interesting. I thought it did an excellent job of showing the web of people, technologies, and institutions that make up the concrete reality of the American system of nuclear war. Ultimately, I think it is a timely film, even inasmuch as aspects of it, either deliberately or not — it was filmed before the November 2024 election — do not resemble our current political reality. I think it is definitely worth seeing.

But I have some additional thoughts, which necessitate many spoilers to the plot, so if you have not seen it and do not want to spoil it, you should stop reading here.

WARNING: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE SPOILER ZONE!

The plot of A House of Dynamite is relatively simple: on a random July day in an alternative timeline circa 2025, US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) detects an ICBM launch. The exact position and moment of launch is unknown, as the US satellites meant to detect launches have failed to detect it. At first it is thought to be some kind of North Korean ICBM test on a parabolic trajectory that will land in the sea of Japan. Over the next few minutes, it becomes clear that its trajectory is flattening, and it is projected to land somewhere in the United States. A US ballistic missile defense station in Alaska launches two ground-based interceptors (GBIs) at it. They miss. The missile is on a trajectory that will take in into the heart of Chicago, with millions of projected casualties.

The President is under pressure to consider a (nuclear) retaliatory response, while officials are evacuated to Raven Rock, a secure facility in Pennsylvania. The Russians and Chinese deny knowledge of who launched the missile, and the possibility of it being North Korea is discussed, as is the possibility that either Russia or China aided them by “blinding” the satellite that would have detected its launch. The film never tells us what the President does, or even whether the warhead goes off.

The structure of the film is unusual in that the main drama is only about 20 minutes long (reflecting the time of flight of the missile) and it loops three times. Each “loop” focuses on the perspective of different actors in the scenario, largely moving “up” the chains of commands, with the last “loop” finally showing the President (whose identity and responses have been largely obscured in the previous two loops). It is not quite Rashomon — all loops show the same “truth” — but it has a similar sort of intent.

In terms of its filmmaking, I thought this structure and approach worked well. It was gripping, and each loop did provide additional perspectives and information to the viewer, and it was a good cinematic answer to the question of “how do you make a feature-length movie revolve around the flight time of an ICBM?”

In terms of its accuracy, there is much one could talk about. In its favor, I think A House of Dynamite does a really good job of showing what the main structure of a nuclear crisis in the present day might look like, in terms of people and institutions. I think it does an excellent job of showing how much denial people would be in about the threat until it was almost too late to deny it further, and the ways in which the clinical, procedural, and game-theoretic approaches to this kind of problem would be intensely complicated (and impacted) by the very personal, psychological, and individual circumstances of people all throughout the chain of command.

There are certainly things missing, some of which were clearly cut or consolidated just to limit the complexity (e.g., the lack of a Secretary of State), and some of which are more important, but I think for your average viewer, this film already gives one a much better sense of the concrete realities of nuclear war than they otherwise would have had. I think that is a positive service that the film does.

The trickier inaccuracies are the deeper ones, the ones that feel necessary for the specifics of the plot, and thus make it feel somewhat contrived. For example, the launching of only two interceptors, which even characters in the film question the logic of. One understands why the writer/director did this: they wanted to emphasize (correctly) the deficits of ballistic missile defenses. But it strikes me as very unrealistic that, in this situation, where they believe a single nuclear-armed ballistic missile is aimed at a US city, that they would only launch two.

Could one have written a plot that still emphasized that ballistic missile defense is a losing game? Sure — but it would have required a very different setup. You could have multiple interceptors, but the incoming missile could use countermeasures (like decoys and chaff). Or you could have more than one incoming missile, and have a few get knocked out, but not all of them.

The problem with these plot changes, I think, are that they intercept with another major contrivance: the lack of attribution. While I would hardly put infinite faith in the US’s technical capabilities for identifying an incoming missile, it should have been better than in the film. “Blinding” a launch detection satellite is already quite a big leap, in my view, but even without that, there exist (I am told) technical means by which the US could, from the plume signature alone (which they do showcase briefly in the film), tell what kind of missile it is, in real-time.

The lack of attribution is necessary for this particular story, because the writer/director did not want it to be a simple story about specific bad guys, but about the general nuclear threat. I get that. But I’m not sure that works: nukes don’t just appear out of nowhere. Someone has to make a choice. Who made the choice? Why did they make it? What is the context? In the film, this is deliberately avoided — it is “context-free.” Which does not feel very realistic to me, or a very good way to think about the possible pathways to a nuclear use. One can compare this with Jeffrey Lewis’ excellent novel, The 2020 Commission Report, which is an in-depth, fictional account of a nuclear weapon detonation that is almost entirely about the kind of context that would produce such a thing in the modern world. A context-less nuclear attack is both a strange contrivance and a missed opportunity.

I have heard suggestions that perhaps there were more Hollywood reasons for keeping the attribution unclear: if you make the enemy China, then you limit your Netflix distribution possibilities, and if you make it North Korea, then you risk getting hacked. (I’m not sure if Russia gets ruled out for reasons like that, although I can see the argument that the complicated domestic political views towards Russia in the US right now would muddy the point the film is trying to make.)

The other major “accuracy” critique is that it feels odd that there were so many pressures, especially from the head of STRATCOM, on the President (played by the wonderful Idris Elba, and labeled in the credits simply as “POTUS”) to make an immediate decision about some level of a nuclear response. With a different “scenario” — e.g., a larger attack that might threaten US retaliatory capabilities — I could see those pressures being real. But for an unattributed single weapon, one whose consequences are not fully predictable before it detonates (or doesn’t),1 while I can believe there would be some voices for coming up with some kind of “immediate” response, I think the bulk of the weight would be against a nuclear response (and against who!?), and there would be no real reason (other than potentially a perception of political pressure) for the decision on any response to be made in minutes. The “making a decision” in minutes scenario does exist, to be sure, but this scenario is not that scenario.

More generally, my biggest concern and critique about the film is its overall “scenario.” The “bolt out of the blue” scenario, which historically has also been called an “atomic Pearl Harbor” or (later) a “nuclear 9/11” scenario, is one in which the United States has been minding its own business when suddenly it is attacked in a way it is not prepared for.

This has been a fear of the military and think-tank analysts in the United States since the Soviet Union developed a nuclear arsenal. It is why things like the “nuclear football” got developed, as well as weapons systems with fantastically (and perhaps dangerously) rapid response times, and nuclear-armed submarines, and so on. It is a fear that usually (but not always) comes from hawks, not doves, and there have been many iterations of it over the years.

Such fears are often invoked to justify the need for new systems, new capabilities, and — often — missile defenses. It is a scenario that generally implies a moral blamelessness on the part of the United States, rather than acknowledging that it likely would have a role to play in whatever escalation occurred, and implies a total moral debasement (and high tolerance for risk) in American adversaries, who are willing to gamble their entire nations on the possibility that they might catch the United States unaware. It is the fear that makes you put weapons on hair-trigger alerts, under the belief that the sneak attack could come at any moment, and without any warning.

I do not think that the director or screenwriter are hawks. To the contrary, they seem to see this as an anti-nuclear film, one whose ultimate message is that these weapons are dangerous and that their risk is uncontrollable. And there have been, in the past, doves who invoke the “bolt out of the blue” scenarios as a means for arguing against the possibility that nuclear war could be rationally avoided.

Ultimately, it would be very interesting to me to see how “lay” audiences view this film and its message. I could imagine a study, one that looked at people’s attitudes before they watched the film, and then immediately after they watched it, and then maybe a follow-up several months later to see what impression still “stuck around,” if any do. What I’d be interested in knowing is whether it caused any “movement” one way or the other on questions about nuclear weapons, their dangers, what the likely scenarios might be for their usage, the question of disarmament, and specific policy proposals like spending trillions on missile defenses. Most importantly, I would be interested in knowing what they think the “remedy” would be for the problem posed by the film.

I can’t predict how such audiences would view the film — I am not the target audience, I acknowledge that — but I fear that one of the main responses that Americans might have in particular is that the “remedy” for the situation outlined in the film would be to just build more missile defenses. The film doesn’t really discredit missile defense at all; it suggest that the current success rate of an interception is about 60%. That itself is probably too high a number, one derived from controlled tests, and not against serious countermeasures.

Americans are very prone to believing that with enough money, a merely “technical” problem like this could be solved. And maybe they can be! The film does not give what is, to my mind, the more serious arguments against ballistic missile defense: that the inevitable response to them by an adversary would be to either not rely on ballistic missiles for their nuclear deterrent posture, and/or to develop offensive ballistic missile capabilities of such a size that they would overwhelm such a system. And that is exactly what we see both Russia and China doing today, in part in direct response to US investments in ballistic missile defenses.

Ballistic missile defenses, in other words, don’t “solve” the problem of nuclear weapons risks at all: they may in fact make them worse, as they encourage larger and “weirder” arsenals (drone submarines, hypersonic launch vehicles, possibly smuggled weapons). And, of the utmost importance, there seems to be no reason to think they have a stabilizing effect: they encourage both the United States and its adversaries to engage in riskier behavior and expensive arms races. (And I suspect the latter is very much a “feature” and not a “bug” in the minds of the generals and contractors who argue for these systems.)

Did you get that message from this film? I didn’t. Could one imagine a film that did get this point across? Sure: but it would require a very different “scenario.”

But I could be wrong about how others read it. Again, I am not the target demographic. I suspect that, like basically everything about nuclear weapons in the world, the response will be very demographically rooted: people who lean “dove” on nuclear issues are likely to read it differently than those who lean “hawk,” and Americans are likely going to read it very differently than Europeans, and so on.

One idea that did occur to me recently when thinking about it, is that some of the “contrivances” of the plot could be addressed with one simple “theory”: that the missile is in fact an American missile, being launched as part of some Tom Clancy-ish conspiracy plot by the US military (for whatever nefarious aim). That would explain the “blinding” of the satellite, the relentless pressure on the President from everyone connected with the military for a massive escalation, the underwhelming effort on the interceptors, and maybe even the actions of the Secretary of Defense (who perhaps was dimly aware of the plot, but did not know its target, and was suddenly stricken with guilt). It’s an elegant solution, really… but I don’t actually think it was the goal of the creators of the film. But if I were going to write a fourth “loop” for it, maybe that is the approach I would take, a big reveal that made all of the nit-picking critics suddenly realize that they were simultaneously right and wrong!

Will A House of Dynamite join Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe, and The Day After as an important touchstone for thinking about nuclear weapons in our time? I have no idea. Culture works in mysterious and complicated ways. Do I think its contribution will be ultimately positive or negative? I have no idea. It will depend on whether it resonates at all, and what message people take from it. I will say that I am, ultimately, glad that it was made, because I think it does do a lot of positive “good” with respects to giving a deeper sense of the tangible, concrete realities of nuclear weapons and nuclear systems. I do hope it is financially successful, because that might mean that more films could be made on these topics. I just hope that this isn’t the “last word” on this issue for another two decades or so.2

President MUFFLEY: The doomsday machine? What is that?

Ambassador DESADESKI: A device which will destroy all human and animal life on earth. […] When it is detonated, it will produce enough lethal radioactive fallout so that within ten months, the surface of the earth will be as dead as the moon!

General TURGIDSON: Ah, come on DeSadeski, that’s ridiculous. Our studies show that even the worst fallout is down to a safe level after two weeks.

DESADESKI: You’ve obviously never heard of cobalt thorium G.

TURGIDSON: No, what about it?

DESADESKI: Cobalt thorium G has a radioactive half-life of ninety three years. If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred megaton range and jacket them with cobalt thorium G, when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud. A lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety three years! […]

MUFFLEY: I’m afraid I don’t understand something, Alexiy. Is the Premier threatening to explode this if our planes carry out their attack?

DESADESKI: No sir. It is not a thing a sane man would do. The doomsday machine is designed to to trigger itself automatically.

One can think of the Doomsday Machine of Dr. Strangelove as having several separate associations:

1. It is obviously meant to be a metaphor for nuclear deterrence and the nuclear arms race in general. It is a weapon that makes sense according to a certain logic of strategy, but whose implementation ends up being an act of suicide.

2. It is a specific weapons concept (a “salted” or “Cobalt” bomb) that could have radioactive effects far beyond those of “normal” thermonuclear weapons.

3. It is a representation of a general idea of a machine that could destroy the entire world.

What I want to do is look at the history of each of these aspects of it, and how we get this idea into something like Strangelove as a central, motivating idea.

The latter association is perhaps the easiest to start with: a modern, technological machine that can easily destroy the world. The earliest instance of this trope that I have tracked down — which I am not suggesting is the first version of it, but gives a sense of its age — is from the 19th century. In 1896, a Parisian newspaper published a “skit” about how the American inventor and master of electricity, Thomas Edison, had made a machine that could destroy “every country in the world” at the push of a button. This was itself reprinted in the United States under the title, “Wrecker of Worlds.” “I have an electric button connected with every foreign country, which will destroy it when pressed,” the fictional Edison tells his assistant. “In ten minutes I could destroy every country in the world, the United States included. Be careful, now, that you don’t touch any of these buttons accidentally — you might do a lot of damage.”1

As the American translation of the article itself indicates, this “funny” story is a satire of “the astonishing progress of electrical science” in the late industrial revolution, and possibly anxieties about the rise of push-button automation in the “machine age.” It is not a serious idea for a machine, but this kind of “doomsday machine” represents an idea and an anxiety, embodied in fiction. It is not, in this short story, being used to make much of an argument, though — it presents this machine as something that would end the possibility of war with its owner (“If we should ever be at war with any other nation, you have only to notify me”) but does not explore the implications of that idea further.

Would not other nations immediately begin developing their own such machine, now that it had been revealed to the world? What happens if two nations have such machines? And so on. This is not a “Doomsday Machine,” to be sure — Edison is still very firmly at the controls, it is not automatic.

Let us now turn to the idea of a Cobalt bomb, or, more generically, a “salted” bomb. The idea here is relatively simple. Thermonuclear weapons would be a potent source of neutrons; one Los Alamos report from 1949 estimated that a “Super” bomb would produce something like 70 times more neutrons per gram of fuel than a fission bomb.2

Many otherwise inert elements, when exposed to neutrons, will absorb them and become radioactive versions of themselves. This phenomena of “artificial” or “induced” radioactivity was known prior to the discovery of nuclear fission, and the byproducts of such reactions vary dramatically in their radioactivity depending on what the new isotope created is.

Uranium-238 will, under bombardment by high-energy neutrons, undergo fission by itself, producing both energy and radioactive fission products.3 These are already pretty radioactive. But from at least mid-February 1950, and possibly as early as September 1947, the scientists at Los Alamos were aware of the idea of introducing materials that would become even more radioactive:

If... special arrangements are made to utilize the neutrons in making fission products or other radioactive materials, one gets effects similar to those in the case of the Alarm Clock. In fact, by absorbing the neutrons in appropriate materials and generating activities of the right kind, one might obtain from the Super many times the radioactive effect produced by an Alarm Clock.4

“Alarm Clock” here refers to a specific design for a thermonuclear weapon (or “Super”) which necessarily included uranium-238 in it, and thus a lot of fusion-induced fissioning; the above passage from a report by Edward Teller, they are pointing out that they could get far more “radioactive effect” than just the fission products produced by having uranium-238 in a “Super” bomb.

The popularizer of the idea was the famed Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard, who in February 1950 — only a few days after the above-mentioned report, curiously — took part in a roundtable discussion at the University of Chicago about the possibilities of the “Super” or hydrogen bomb. In it, he described a way in which the “Super” bomb could be made even more radioactive:

It is very easy to arrange an H-bomb, on purpose, so that it should produce very dangerous radioactivity. Most of the naturally occurring elements become radioactive when they absorb neutrons. All that you have to do is pick a suitable element and arrange it so the element captures other neutrons. Then you have a very dangerous situation. I have made a calculation in this connection. Let us assume that we make a radioactive element which will live for five years and that we just let it go into the air. During the following years it will gradually settle out and cover the whole earth with dust. I have asked myself: How many neutrons or how much heavy hydrogen do we have to detonate to kill everybody on earth by this particular method? I come up with about fifty tons of neutrons as being plenty to kill everybody, which means about five hundred tons of heavy hydrogen.5

He then elaborated the consequences of such a doomsday bomb:

What is the practical importance of this? Who would want to kill everybody on earth? But I think that it has some practical importance, because if either Russia or America prepare H-bombs — and it does not take a very large number to do this and rig it in this manner — you could say that both Russia and America can be invincible. Let us suppose that we have a war and let us suppose that we are on the point of winning the war against Russia, after a struggle which perhaps lasts ten years. The Russians and others can say: “You come no farther. You do not invade Europe, and you do not drop ordinary atom bombs on us, or else we will detonate our H-bombs and kill everybody.”

Faced with such a threat, I do not think that we could go forward. I think that Russia would be invincible. So, some practical importance is attached to this fantastic possibility. […] I do not know whether we would be willing to do it, and I do not know whether the Russians would be willing to do it. But I think that we may threaten to do it, and I think that the Russians might threaten to do it. And who will take the risk then not to take that threat seriously?6

Now we are getting very close to some of the dialogue in Dr. Strangelove, indeed. In April 1950, when the above was re-printed in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Szilard appended a footnote which specifically indicated that cobalt could be a useful element in such a scheme. Cobalt-59 (normal, abundant cobalt) can turn into cobalt-60 if it absorbs a neutron, and cobalt-60 has a half-life of about 5 years — short-enough to be dangerously radioactive, long-enough to not disperse over the course of a few weeks the way that fission products do.7

“Salted” bombs were studied by the US Atomic Energy Commission during the Cold War. There is some confusion in the literature on this, because they sometimes referred to “normal” thermonuclear weapons with U-238 components as “salted” weapons, as opposed to “clean” weapons which substituted U-238 for an inert element like lead. The term “salted” became preferred over “dirty,” because they didn’t like the association of talking about “dirty” bombs. Ultimately, nearly all of the US thermonuclear weapons deployed were in fact “dirty” in this way — in that at least half of their yield came from the fissioning of U-238.

The reports I have seen suggest that after further study, the US saw little military utility in “true” salted bombs, like Szilard’s cobalt bomb idea. Nuclear fallout of the “normal” sort (fission products) was bad-enough, and had the convenient property of becoming much less acutely radioactive on a timescale of weeks. A weapon whose fallout stayed deadly for months or years was not particularly useful if you were imagining that a nuclear war would not just be an “everybody dies” situation, but a situation where you might imagining being the “victor” in some way. A doomsday machine of the sort imagining by Szilard (or in Dr. Strangelove) is not something you’d want to have if you thought nuclear war was likely and you might be able to “win” it, in other words.

But the idea stuck around, particularly as a metaphor. Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach (1957) describes the aftermath of a nuclear war in which cobalt bombs were used by the thousands, creating a doomsday cloud that circles the Earth, eradicating all life. The book on which Dr. Strangelove was based, Peter George’s Red Alert (1958), also describes a Doomsday Machine:

It is a quite simple idea, but if you look at it carefully you will see it really is the ultimate deterrent. You take a couple of dozen hydrogen devices. They don’t need to be bombs, no airplane is going to be called on to carry them. You jacket those devices in cobalt, and you bury them in a convenient mountain range. They can be exploded at the press of a button. All of them. How long would you give human life on this earth after such an explosion? […]

The Atomic Energy Commission were given that question as a theoretical exercise. Their answer was this. That all life would cease in the northern hemisphere between eight and fourteen weeks after the explosion. […] There would be no escape from the radio-active cloud. It would enshroud the entire earth, and poison every living organism. It would retain its lethality for hundreds of years. It would mean the end of the world. Literally.

Unlike in Dr. Strangelove, this monologue was given to those in the war room by the President himself — one of the many differences from Kubrick’s 1964 screenplay. There is no Strangelove character in the novel; the novel plays all of this quite straight, not as satire; and the Doomsday Machine is not automatic at all.

The jump to Strangelove for Doomsday Machines likely came from the work of game theorist think-tanker Herman Kahn, whose books Kubrick studied deeply when researching the film, and who is one of the (several) inspirations for the character of Dr. Strangelove. Kahn’s 1960 classic On Thermonuclear War contains an extensive discussion of the idea of a Doomsday Machine, and may be the one who first coined the term (he certainly popularized it).

Kahn distinguished between three types of “conceptualized devices,” the Doomsday Machine, the Doomsday-in-a-Hurry-Machine, and the Homicide Pact Machine. (One can criticize Kahn on many levels, but his skill in coming up with evocative names appears unmatched.) The Doomsday Machine of Kahn was defined as:

A Doomsday Weapon System might hypothetically be described as follows: let us assume that for 10 billion dollars one could build a device whose function is to destroy the earth. This device is protected from enemy action (perhaps by being situated thousands of feet underground) and then connected to a computer, in turn connected to thousands of sensory devices all over the United States. The computer would be programed so that if, say, five nuclear bombs exploded over the United States, the device would be triggered and the earth destroyed. 8

Kahn did not believe that either the US or the USSR would actually build such an automatic machine; it was an “unsatisfactory basis for a weapon system,” he argued, because its cost would be so high that it would invite scrutiny, “a scrutiny which would raise questions it could never survive.”

But as a concept, it was for Kahn useful way to think about what went into making a good deterrent. He listed six “desirable characteristics of a deterrent,” reproduced above, and pointed out that, in his estimation, a good Doomsday Machine could easily satisfy the first 5 characteristics. The one that most tricky was how controllable it was; because the Doomsday Machine was automatic, any failure of deterrence of a large-enough scale to trigger it would be catastrophic. “A failure kills too many people and kills them too automatically,” as he put it.9

The Doomsday-in-a-Hurry Machine would be very similar, but would involve a more fine-grained tuning to the kinds of “acts” that would trigger it. The Homicide Pact Machine is basically a form of automatic Mutual Assured Destruction, in which a mutual triggering would cause two nuclear nations to annihilate one another. Kahn notes:

The major advantage of the Homicide Pact is that one is not in the bizarre situation of being killed with his own equipment; while intellectuals may not so distinguish, the policy makers and practical men prefer being killed by the other side. It is just because this view no longer strikes some people as bizarre that it is so dangerous.10

Kubrick’s Doomsday Machine is Kahn’s Doomsday Machine in both name and function: it is an automatic suicide machine, one that takes the whole world down with it. Kubrick of course was using this as a metaphor for the arms race and deterrence in general. Kahn would no doubt object that the more apt metaphor is the Homicide Pact Machine, as that is essentially what the actual late arms race evolved into.

The United States never developed anything like a Doomsday Machine in the sense that either Kahn or Kubrick meant it. Of course, as Dan Ellsberg (among many others) argued, the Homicide Machine of the arms race was in no great way quite distinguishable from a Doomsday Machine. But it was not automatic; even the Soviets’ famous Perimetr/Dead Hand system was not quite as automatic as the actual Doomsday Machine (humans were still involved at every stage).

The issue is not its impossibility — all of these things from the cobalt bomb onward are possible. As Dr. Strangelove put it: “the technology required is easily within the means of even the smallest nuclear power. It requires only the will to do so.”

So why did the US not have the “will” to do it? I think Kahn does partially hit the nail on the head: people prefer committing mutual homicide to mutual suicide at some level, and it is too automatic. The war planners did want to deter global nuclear war, but they also wanted to be able to imagine winning nuclear war if it did happen. And a Doomsday Machine doesn’t let you do that kind of thing — it shatters the illusion that nuclear war can be won, just as it challenges the idea that we, the humans that made it, are really the ones in control of this technology.

The nearly seven-minute song is far less straightforward than “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” which feels trivially literal by comparison. “A Hard Rain” follows a fairly simple, repetitive pattern, in which one voice asks another where he has been, what he has seen, what he has heard, who he met, and what he’ll do now. And the meat of it is in the replies, each of which are fragments of a dark world:

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard,
and it’s a hard,
it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it’s a hard,
and it’s a hard,
it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

If the structure of the song, musically, feels oddly old-fashioned, it’s not a coincidence. It is based directly on the Anglo-Saxon ballad “Lord Randall” (dating from at least the 17th century, but has a distinctly medieval feel to it), which has the same call-and-response format. “Lord Randall” is fascinating and worth a full listen by itself. Of the many versions on YouTube, my favorite is this one, and it helpfully has the lyrics displayed:

“Lord Randall,” like “A Hard Rain,” is a dark ballad, but unlike “A Hard Rain,” it tells a single, evolving story, one that gets darker and darker as the song continues. “A Hard Rain” starts dark and lacks any kind of real progressive narrative; it is not telling a story, it is describing a world, of sorts, albeit from different perceptions (where you’ve been, what you saw,

What is “A Hard Rain” really about? It’s been often argued that it is about nuclear war (with the missiles or the fallout being the “hard rain”) or the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dylan himself has always pushed back on this, insisting that while it contains allegories and metaphors, it is not in response to a single thing or event, or even depicting a single thing or event, and that the allegories/metaphors are pretty hard to parse. He wrote it prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, in any event.

Whenever I listen to “Hard Rain” — which is fairly often, I admit — I am always drawn to the evocative imagery of individual lines, as opposed to it adding up to a coherent whole. Each “image” makes for a bold and dark statement, self-contained and horrible in its own way. Many of them feel ripped straight out of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, though of course if there is any influence it is the other way around. And like The Road, its lack of specificity of allows it to be fit and interpreted in a wide variety of possible “worlds” — including, of course, the idea that it is just a description of our current world, just in veiled imagery. Perhaps we’re already in the post-apocalypse.

When working on scenes for the Oregon Road ‘83 video game, I’ve often thought about trying to use these lines as writing prompts, imagining how one would integrate them into a “grounded” view of the post-apocalypse:

• I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans

• I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

• I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it

• I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it

• I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken

• I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children

• Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’

• Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley

• I met a young child beside a dead pony

• I met a white man who walked a black dog

• I met a young woman whose body was burning

• I met one man who was wounded in love

• I met another man who was wounded with hatred

• Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

• Where black is the color, where none is the number

I’ve known for a long time that I’m not someone who gets a lot of out poetry, despite occasionally having read it. Most of it does very little for me. I don’t know what that says about me, but despite this, I have come to learn to respect that a good poet can create a sentence that, despite being simple and spare and short, can evoke a tremendous emotional response. The right words in the right order, I often tell (STEM) students who are unsure whether they should put effort into being better writers, is like code you are injecting into peoples’ brains, and if well-done can trigger immensely powerful ideas. It might be one specific idea, or it might be vague-enough that every listener has the opportunity to make their own meaning from it, to resonate with it (or not) in their own way.

“Where black is the color, where none is the number” is a statement about the aesthetics of absence, both as a literal representation and a feeling — that infinite emptiness opens up inside of one, when those dark and melancholy thoughts settle upon one. Churchill called this feeling “The Black Dog,” and this is also what comes to my mind when I hear “I met a white man who walked a black dog."

In December 2016, Bob Dylan was (controversially) awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He didn’t go to the public ceremony (as is his wont), and in his stead Patti Smith performed an “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” It’s an emotional and complicated performance, including a difficult moment in the beginning in which she freezes up and has to restart it. But that humanizes it far more than a more polished performance might:

At the time, this felt like a dirge, a funeral march, and a portent, coming right after the disastrous election of 2016. The context felt like it turned the song into an expression of mourning — which is not what I hear when I hear Dylan, then a young man of only 21 or so, singing it on the original recording. But I get the sense that Smith chose it also because if any song of Dylan’s is to stand in for his worthiness for a Nobel Prize in Literature, “A Hard Rain” is a pretty solid candidate.

I’ve seen some interviews where Dylan explained what he meant by a line or two of “A Hard Rain,” and, frankly, it’s not as interesting as I’d like it to be. This doesn’t take away from the final product, for me, or its impact. Dylan was not, here, trying to communicate some kind of “message” in the same way that “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” or “Blowing in the Wind” could be construed as trying to do. As young people today might say, it’s mostly a song about vibes, evoking images and associations that the listener processes according to their own circumstances and concerns. It is not a song about the 2016, or 2024, American election results. And yet, the best art transcends the specific intentions of the artist, perhaps, and the best poetry captures something in language that feels so perfectly apt as a deeper description of the world, or of our feelings, that one can understand why poets of old believed such insights must be divinely inspired.

The last verse of “A Hard Rain,” when the traveler is asked what they will do next, offers up different kind of resolution than “Lord Randall” does, though: a future. The traveler will go back into the world, “Where the people are many and their hands are all empty / Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters / Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison / Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden,” and so on. The world is still the world it is; it is still dark and ugly and perhaps ruined. There’s no sugar-coating it.

But even in this world, the traveler — the poet — has a role:

And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
When I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

That’s not exactly hope. But it is survival, and it is purpose. And that’s more than simply a world of black and nothingness.

One of the most arresting books I've read in modern speculative fiction is Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015). The basic concept of setting is easy to explain, in principle: What happens to the American West if the water runs out? The book’s characters takes pains to indicate that this is not really a matter of if but probably a matter of when, with repeated references to Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (1986, updated 1993), a work of history that describes exactly what enabled the American West to be so inhabitable and agriculturally productive in the first place — mostly massive, New Deal water projects — and the ways in which the entire foundation of the American West is built on what is fundamentally a wasting asset.

I was inspired to read Reisner’s book after reading The Water Knife, and found it compelling and astonishing. I grew up in California’s San Joaquin Valley, which is simultaneously one of the most agriculturally-productive areas of the United States but also one of the most dependent on the water-works that Reisner describes. Growing up there, I was aware that agriculture was a key industry, but I had no idea that all of that agriculture was due to water availability that was fundamentally artificial in nature and relatively recently (e.g., within the last century) enabled. Reisner’s book also makes a compelling case that the projects to move water around the West are mostly maxed out (there are only so many rivers to dam and manipulate), the amount of replenishable water available cannot sustain the large populations and intensive agriculture currently being used, and the difference has been made up by drawing from aquifers at rates that vastly outstrip their ability to “recharge.” The dream of making the desert bloom was a compelling one, but any progress there would be both limited in what it could support, and temporary.

So what does that mean for the tens of millions who live in the states and cities that the water enables, when the water runs out? That’s what The Water Knife is trying to explore. And, in a way, it’s much worse than some of the more dark post-apocalyptic books, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, because it combines plausibility with a sense of inevitability.

Without getting into the specifics of the plot (because I don’t want to spoil a book that in my experience most people have not read, but might find worth reading), I want to just talk about the world that Bacigalupi imagines.

First, the water doesn’t just “run out” in some kind of apocalyptic suddenness.1 This is in the category of a “slow disaster,” or a “slow apocalypse”: a death by a thousand cuts, with no clear “inflection point” or moment of terror.' I will be writing more on this “slowness” and is relationship to climate fiction at some point in the near future, but it is, I think, one of the things that distinguishes climate apocalypses from, say, nuclear apocalypses. So instead of imagining the water “running out” as a moment in time, imagine it as a process that unfolds, bit by bit, over decades, with little harbingers and local-scale consequences popping up here and there, individually uninteresting except to those affected by them, but adding together into something that fundamentally reconfigures the West.

Bacigalupi’s book imagines that this will coincide with (and possibly contribute to) a decline in federalism in the United States. The tension between the autonomy of individual states (like California) and centralized control by the federal government has been present from the beginning of the nation, and of course has had moments of tremendous conflict (including the Civil War), and the world of The Water Knife finds the federal government having essentially exited certain key arenas of policy, and letting the states (sometimes literally) fight over them as autonomous political entities.

There are two domains where this really comes into play in The Water Knife. One is the nebulous legal area of “water rights”: the Colorado River passes through five states, and finally crosses into another country, Mexico. What obligations do states up-river have to those down-river, in terms of how much water they can divert, how much wastewater they discharge into it, and so on? At the moment, these sorts of things are arbitrated by agreements and federal oversight, to some degree; in The Water Knife, it has become a near free-for-all, with states conducting covert wars against one another to secure or sabotage the precious river water.

The other area is that of internal migration and internal refugees. Some states, because of their lack of access to direct water sources, get hit the hardest when the water “runs out.” Arizona and New Mexico, in Bacigalupi’s book, end up in pretty desperate straits, and end up with entire urban areas that simply cannot supply the basic water needs for their populations. When the water gets shut off (or prohibitively expensive) for a city, people can’t survive there long, and so understandably try to move to the places that do have water. But the states with water don’t necessarily want tens of millions of people — especially those who are quite poor, made even more so by the fact that any property they had in their previous areas of residence has become worthless — showing up as their new “water refugees.” And so internal migration is shut down, with (again) the federal government refusing to intervene to enforce freedom of movement.

I wish I found the above totally implausible. I think about the latter aspect every time I see the intense anti-immigration and anti-refugees sentiment that some people in this country have (despite nearly all being descended from immigrants, and many being the descended from refugees), and seeing the way in which many Americans are perfectly willing to extend outright scorn to the entirety of residents of other states (a sentiment not helped by living in New Jersey, which engenders a negative reaction in vast disproportion to any negative qualities it or its residents have). I find it entirely plausible that Americans in the near future will find themselves at the mercy of their own countrymen, and find them shockingly ungenerous in dispensing it.

And so this is what I find so utterly disturbing about The Water Knife, this marrying of a plausible future state of the natural world — the water problem — with a plausible way of it being adapted to by societies — a political problem. The world it creates is perhaps not totally “post-apocalyptic,” in the sense that civilization is wiped out, but it is definitely something different, something terrible, something that certainly doesn’t feel like it is part of the current world.

There has been a drumbeat of news coverage about water running out in various locations over the last few years, and increased attention to water availability as a salient and very near-term climate problem, one whose consequences are only just being appreciated. There’s so much news of a dark nature these days, though, that it’s hard to give one’s attention to any one piece of it, or even imagine what futures are possible.

The Water Knife doesn’t offer any “solutions,” really — it is not that kind of book. Its characters have very little agency over anything other than their immediate surroundings. What it does, though, is offer up one possible, plausible, awful vision of the future, and that provides a very useful organizing principle for making sense of all of these news stories, and what darkness they might portend.

At the time of Night of the Living Dead’s release in 1968,1 most horror movies were children’s entertainment, schlock-fests featuring actors in rubber suits. In a contemporary review , Roger Ebert describes his experience of watching it during a Saturday matinee, in a theatre filled mostly with children:

There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.2

Besides the gore and violence, which were extreme for the time, the film was also terrifying because of how real it felt. This was at least partially because, and not despite, its low budget. Director and producer George A. Romero and his production crew, Image Ten Productions, had just over $100,000 to work with, so they had to resort to guerrilla filmmaking that, in the end, led to a movie that felt rawer, more urgent, and more real.3

Guerrilla filmmaking is a popular approach among indie filmmakers like Romero. As the name suggests, it is a filmmaking style that is fast, cheap, and often a little bit out-of-control. Such films are shot almost entirely on-location rather than in soundstages, and often quickly and sneakily because the filmmakers often lack the proper permits. Props are minimal, and dialogue is often improvised. Cameras are sometimes hidden, or handheld, with various degrees of stability. Every decision is about efficiency: they want to get in, get the movie made, and get out again.

Among the earliest guerrilla filmmakers were the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), whose indie aesthetic and preference for low budgets and complete artistic control were a central part of their creative ethos. The French New Wave inspired similar movements across the globe, including America, where a new generation of young auteurs, including Romero, were dubbed the New Hollywood.4 The filmmakers of the French New Wave often merged guerrilla tactics with their signature cinéma verité style,5 a logical pairing since cinéma verité values the visual appearance of truth and authenticity above all else, and that generally means less artifice.

Cinéma verité prioritizes real settings over soundstages, nonprofessional over professional actors, handheld camerawork, and a “fly on the wall” approach to cinematography. Inspired by Dziga Vertov’s concept of Kino-Pravda (“film truth”), cinéma verité’s goal is to film with minimal planning or scripting in order to arrive at the core truth of the scene. Though it started as a style specific to documentary films, elements of it quickly spread to fiction films throughout the 1960s, shaping the aesthetics of directors worldwide.

The influence of cinéma verité can be seen all over Night of the Living Dead. Unable to afford soundstages, Romero had no choice but to shoot mostly on-location. The majority of the movie was shot at the Evans City Cemetery, about thirty miles north of Pittsburgh, and a neighboring farmhouse scheduled for demolition, which the filmmakers were able to rent.6 The creepy, abandoned farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere is practically a character itself, and it has a sense of familiarity. It looks like any of a hundred rundown old farmhouses you might pass driving down a country road.

The dialogue, largely improvised, also contributes to the sense of authenticity. In one scene, Ben, our leading man (played by Duane Jones), describes for our leading lady, Babara (Judith O’Dea), a zombie attack at Beekman’s Diner:

…a big gasoline truck came screaming right across the road. But there must have been ten, fifteen of those things chasing after it, grabbing and holding on. Now, I didn’t see them at first. I could just see that the truck was moving in a funny way. Those things are catching up to it. The truck went right across the road. Slammed on my brakes to keep from hitting it myself. Went right through the guardrail. I guess, I guess the driver must have cut off the road into that gas station by Beekman’s Diner. It went right through the billboard, ripped over a gas pump and never stopped moving. By now it was like a moving bonfire. Didn’t know if the truck was going to explode or what. I can still hear the man screaming. These things just backing away from it. I looked back at the diner to see if there was anyone there who could help me. That was when I noticed that the entire place had been encircled, wasn’t a sign of life left except… By now there were no more screams. I realized that I was alone with fifty or sixty of those things just standing there, staring at me. I started to drive, I just plowed right through them. They didn’t move. They didn’t run or… just stood there, staring at me.

Ben’s story is the scene, as there was no way they could’ve afforded to actually film what Ben describes. But it works. The shellshocked manner in which he describes it feels so genuine that his story is more frightening than the actual scene would’ve been, and it lets the audience’s imagination do the dirty work. In reference to this particular scene, Judith O’Dea later recounted: “I don't know if there was an actual working script! We would go over what basically had to be done, then just did it the way we each felt it should be done.”7

Ben’s entire character was, in fact, a product of improvisation. The original description of the character was not much more than an angry, unpleasant truck driver. No mention was made of his race, but when Jones, a Black man, delivered the best audition and became the clear choice for the role, Romero and his co-producers, John Russo and Russell Streiner, decided to keep everything about the character exactly the same. As Romero has described in interviews, they thought they were being cool by playing it entirely “colorblind.” But Jones had concerns, and he pushed back by improvising much of his dialogue to make Ben sound more thoughtful and intelligent, though still pretty angry, and a narrative begins to emerge: Ben’s anger stems from the fact that his capabilities are overlooked due to his skin color.8

Though Romero, Russo, and Streiner initially wanted to keep the racial commentary relegated to subtext, the social context of the time made that impossible. The film was shot between July 1967 and January 1968, in the wake of the Detroit and Newark race riots. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., that April, was still a raw and palpable event when the film was first filmed in early October. In this context, it was, and is still today, impossible not to view Ben’s conflict with his fellow survivor, a white man named Harry Cooper; nor his death at the hands of a redneck posse who “mistake” him for a zombie outside of a racial lens.9

Eventually, the producers embraced the racial politics of their movie, and thus another central trope of the zombie apocalypse genre was established: zombie as sociopolitical commentary. Night of the Living Dead reflected late-sixties anxieties about race and Vietnam; its sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1978), set in a shopping mall, was an unsubtle allegory for mindless consumerism; and the third entry in the initial trilogy, Day of the Dead (1985), explored Reagan-era warmongering and distrust of the military.

Beyond writing, acting, and setting, we can also see the influence of cinema verité in Romero’s cinematographic choices. The movie extensively featured handheld camerawork, such as a scene early on where Barbara escapes a zombie in the cemetery that has just killed her brother Johnny. She scrambles up a steep hill and onto a gravel road, and Romero’s shaky, handheld camera backpedals away from her, fixating on Barbara as she desperately flails towards it.

There is also a lot of “fly on the wall” cinematography. In another scene, the camera is placed unobtrusively in the corner of an upstairs hallway to observe Ben wrapping a devoured corpse in a rug for disposal. The camera is tilted on its x-axis in this shot, in what is referred to as a “Dutch angle,” to create a sense of voyeuristic tension in the viewer: we’re not supposed to be seeing this.

Another cinematographic choice that film historians and scholars have frequently remarked on is Romero’s use of 35mm black-and-white film stock over color. Romero made this choice for a variety of reasons, but mainly he hoped that filming in black-and-white would cover a lot of the rough edges resulting from his lack of experience at making a feature length film.10

It also allowed for the minimal use of props, special effects, and makeup. Bosco Chocolate Syrup (the same brand Hitchcock used for Psycho eight years earlier) served as blood, and the human flesh the zombies eat was boiled ham and offal donated by an investor who owned a butcher shop.

For the zombies, makeup artist Marilyn Eastman (who also played Helen Cooper), only needed to use some pale paint with dark circles around the eyes, and mortician’s wax for their open wounds. The use of black and white also allowed the filmmakers to rely on a chiaroscuro lighting style to emphasize the characters’ growing sense of dread and isolation.

A side-effect of the use of black-and-white film stock was that it served as a nod to documentary realism. As Stephen Harper has noted, news broadcasts in 1968, especially in rural markets, would’ve likely still been broadcast in black-and-white.11 As such, the overall context of the film’s aesthetic choices add to its sense of unsettling “reality.” Its in-film news broadcasts in particular serve to reinforce this while providing backstory to the viewer about how the zombie apocalypse works in a way that seems grounded within both the movie’s cinematic world, and the visual culture of the contemporary audience.12

After shooting was completed, Romero and his collaborators initially struggled to find a distributor. Some were turned off by the violence and gore, others by the use of black-and-white film stock. Everyone wanted them to reshoot the ending to be a happier one, a change the filmmakers were unwilling to make.

Eventually, the Walter Reade Organization agreed to show the uncensored, unedited film, but the title the crew had settled upon, Night of the Flesh Eaters, had to be changed due to similarity with another film. Thus, it became Night of the Living Dead. However, the copyright notice was infamously left off the title card of the film, thereby landing it in the public domain, causing the cast and crew to lose out on all future revenue and leading to dozens of unsanctioned rereleases, special editions, and remakes, many of which were terrible enough to leave a stain on the original’s reputation.13

The initial October 1968 screening of the film took place in Pittsburgh’s Fulton Theater. Early reviews echoed Ebert’s in their focus on the violence and gore, some going so far as to label the film as a moral failure of the filmmakers. One of the few and first positive contemporary reviews ran in Andy Warhol’s Inter/view magazine. The reviewer, George Abagnalo, declared that Night of the Living Dead “should open at an art house and run for at least a month, because it is a work of art.”14 Though a minority opinion at the time, Abagnalo has been proven correct.

The film has appeared in numerous best of all time lists, and the Library of Congress has added it to the National Film Registry as a film that is “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” After the film received international distribution, the highly respected French journals Positif and Cahiers Du Cinema (where many of the French New Wave auteurs began their film careers as critics) wrote positive reviews, and a 1970 screening at the Museum of Modern Art prompted critical reevaluation. Pauline Kael wrote a backhandedly positive review emphasizing the film’s low budget and DIY aesthetic: “The film’s grainy, banal seriousness works for it—gives it a crude realism; even the flatness of the amateurish acting and the unfunny attempts at campy comedy add, somehow, to the horror—there’s no art to transmute the ghoulishness.”15

The film’s domestic gross of $12 million and international gross of $18 million amounted to a profit of 250 times its $114,000 budget, making it one of the most successful independent films and horror films of all time. Audiences (and some critics) clearly found allure in the film’s controversy and violence, as well as its cinéma verité-influenced sense of “realism. “

Its success spawned a franchise that has since produced five more films. With the exception of Dawn of the Dead (1978), which some critics consider Romero’s masterpiece, none of these sequels have managed to garner anywhere near the success or critical respect of the original. These films’ larger budgets, and more carefully controlled production processes, may have diminished the sense of urgency that made the original so terrifying to audiences. Additionally, gore and violence became more and more common in American film, horror and otherwise, over the following decades, making later films in the franchise less shocking by default. It wasn’t until the release of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later in 2002 that the zombie apocalypse genre recaptured its magic, largely because that film returned to the grainy, DIY aesthetic re-popularized by indie films of the late nineties and early 2000s.

Had Night of the Living Dead been made under the watchful eye of a studio, or with a larger budget or more forgiving production schedule, Romero and his collaborators possibly would have produced something more polished — but also probably less affecting, less “unexpectedly terrifying,” as Ebert put it. One wonders if we would even have “zombie apocalypse” as a genre had Night of the Living Dead been a bit more traditional, a bit more acceptable, a bit less verité, a bit less willing and likely to make a child cry during a Saturday matinee.

I first read the book while preparing to teach an “introduction to the humanities and social sciences” course for freshmen in 2018, on the subject of “The End of the World.” The organization of the course was around four “modern horsemen of the apocalypse”: nuclear war, food insecurity, global pandemic, and ecocide.1 Each of these units involved reading one novel, watching one film, and reading a number of academic articles. The hardest one to come up with the “fictional” components was food insecurity, as there aren’t as many everybody-starves works of fiction as there are everybody-gets-nuked or everybody-gets-sick or everything-goes-to-hell-because-we-killed-the-environment works. So I came across Death of Grass in this context: looking for a thought-provoking book to assign to freshmen. I didn’t end up using it, for reasons I’ll get into (I assigned The Road instead).2 But I ended up somewhat obsessing over it, and have now read it several times.3

I consider The Death of Grass to be a textbook example of what I think of as a “post-apocalyptic road-trip.” Things were normal. Then, the world fell apart. The plot requires the protagonists to get from point A to point B. Along the way, they see the ruin of the world, and undergo various challenges. They make it to their destination but — surprise! — it proves to be less of a refuge than imagined. Roll credits. The genre is a somewhat dark variation of the Hero’s Journey, where the traversal through the world leads to a lot of world-building opportunities as well as setting up an almost unlimited number of challenges to overcome, but often leads the characters through a sort of “anti-hero arc” rather than a traditional “hero arc.”

The specific “end of the world” scenario in The Death of Grass is unusual, and what makes it somewhat stand out of a very busy crowd. An agricultural virus is rapidly spreading through the world, country by country, rapidly killing any and all grasses.4 As this includes wheat, rice, barley, and animal stock, this has a massive and swift impact on food availability. Our protagonists, from London, watch this happening in Asia and then the European Continent with a muted apprehension that feels particularly British. Wherever the virus spreads, the food supplies rapidly dwindle, and is followed by riots and political collapse. Our British protagonists tut-tut at this display of incivility and, of course, we know that they are not long from this same fate themselves.

The book follows around John, his friend Roger, and their families (wives, children), as they try to cope with this situation. They get a tip-off that the virus has been found in the UK, but that the government is trying to keep it under wraps. They anticipate that London is going to fall to pieces, as have the capitals of other countries so affected, and so John and Roger conspire to sneak their families out of the city before any lockdown or bedlam goes into effect. Their goal is to reach John’s family farm, run by his brother and specializing in virus-free potatoes, which is away from cities and located in an easily-defensible valley.

Before they get out of London, they attempt to purchase a firearm from a gun store, but are thwarted when its owner, Mr. Pirrie, won’t sell them a weapon without a license. They attempt to use violence against him, but fail: he gets the upper hand on them, at which point they let him know the full situation. Pirrie agrees to help them — if they allow Pirrie and his wife to travel with them.

Their attempt to simply drive out of London fails, however, when the lockdown happens earlier than they anticipated. They get out… but only by murdering three soldiers in cold blood. Yikes.

They then proceed to retrieve one of their children from a boarding school — they muse on the fact that the school staff and the kids there are probably going to be in for a rough time — and then onwards to the farm. Along the way, they witness the full force of the famine and the subsequent decline in order, which includes such 1950s classics as the government nuking its own cities to reduce the number of mouths to worry about. The more time passes, the worse things get: they face robbers, bandits, and, well, worse. Murders, rapists, you name it.

But the real conflict, in a way, comes from within. What makes The Death of Grass a shocking read, even today, is not just how quickly their world falls apart — it goes from the tut-tutting to all-out, no-holds-barred social destruction in a matter of days — but how quickly the protagonists adopt a wholly rapacious, self-interested, eat-or-get-eaten worldview. They jump from “civilized” to “murderers” in one quick leap. And I use “murderers” purposefully: what they are doing is not self-defense in any true sense. They murder those three soldiers, just doing their jobs and ignorant of the broader circumstances, rather than explore or attempt any other possible options (alternative escapes, reason, bribery, etc.). They come across a farmhouse and shoot the adults in it in order to take their food, rationalizing it on the basis that if it wasn’t them doing it, someone else soon would. Their only bit of “charity” is that when they find that they had a teenage daughter, they agree to take her along with them. Great.

The text is pretty heavy-handed with this theme. The protagonists bellyache quite a bit about how they are transforming into monsters. They express remorse about not being able to really help anybody else most of the time. But they also eagerly and immediately embrace that they are living in a “new era” with new rules and new morality, where loyalties are tightly constrained along familial or transactional lines.

There are many villains to go around, but the amoral Pirrie is painted as the worst, because he doesn’t bother bellyaching, and is quite willing to abuse his new-found power as a-man-with-a-gun. He’s wily, wary, and a crack-shot, so he has value to John and Roger, but they don’t trust him very much. He reveals himself to be quite a monster, ultimately, “marrying” the aforementioned teenage daughter. The point being made appears to be that even in a world with a shifted moral spectrum, there is still a spectrum of sorts. But, of course, John enables Pirrie’s actions, because he both needs and fears him.

There are two things that jump out to me about the moral void they leap into. One is that they do not conform to the standard post-apocalyptic good-guy moral code at all. Yes, Mad Max kills a lot of people. But they’re usually all “bad guys”: they are raiders, killers, robbers, etc. They usually shoot first, or at least it is a reasonable assumption that they are going to shoot first. Mad Max doesn’t like, show up to an encampment of good-if-somewhat-hapless people and then wipe them out so he can get a meal. And Mad Max is not even the most selfless of the post-apocalyptic good guys! But he’s not, you know, evil.

But John is… pretty bad! And ultimately it ends up costing him a lot. But it is still portrayed, for the most part, as self-evidently what he needs to do. It does feel like a dreadfully cynical outlook being expressed by the author.

The other thing is the speed at which they descend. There’s an episode of South Park where, after getting trapped in a gymnasium during a snowstorm, a group of the town’s citizens immediately begin discussing the need to engage in cannibalism. And I think of that, sometimes, when thinking about what the appropriate interval of time is for throwing out one’s moral code in the event of social destruction.

When thinking about apocalypse in the abstract, it’s a dilemma of sorts: if you accept that social disintegration requires adopting a new moral code, at what point, or after what events, do you adopt that code? It is a question I’ve enjoyed posing to students. Only one or two have ever answered “never”: they maintain that they would prefer to maintain their moral code rather than survive, if it came to that. Most suggest an interval of time on the order of weeks. When I ask them why, it is because they are expressing an uncertainty about whether or not the social disintegration has actually occurred. They wouldn’t want, as happens in the South Park episode, to be found chewing on a human femur when the snow plow shows up. The tricky balance is acknowledging that the more time goes on, the fewer resources or opportunities they may have under the “new moral order” (e.g., to steal or loot), but that without adding some kind of time interval, they fear crossing into morally deficit territory prematurely.5

I don’t know what the proper speed is to do such things, if there is a proper speed at all — it depends both on whether one’s personal moral code would allow for such a thing at all, and the confidence one has that the circumstances do indeed warrant it. But the answer given in The Death of Grass — that one should jump into the moral abyss immediately should it feel necessary to protect one’s family — feels, well, a little wrong to me. But it’s provocative for just that reason, I suppose.

I was also struck by how, for lack of a better term, British the book felt to me. One doesn’t want to generalize wildly about the “national character” of stories and narratives — there are always counter-examples. But the “what if beneath our civilization, we’re all just a meal or two away from being savages?” feels like a very British preoccupation to me. It’s Lord of the Flies, it’s Darwin meeting the Fuegians. It’s a colonial (and post-colonial) fear: that the difference between the civilized people and the barbarians is no deeper than a coat of paint.

American post-apocalyptic fiction, by contrast, is often obsessed with a very different theme: the lone man surviving against the hostile world without any government help. It’s often about the rugged individualist who survives by their wiles and their guts, and it’s usually one part fantasy, even when it is supposed to be an intolerable world situation. There are, to be sure, works that deliberately subvert this, as well, but part of that subversion seems to be quite deliberately pushing back on exactly this cultural expectation.6

Can one make similar overly-lofty-yet-still-perhaps-useful generalizations about how other cultures handle the post-apocalypse in fiction? I assume so, though most of what I have read in the genre is either British or American in origin. (If anybody knows of worthy additions from other cultures — particularly those that have been translated into English! — let me know, I would be quite curious to read them.)

So why didn’t I assign The Death of Grass, if I find it so provocative and interesting-enough that I’ve read it a few times? Ultimately, there were a few reasons. One is that for the purposes of the class, I wanted something that felt like a true work of “Literature with a capital L,” and The Death of Grass was just a bit too obvious and pulpy for that purpose. Hence going with McCarthy instead. Another is that I did fear that the students would find it to be distressing without sufficient payoff. I don’t hesitate to give students texts that are designed to make them uncomfortable (again, The Road was the alternate!), but I’ve got to feel it’s worth it and this book just felt too slight for that. I found ways to bring the questions that I thought were interesting in it out into the class without requiring the students to grapple with its rather cavalier attitude toward murder and rape.

And, ultimately, what I find interesting about the book is how wrong I find a lot of it. A wrong book, in the sense that its author puts forward what I find to be a pretty unconvincing argument, can be useful for thinking something through, but isn’t where I’d recommend people start thinking about anything, just because if you don’t have anything to fall back upon, it can be pretty hard to see exactly why you don’t agree with the argument in the first place.

And beneath the zombie facade is a deeper message, one about how global catastrophes and problems are (and aren’t) really solved. It’s a book that’s about how the solution won’t be found in a central hero, a miraculous discovery, or a technological fix. Rather, it will be found in carefully analyzing the nature of the hazard itself, and collectively working towards a slow, tedious, but ultimately successful solution.

And that even when you “fix” the problem, you haven’t really ended it. Even when the “solution” is identified, it’s a long, hard slog to implementing it, and the world is irrevocably changed in many ways. You can’t go back, the book makes clear, but there are different paths going forward, some better and some worse than others.

Sound familiar? Yeah. Aspects of this book hit differently since the pandemic, because its central zombie metaphor is very disease-based. The zombie genre is always an analogy, metaphor, or commentary on something, and what I appreciate about Brooks’ book is that it is a commentary on how society deals (and fails to deal) with large, systemic, overwhelming problems. I don’t know which of these Brooks had in mind while writing it, but prior to the pandemic I tended to read it in the light of climate change. Today it feels a lot like COVID.

There will be more talk about zombies on here in the future, as zombies have been a major way in which post-apocalyptic stories have been and continue to be explored. As the Google Ngrams plot above makes clear, while zombie-themed films and books do go back a bit, the amount of zombie-lit in the early 2000s reached… epidemic proportions. Brooks’ book, in 2006, was published just before the point of over-saturation.

Marc Forster’s film adaptation of World War Z was not. Coming out at the peak of the zombie craze, in 2013, it might have contributed to the sense that it had been, er, done to death.2

Where Brooks’ book was a fun-but-serious attempt to use zombies as a way to explore the complexities that accompany real-world catastrophes, Forster’s film was… something else. Let’s leave aside how it works as a zombie movie — I’ll concede it has a few inspired scenes, embedded within what was otherwise a pretty uninspiring film.3 But as an adaptation, it was, in my view, an utter disaster.

Aside from having only the loosest of connections to any aspects of the source material, it managed to almost perfectly subvert and reject the underlying structure and message of the book. It’s a generic zombie film whose sole innovation is having its brawny heroic protagonist, played by Brad Pitt, visit a handful of other countries on his mission to find an instant cure to the zombie outbreak. Which (spoilers except it is bog-standard obvious) he does, which fixes the world overnight. I guess I could imagine even more perverse ways to disregard the source material — at least Pitt does travel a bit — but it’s still a pretty impressive fete, to so perfectly invert the message of the source material.

How and why did this happen? I don’t know. I imagine the conversation in the studio centered around ideas like “I bet a Brad Pitt zombie movie would make a lot of money” and “only nerds care about the source material, and they aren’t our target demographic for making lots of money.” Anyway, however it got that way, it took what was a very intelligent book and turned it into a very dumb movie.4

A question that has been going through my mind for a decade now is this: what would a good film adaptation of World War Z actually look like? By “good” I mean, “faithful to the original message of the book,” but I am also not ignorant of the fact that to be successful, much less actually get funded and made, such a film would have to conform to various Hollywood standards and expectations. A purely literal script based on the book would absolutely not work, because books aren’t films and films aren’t books. Great adaptations find a way to grasp the core of the original work and maintain that through the transmutation to the new medium, while at the same time adding elements and approaches that can only be accomplished in the new medium.5

I’ve come up with two possible answers to this. If you have pitches of your own, put them in the comments — I’m all ears, and this is something I think about every time I re-read World War Z, which is fairly often (because I like to contrive excuses to assign it to my students).

The first is to go back to the Terkel-esque aspect and how that is normally translated into film: as a documentary. So one version of this imaginary adaptation would be as a multi-part faux documentary, played totally straight, in the style of, for example, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War (2017). I really enjoyed the latter (which does not mean it is not without its flaws, critiques, etc.) because it takes the time to try and tell a lot of stories about the Vietnam War from a lot of different perspectives.6 And by time, I mean it is ten episodes long, and clocks in at over 17 hours. Which, of course, is much more than you could do for a feature film. But it would totally work as a streaming series, right?

Such an approach would let you really do Brooks’ approach justice, because you could essentially replicate the message of the book, including its conceit that we, the audience, also experienced the zombie apocalypse as well. (Also, imagine the possibilities for “in-universe” commercials.)

Of course, that’s a pretty radical reimagining, in terms of genre: not a “zombie film” that could play in the theaters, but a television series that would work better in the media landscape of today than that of when Forster’s film was made.

What if we wanted to achieve something better, but still through the lens of a standard, feature-length, blockbuster movie?

My second suggestion would be to have a film which wasn’t as multi-faceted as Brooks’ book, but wasn’t as narrowly-focused as the Brad Pitt picture. A model for this might be the 2011 film Contagion, which has multiple focal points/protagonists, each navigating totally disconnected paths through a world disaster simultaneously. Contagion still manages to conform to aspects of a Hollywood narrative (heroes, struggles, stars, etc.), but does so in a way that mostly doesn’t oversimplify in traditional fashion.7

I’ll write more about Contagion at a future time, as it’s another one that we no doubt “read” differently now having lived through a pandemic (and that I know a lot of us watched or rewatched during it), but for the purpose of thinking about World War Z, what works about it is exactly the way it conjures a “global” sense of the scale of the catastrophe, the lack of the “central male protagonist who fixes it all” trope, and, in what I think is its best aspect, the way it indicates that even after you get the “fix” (in this case, the vaccine), the roll-out time will still be impressive, and the overall effects of the disaster don’t just vanish.

If anything, the experience with COVID indicates how much further it could have gone with that, but I don’t know of any other disaster films that quite goes as far in that direction. It subverts the “happily ever after” trope and the “and then everything was fixed” tropes, both of which can be narratively satisfying, of course, but are deeply misleading when it comes to how real-world catastrophes play out.

OK, those are my pitches. If you’ve got other ideas, I’m all ears.8

For me, the reason this is an interesting question, aside from the fact that I like the Brooks book and was disappointed by its film adaptation, is that ultimately this isn’t just a question of how to do one book. What makes World War Z, the book, interesting is that it is about disaster and recovery, and takes a serious approach to both aspects of it. Most of our disaster and apocalypse media focus on the first part of that — and usually, the disaster is averted. When we have media that is about a non-averted disaster, it often jumps to a fully-destroyed (post-apocalyptic) world. World War Z is a book about going to the brink, losing a lot, and then slowly beginning the process of clawing one’s way back. It’s a lot closer to how disaster planners view these kinds of events, and how survivors experience them, than films about individual heroes or “magic” fixes.

So thinking about how to tell that kind of story well, in a way that is still palatable to large audiences, feels to me like a fairly important question. Because, as Brooks implicitly argues in the book, if you have a bad model for thinking about what global disasters look like, you’re going to have a hard time surviving them. And as the COVID experience quite plainly indicated… we’ve got a long way to go.

The book’s reputation for bleakness, grayness, and grimness is well-earned, as anyone who has read it can tell you. There’s also a movie, which I won’t be talking about right now (because I’ve been avoiding it!).1

If you haven’t read The Road, it tells the story of a father (“the man”) and son (“the boy”) in an utterly dying world: an unexplained apocalypse has just killed pretty much everything off, and the few survivors that remain are almost entirely categorized as either the eaters or the eaten. The world is coated with a layer of toxic ash that has killed off nearly everything, plant and animal alike, and reducing humanity to dwindling, uncivilized numbers. The man and boy travel through this world along the titular road. Along the way, they have mostly bad times, although occasionally they stumble across something… less bad? Very early on, they stumble across what may be the last remaining can of Coca-Cola, an artifact of an earlier time. The man shares this treat with the boy, and we feel the bittersweetness of it, this fleeting joy and its implication of finality.

There’s... more, and it’s mostly bad. Many of the things the travelers encounter — especially those involving other people — are firmly in the realm of horror. Disturbing images of the sort that McCarthy is famous for, the kind of graphic violence that has led a lot of well-read people I know to basically roll their eyes when he comes up in a conversation. Bad men. Bad times. A bit of cannibalism.2

So even the good bits aren’t all that good against a context like this one. For years, my wife and I have discussed the question: is there any room for hope in The Road? Because the world that McCarthy envisions doesn’t exactly hold out a lot of options. It doesn’t feel like the low-point in something that will climb back up again, it feels like, er, the end of the road. The ending of The Road (which I won’t spoil) is deliberately ambiguous, but my feeling is that it is pretty hard to read it as offering up a positive future. The verdict’s in, McCarthy seems to be saying, and humanity’s future is, well, dust.

So what does it say about the early 2000s that the The Road was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and chosen for Oprah’s Book Club? Some of this might be the sort of accolades that get thrust upon older authors of a certain “stature” whose work was deemed controversial when they were younger. And it’s a genuinely gripping book.

But it’s also an artifact of its time and place. The early 2000s were bursting with grim, post-apocalyptic media — 28 Days Later (2002), The Walking Dead (2003), and World War Z (2006) come immediately to mind as emblematic examples of the rising “zombie apocalypse” trend (I’ll write more on that another time). These are all dark, gritty apocalypses. And The Road feels like the grittiest of the gritty, with its literal layer of toxic ash, and McCarthy’s lack of a desire to give you anything like a real sense of resolution.

I think it’s pretty easy to make rather broad arguments about the zeitgeist of the early 2000s. The effect of 9/11 on the minds of Americans was profound, and one of those things I’ve struggled to convey to my students. It’s not that things were great before 9/11. But it felt like an inflection point, a descent to somewhere terrible, one that various powers-that-be were almost giddy with enthusiasm about pursuing to its deepest, darkest ends.

I don’t think that’s the whole story about post-apocalypticism in the early 2000s (this is a theme that will be returned to in future posts), but I think it’s part of the context for why this book, and these kinds of themes, seem to resonate at the time.

McCarthy was interviewed by Oprah in mid-2007 after she chose the book for her book club (which boosted its sales into the area of 1.3 million, apparently). It’s an odd interview. McCarthy did not really give interviews, and was not exactly a great interviewee. And Oprah was not exactly the best interviewer, in this case. But she did ask him, several times, about where he felt the book came from, for him, and why people responded to it. Here are the parts I found most interesting:3

O: Where did this apocalyptic dream come from?

M: Well, it’s interesting because usually you don’t know where a book comes from. It’s just there, some kind of itch that you can’t quite scratch. My son John, about four years ago, he and I went to El Paso —

O: He’s 8 now.

M: Yeah. And we checked into the old hotel there. And one night, John was asleep. It was probably about 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. And I went over there and I stood I looked out the window at this town. There was nothing moving, but I could hear the trains going through, a very lonesome sound. I just had this image of what this town might look like in 50 or 100 years. I just had this image of these fires up on the hill, and everything being laid waste, and I thought a lot about my little boy. So I wrote those pages and that was the end of it. And then about four years later I was in Ireland, and I woke up one morning and I realized that it wasn’t two pages of another book, it was a book, and it was about that man and that little boy.

O: Is this a love story to your son?

M: Hmm.. In a way I suppose it is, although it’s kind of embarrassing. I suppose it is, yeah.

O: I just saw you blush! When I called you at first, I said, people want to know, where did this book come from? You said, well, it’s obvious it came because my son practically co-wrote this book.

M: Yeah.

O: Had you not has this son at this time, this book wouldn’t have been written?

M. No. Absolutely not. Never would have occurred to me to try to write a book about a father and a son.

And then a bit later:

O: Are we to ever know what actually happened [in the book]? All kinds of critics and all kinds of fans read all kinds of things into it. Some people say it’s about the journey of man on Earth, it’s about a man’s spiritual journey here on Earth… is that true, or is it just about the man and the boy on the road?

M: Well, I like to think it’s just about the boy and the man on the road, but obviously you can draw, you know, conclusions about all sorts of things from reading the book, depending on your taste. It’s a pretty simple and straightforward story, I think.

O: You know, it’s so interesting, I think if we had read this book 25 years ago, 20 years ago, it would have seemed futuristic. But something about it feels ominous and real.

M: Yeah, I think it is, maybe since 9/11, people are more concerned about apocalyptic issues. We’re not used that.

O: Not accustomed to living in fear, being anxious about what’s going to happen.

M: We’ve had it pretty good. This country’s been lucky. Just like me.

O: So, you know that it’s now on people’s minds, when you were writing it. Obviously it’s on your mind.

M: Yeah.

O: What do you want us to get from this book in particular?

M: Just simply to care about things and people and be more appreciative. Life is pretty damned good. Even when it looks bad. And we should appreciate it more. We should be grateful. I don’t know who to be grateful to, but you should be thankful for what you have.

The idea that The Road is about a) the love of a father for their son, and b) that its message is about gratitude for the present world is, well, a little jarring to me. Both make sense once you hear them articulated. But they’re absolutely not how I read The Road, nor what I think of as the point of post-apocalyptic stories in general.

On love, sure. I can see it. The Road is a story of a father trying to protect and nourish their son in a world gone wrong. It’s ever-present in the father’s fears and concerns, but also his self-sacrificing ways that he tries to increase the odds of his son’s survival and, to the extent possible, enjoyment.

Love is giving your boy possibly the last Coca-Cola on the planet. Love is keeping one bullet in the chamber so you can shoot your boy in the head before the cannibal bands grab him. This isn’t a standard definition of love. But could it be the expression of love under such circumstances? Sure.

But… gratitude? Most post-apocalyptic stories are commentaries on the present in some way, either as a warning (“don’t go down this road!”) or as a dark lens being applied to a society (“we seem civilized today, but watch what happens when chips turn!”). They aren’t usually something along the lines of, “aren’t you glad you don’t live in this horrible world I invented?” That’s an odd take, and an odd goal.

McCarthy makes clear elsewhere in the interview (as he has elsewhere) that he didn’t know where the book was going until he wrote it. His writing style is notoriously stream-of-consciousness.4 As an approach to storytelling, that has its ups and downs.

I think one of the consequences, though, is that it almost necessarily means that such a book is not going to channel a specific “message,” but rather channel a specific mental state.5 And in this case, the mental state of an older author who was thinking about the love he had for his young son, and who was reflecting on his own gratitude at the position of relative comfort he’s ended up in towards the end of his life.

The result is this semantically ambiguous product, a work of art that can be interpreted by different people in different times in different ways. The Road is in some ways one of the more experiential post-apocalyptic novels I’ve read, gesturing impressionistically at its world but not getting too caught up in the act of world-building. And in this case it is almost essential that the book doesn’t explain how the world got the way it was, or where it might be going.

There was a lot of speculation when it came out, and speculation since then, on what the cause of The Road’s apocalypse was. In my mind, it’s largely not that interesting. A lot of people have always assumed it was nuclear, though it doesn’t really match up well with that. I’ve heard people suggest it was perhaps meant to be supernatural in nature, a promised cleansing by fire. McCarthy apparently suggested it might have been a meteor strike. Scientists have suggested the eruption of a super-volcano might fit the bill. What matters, for the purpose of the story, is that it was totalizing and it was relatively quick.

More so than a lot of more deliberate post-apocalyptic futures, The Road’s ambiguity is both its core strength and its chief weakness. It’s what makes it an impressive work of literature. But it also makes it a book that is pretty unpleasant to read twice.

I think it is interesting that much of the post-apocalyptic media that is popular today, by contrast, tends to have more optimistic overtones, more explicit hope, than that of 20 years ago. Perhaps because that dread and sense of vulnerability that was so novel in the early 2000s has become just a bit too… persistent.