The Doomsday Scenario

In 1998, for no particular reason other than I had an ultimatum to spend fifteen hundred dollars in unearned grant money, I flew to New Mexico for two weeks, rented an anonymous white sedan, and drove around. My mission, de-facto, was to check out a lo-fi innovation in green building design - the cool, strange houses called Earthships. I spent about a week with a community building Earthships. From a design perspective, the structures are very compelling - applying age-old principles of designing in harmony with the local environment, a handful of modern innovations, and effectively reusing waste and natural, sustainable materials to build simple, highly efficient structures. The egalitarian and community ethos of the organization was also compelling. Ultimately, the only odd impression I left with was of many of the volunteers and die-hards who had found themselves working on Earthships in the desert - a noxious mixture of a righteous hippie vibe with a survivalist paranoia. Maybe they will inherit the Earth.

After exhausting my single week of research, I took the opportunity to point my sedan down to Sandia, where I wanted to visit the National Atomic Museum. Through countless American History classes, war movies, documentaries on the Manhattan Project, and influenced, at some level, by Joy Kogawa's Obasan, I had developed an interest in the iconography of the Bomb, and through it, a morbid fascination with the most unimaginable and unholy outcome - a doomsday event. I won't spend much time describing this fascination, but suffice to say that while I was intellectually engaged, the visceral reaction never rose much above the level of kitsch. I bought postcards to tape to my dorm room wall.

Living in New York in the post-millennial, you can't escape that nagging feeling (it wouldn't be accurate to call it fear) that in some permutation of some horrible world, a doomsday is in the offing, and this is where it would have to happen. Whether it's a rogue nuke lost by the listless administrations of a Soviet satellite state or the one-off concoction of some manic and misled nuclear engineer in some disappointing corner of the world, that shadow looms. Which is why Ron Rosenbaum's recent article in Slate brought me no comfort:

according to a new book called Doomsday Men and several papers on the subject by U.S. analysts, it may not have been merely a fantasy. According to these accounts, the Soviets built and activated a variation of a doomsday machine in the mid-'80s. And there is no evidence Putin's Russia has deactivated the system.

Instead, something was reactivated in Russia last week. I'm referring to the ominous announcement—given insufficient attention by most U.S. media (the Economist made it the opening of a lead editorial on Putin's Russia)—by Vladimir Putin that Russia has resumed regular "strategic flights" of nuclear bombers. (They may or may not be carrying nuclear bombs, but you can practically hear Putin's smirking tone as he says, "Our [nuclear bomber] pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life.")

These twin developments raise a troubling question: What are the United States' and Russia's current nuclear policies with regard to how and when they will respond to a perceived nuclear attack? In most accounts, once the president or Russian premier receives radar warning of an attack, they have less than 15 minutes to decide whether the warning is valid. The pressure is on to "use it or lose it"—launch our missiles before they can be destroyed in their silos. Pressure that makes the wrong decision more likely. Pressure that makes accidental nuclear war a real possibility.

Once you start to poke into this matter, you discover a disturbing level of uncertainty, which leads me to believe we should be demanding that the United States and Russia define and defend their nuclear postures. Bush and Putin should be compelled to tell us just what "failsafe" provisions are installed on their respective nuclear bombers, missiles, and submarines—what the current provisions against warning malfunctions are and what kinds of controls there are over the ability of lone madman nuclear bombers to bring on the unhappy end of history.

The scenario that Rosenbaum portrays is unlikely, but not impossible. And scary. My addled mind began racing. It didn't help that I had just started Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Immediately, the speculative movies and novels of and after a nuclear holocaust leapt to the fore of my unsteady imagination. I quickly ran to Wikipedia, to learn all that I could about the Doomsday device. I made one key finding.

Before veering too far from the track of paranoia, let me forward one hypothesis: pop culture won the war against mutually assured destruction. The theory itself is unsound in every way. Only the weight of its own ridiculousness, reflected in the fun-house mirror of pop, brought it down - or at least quieted the beast, if Rosenbaum is to be believed. If you don't believe me, peruse for yourself the list of key pop culture references to the Doomsday device in Wikipedia. All they share is a complete ridiculousness in dealing with such a traumatic eventuality. I was, and still am, disappointed. Here are the highlights:

• In the film Dr. Strangelove, the Soviet Ambassador, upon learning that the Americans could not call back a bomber set to deliver nuclear weapons inside the Soviet Union, informs the President that Soviet Premier Kisof had ordered the creation of a doomsday device. The existence of the device hadn't yet been announced, simply because the Premier "liked surprises," making it useless for its intended purpose of deterring nuclear attack.
• In the Star Trek episode The Doomsday Machine, a conical planet killer goes on a planet destroying rampage, its projected path threatening "...the very heart of the Federation". Captain Kirk speculates that the machine was created as a doomsday device, and used, thus destroying its creators and then going on a random path of destruction.
• In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, a doomsday substance called ice-nine is created with the capability to freeze all the water on Earth. The creator of ice-nine is depicted as being willfully negligent of the practical dangers of his research, and it is carelessness in the handling of the substance which causes the Earth to freeze.
• In the novel Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams, the supercomputer Hactar was asked by the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax to "create the ultimate weapon." When he asked them what they meant by ultimate, he was told to "look it up in the dictionary", and concluded that they wanted him to destroy the universe. Hactar, reasoning that the known consequences of setting off such a device are worse than any possible consequence of not setting it off, creates a non-functional one. The device Hactar created was designed to be "a very small bomb" that was simply a "junction box in Hyperspace that would, when activated, connect the heart of every major sun with the heart of every other major sun", thus destroying the Universe in one gigantic Hyperspacial-Supernova. However, as stated, Hactar ensured that the device was non-functional.
• In Robert McCammon's novel, Swan Song, the President of the United States, delusional and believing himself God fallen from heaven, decides that evil has won on Earth (after the nuclear holocaust he helped induce) and the planet must therefore be purged using the Talons of Heaven. This concept involves firing a massive payload of nuclear weapons at the poles, knocking the earth off its axis, causing massive icecap melting and subsequent flooding.
• In Futurama, Professor Farnsworth is known to possess several doomsday devices, which (ironically) infrequently come in handy for saving the universe.
• In the video game Halo, the central plot device, Halo, was designed to eradicate all organic life in the galaxy, ironically to stop the very enemy threatening it.
• In the book Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, the Molecular Disruption Device can destroy an object, and any object near it, such as a fleet of space ships. Eventuality it is used on a planet near the Bugger's main fleet, destroying it, and ending a long war. In the sequels Speaker for the Dead and Children of the Mind the threat of the MD Device (also called "Dr. Device") looms over a human colony on a world with a newly discovered sentient species.
• In the Discworld story The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett, Cohen the Barbarian plans to detonate an explosive called Agatean Thunder Clay at the Hub, to show the gods how annoyed he is with them. Unknown to him, this would disrupt the Discworld's standing magical field, thereby rendering it impossible for it to exist.
• In Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the "Alpha-Omega bomb" works by igniting the atmosphere.
• In Star Wars: A New Hope and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, both Death Stars can be seen as doomsday devices as it has a superlaser which can destroy entire planets.
• In the James Bond movie Moonraker, Sir Hugo Drax creates a doomsday device -a poison dispersed by satellites- to eradicate all human life on earth. Afterwards, he wants to re-inhabit the earth using a colony of "perfect" human beings, orbiting in space while the doomsday device is active.
• The Tom Clancy book Rainbow Six has a plot line in which a wealthy industrialist develops an airborne toxin and an "antidote" to the toxin that will actually spread the effects further, and will be released during the Sydney Olympics, with the so-called antidote actually being lethal to everyone not previously inoculated by the "real" antidote, and only his group of people who have been so inoculated will be alive to repopulate the earth.
• In the cartoon series The Flintstones, the character The Great Gazoo is sent to earth as punishment for creating a button which would annihilate the entire universe.
• In the 1987 spy comedy Real Men, the climax of the movie involves two CIA agents charged with the task of receiving, on behalf of the U.S. government, a choice of one of two gifts from a group of extraterrestrials. One of the choices is referred to only as "The Big Gun", a weapon apparently capable of destroying the entire old Soviet Union (along with the United States). The other choice is called "The Good Package". (Neither device is ever actually seen on screen, nor has its function described in great detail and for purposes of the story either one can be regarded as a Big Dumb Object).
• The final story arc of the animated television series Exosquad is dedicated to the dictator Phaeton's attempt to detonate a doomsday device on Earth as revenge for the destruction of his homeplanet Mars.
• In the videogame Warzone 2100, a nuclear missile defense system gets infected with a computer virus, launching missile strikes to all major cities of the world. This event creates the phenomena called nuclear winter.