The fate of the Earth, the Bush years

To this day, despite coming to the edge of thinking about using the bomb -- in Korea, Vietnam, even, if rumors are to be believed, in these last years when the Bush administration may have been preparing to wield "the nuclear option" against Iranian deep-dug nuclear facilities -- it has yet to happen.

That brings us to another dimension of the bomb in the mind. It turned out, as I mentioned, that this weapon was not going to be useful for war-fighting; that, at very best, it was useful for threatening. After all, use was likely to annihilate everyone concerned -- and possibly the rest of the human species in the bargain. Thus, nuclear policy became a matter of bluster and bluff, while what we thought of as "the balance of nuclear terror" proved to be a strictly mental operation. Policy became a pure play of psychology and images, of threats as distinct from use.

And yet, somehow, the war-fighting school has made a comeback in the Bush moment…

Exactly, and with a permutation of the familiar Cold War illusion, based once again on the idea of sole, or group, proprietorship of the bomb: That a limited club of good countries, led by the United States, could still more or less corner the market on such weapons.

Well, it's way too late in history for that! But what flowed from that idea, however, was the entire Bush Doctrine, the Bush revolution in nuclear policy, which proposed that the United States, using its immense military force, could actually stop proliferation in other countries by military means. This is probably the most dangerous permutation of the idea of first use and nuclear war-fighting we've had in the nuclear age -- and the Iraq war was its first child.

Over a bomb that really was in the mind, by the way.

(Laughs) Actually, that fiasco illustrates one true fact about the bomb in the mind. The mistake was possible only because everyone knew that Saddam Hussein could have been building the bomb. For the bomb is misconceived as just a piece of hardware, or even many pieces of hardware scattered around the world. It is essentially, originally, and everlastingly a set of scientific and technological capacities open to all and coming at you, in a certain sense, from all directions at all times. As soon as you put out the fire over here, another is likely to spring up over there, and so on. Military force is singularly inappropriate for facing this conundrum and yet that's what the Bush administration chose. It's like trying to dispel a mist with a machine gun, just the wrong instrument for the job.

You have a very vivid image related to this in your new book. You call our world a nuclear archipelago.

Just imagine the science of the bomb as like the white-hot magma at the center of the Earth, always there. The spread of nuclear technology is like volcanic lava spilling onto the ocean floor, and nuclear arsenals are like so many islands that have built up under the sea and suddenly penetrate its surface to form an island chain. The islands seem separate from one another, but in fact are only the highest peaks of an underwater mountain range.

To play out that image, in the Bush years we've been focused on just a few of the smaller islands -- the Korean island, the Iranian island that may or may not be there, the Iraqi island that wasn't there -- to the exclusion of the larger islands or the mainland.

In this blinkered vision, we see an aspect of a grand illusion that was born at the end of the Cold War era. A very curious thing happened. The United States -- maybe Russia, too -- just forgot about its own arsenal. Didn't get rid of it, just pushed it out of consciousness. But other countries didn't forget. They saw that every one of the nuclear powers of the Cold War era was choosing to remain a nuclear power. Even as the numbers of weapons were being brought down a little, huge arsenals were retained. So other countries were then faced with a decision: In a nuclear armed world, are we going to remain without nuclear arms? Well, India decided no. It rebelled against what it called "nuclear apartheid," joined the nuclear club, and Pakistan followed suit.

I want to back up a little. We've been talking about the bomb in the mind. You were born in...

1943...

...and I, in '44, so we barely beat the bomb into the world. The bomb in my mind was a vivid thing. I still remember my nuclear nightmares from childhood. What about the bomb in your mind -- and the path that brought you to your bestselling and seminal book, "The Fate of the Earth."

For some reason, I remember a photo and a headline from the [New York] Daily News announcing that the Soviet Union had set off its first hydrogen bomb in August of 1953. Then, in college at Harvard in the '60s -- it's only in retrospect that I attach any importance to this -- I took a course from one Henry Kissinger. I recall a feeling almost like schizophrenia. It was a very hot spring and I was sitting in sweltering libraries reading these nightmarish texts about nuclear weapons. I remember this thought: that the people who were for the bomb were politically sane but morally crazy, while the people who were against the bomb were morally sane but politically crazy. These seemed like two universes that would never meet.

Of far greater importance was going to Vietnam in 1966 and becoming a reporter on the war. The experience led me to think seriously about nuclear arms. When I began to study the origins of the war and the American search for "credibility" through victory in Vietnam, I saw the connections with the nuclear policies of the day. Even before the United States had many troops there, Vietnam was conceived of as a "limited war." Limited in comparison to what? Well, in comparison to a general war, which was a nuclear war, which you couldn't fight. I began to believe what I still believe: You cannot think about any aspect of international politics without finding the bomb located somewhere at the center of it. Manifestly, that was true throughout the Cold War, and now it's true again.

This leads me to one of the more fascinating, stranger parts of your new book, "The Seventh Decade" -- your complex discussion of the attraction of these weapons to various nations. Since they can't be used, why in the world do states want them?

Often only as a kind of symbol of power and prestige, another bomb in the mind, if you will. This is easily demonstrated if you look at a country like India. There, getting the bomb was never primarily a matter of countering manifest foreign threats. Instead, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party mainly wanted to elevate India to great-power status in the world. It also saw joining the nuclear club as a continuation of the anti-nuclear, anti-colonial struggle, as an escape from nuclear apartheid. If the superpowers would not disarm, India would arm.

But if you happen to think of this motivation as strictly Indian, you'd be quite wrong. If, for instance, you look at the record of British deliberations on the bomb in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there's very little discussion of the Soviet Union, or of any enemy for that matter. All the talk is about keeping in the game with the United States. This was the post-World War II moment. Britain was losing its empire and its leaders were desperate to find some way to maintain a semblance of being a great power.

At one point, for instance, when Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin returned from Washington, having been talked down to by U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes, he told [British Prime Minister Clement] Atlee that Britain must have the Union Jack on the bomb, because he didn't ever want a foreign secretary of Britain to be spoken to that way again.

In France, we find very much the same story. In fact, [President Charles] De Gaulle actually said at a certain point: It's precisely because we're not a great power that we have to have the bomb.

I noticed that, in your book, you link this horrific weapon to a word that normally wouldn't be associated with it. You call those like the Indian leadership who wanted the bomb "nuclear romantics." The romance of a world-destroying weapon. Please explain.

Again, getting the bomb is like striking a pose, like a Byronic or Napoleonic hero. Seeming to be a great power. There is a nice line in the new Richard Rhodes book, "Arsenals of Folly," in which someone says: The reason we don't want to get rid of nuclear weapons is that then we'd walk down the street in a different way. That may be close to the essence of what it's all about. Without these weapons, you can't be quite so cocky.

Next page: Call it: The bomb out of the mind