The (Cold War) Mentality: What is it? What isn’t it? No. II
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know. To see other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.
Our dominant value – sometimes I fear our only value – has, very clearly, become that of power. This aligns us with a brain system, that of the left hemisphere, the raison d’être of which is to control and manipulate the world. But not to understand it: that, for evolutionary reasons that I explain, has come to be more the raison d’être of our – more intelligent, in every sense – right hemisphere. Unfortunately the left hemisphere, knowing less, thinks it knows more. It is a good servant, but a ruinous – a peremptory – master. And the predictable outcome of assuming the role of master is the devastation of all that is important to us – or should be important, if we really know what we are about. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things (2021)
Even before the first successful test of an explosive nuclear device, in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer and other physicists knew that nuclear weapons were almost certain to be made many times more powerful than the single bombs that had destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That would not prevent war they knew, as some Americans seemed to think, any more than the invention of dynamite or the machine gun had. It would, rather, vastly increase the potential of war’s destructiveness. Far beyond the destructiveness of World War II, or of any previous war. Beyond the destructiveness of all previous wars taken together. Increase it to a level capable of ending human life on Earth.
We would have achieved the power to do that.
They were right about even bigger nuclear bombs being possible. In 1950, we tested the first “super bomb” device and in 1954, in the Castle Bravo test, we exploded a device called “Shrimp” that all by itself produced more that three times the explosive power of all the bombs exploded by all sides in World War II. And lots of radioactivity besides. The explosives in World War II hadn’t produced any radioactivity—if you leave out the bombs we ourselves dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After the Castle Bravo test, we knew we had the power to end human life on earth in an afternoon.
Even before the Trinity test in 1945, the first ever test of an atomic bomb, Niels Bohr had brought a proposal to our President Franklin Roosevelt. To prevent the deeply perilous and costly nuclear arms race that would otherwise be inevitable, we should approach the Soviets and tell them about our work in the Manhattan Project to make an atomic bomb. We hadn’t told them anything about this so far. They knew we hadn’t told them, but we didn’t know they knew.
Bohr urged that before we tested the first bomb we try to reach a cooperative agreement with the Soviets about controlling atomic energy in the future. President Roosevelt seemed receptive to the idea and so did some British leaders who were part of their atomic bomb project. President Roosevelt asked Bohr to take his proposal to Winston Churchill. Churchill vehemently vetoed the idea of any cooperation with the Soviets. He might not have tried to understand it.
By the end of World War II, even before it ended, the deeply dangerous and terribly costly nuclear arms race Bohr and other scientists had tried to prevent had begun. And with it what came to be called the Cold War.
That Cold War lasted until 1991. It generated the production by us of 70,000 nuclear warheads, enough to destroy human life on earth many times over, leaving behind, as Jonathan Schell put it in 1982, “a republic of insects and grass.” The cost of the Cold War to us in the United States was estimated soon after its end to be five trillion dollars. Over ten trillion in today’s dollars.
When the Cold War ended, we finally realized we’d have to clean up the radioactive mess left at our production facilities—at sites like Hanford in Washington, Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Fernald in Ohio, Savannah River in South Carolina, Rocky Flats in Colorado—all now Superfund sites. Some polluted, it may be, beyond repair. That was going to cost more billions of dollars easy.
Maybe we’d also think we should pay for health care for the Americans who had suffered the effects of radioactivity from our nuclear mining, production, and testing. Some had gotten cancers of different kinds, some of the cancers fatal.
How about that? The only people killed in the Cold War by our nuclear weapons were Americans.
The Cold War ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved into some fifteen states, some of which then joined a “Russian Federation.” None was a Communist country any more. None is now.
The adversary during the Cold War had been taken to be “Communism,” with the Soviet Union being its principal avatar. With the victory in 1950 of the Communist forces in the civil war in China, the threat posed by Communism was greatly magnified, we thought, as far as the U.S. was concerned. China itself, the country, hadn’t been seen to be a threat to us. That happened only recently. Nevertheless, after China came to be led by Communists in 1950, our Cold War nuclear war plans had designated it also for utter destruction if a nuclear exchange were to take place between us and the Soviet Union.
Today, it is the countries of Russia (which is still not Communist) and China (which is still Communist and a dictatorship but not exactly being run according to Communist principles) that are seen as the threat to us. Communism itself isn’t seen as the threat so much. I don’t think.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had seen Communism leading finally to “the withering away of the state.” That part of their program hadn’t gotten much attention in any Communist state I knew about. Some conservative people in the United States say today that they’d like to see “government” wither away. Might there be a common interest there?
Since the end of the Cold War, many countries have come to be ruled by autocrats but none has called itself Communist. So what are we to make of the fact that one of the mob running up the steps of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2022 carried a sign that said “Communism is the Invisible Enemy.” It was easy to see this on television. I wonder what he thought “Communism” was, beyond being an “enemy” and “invisible.” How old had he been during the Cold War? From what I could see of him, maybe not even born yet.
It’s clear that the Cold War mode of thinking survived the Cold War itself.
Might it, then, be important to see this thinking, not as a response to the way the world is, but as a manifestation of what Einstein meant by a “mode of thinking,” as the kind of thing we needed to change if we were to stop our “drift” toward “unparalleled catastrophe”?
A “mode of thinking,” it seems, needs to be thought of not as something that correlates with “objective” circumstances in the outside world. Not even as something that corresponds to an ideology. Or a theory. Instead it seems better to think of it as something that provides a kind of habitat for any ideology or theory. Perhaps it would be better to think of it as “a disposition” or “character.” Or “a form of attention.”
What I’ll be calling henceforth “the Mentality” is this kind of thing, not just a set of beliefs about the way the world is. It is not a “what” but a “how.”
A challenge for us as we think about the characteristics of the Mentality will be that it is not going to be something we can easily perceive because it is what we are perceiving with. In our effort to characterize its properties, we will not be able to stand outside of it and view it “objectively,” as something presumed to be entirely independent of ourselves. It is something that in an important way constitutes ourselves and our world.
David Foster Wallace was trying to get at the challenge here, I’d say, in his remarkable commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005. He opens the address with a story:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
“The point of the fish story,” Wallace says shortly afterwards,
is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history and technology, not current events—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see a list of other entries that might be of interest, see the You Might Want to Know Archive.
Next: The Mentality Rears Its Undead Head.