Life After Doomsday
Bruce D. Clayton
Dial, $8.95 (paper)
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings
Translated by Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain
Basic Books, $37.50
Bruce Clayton dedicates Life After Doomsday, his how-to volume about surviving nuclear war, to the “memory of a few sensible Romans, who in 79 A.D. fled from Pompeii in the middle of the night while their neighbors laughed at them.” He needn’t have trekked so far back into history to find “survivalists” worthy of his dedication.
More appropriate, perhaps, might be the tens of thousands of Japanese “survivalists” of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Or the hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and civilians who are the “survivalists” of experimentation with nuclear weapons during atmospheric atom bomb tests. But Clayton prefers his own sources: U.S. government–prepared civil defense pamphlets, and those rugged pioneers who are at this minute stocking their cellars with canned goods, water, guns and reading matter for the siege years to come.
Clayton tells us in his preface, that he began to write because he was “angry.” Angered not by the spectre of nuclear doom on some distant horizon. Angered not by Vice President George Bush’s campaign trail speculation that a nuclear war was “winnable.” Clayton is not angry about the re-heating of the Cold War arms race. No, Clayton is angry because disarmament activists he encountered exhibited “bumbling incompetence” and offered “distortions and outright lies” as the “‘truth about nuclear war.'”
As an example, the author cites the case of one scientist who asserted that fallout after a nuclear war would blanket most of the nation. Clayton argues “from my studies I knew that there are many areas of the United States which stand very little chance of getting any fallout at all.” Indeed, Clayton is convinced that “for most Americans, survival of at least the first few weeks following a nuclear attack is not only possible, it is almost unavoidable. With careful preparation, any family or small group of people can insure its own survival under such conditions and also through the long period of recovery to follow.”
Clayton, at the outset, makes the same sort of false assumptions as those he criticizes. One problem, or rather the problem all doomsday prophesiers face, is that there is no way to be certain exactly what sort of nuclear weapons the Russians might use on us, how accurate they might be, how “dirty” in terms of radioactive byproducts they could be or how many of them could be sent to us. Likewise, Americans are uncertain about the reliability of our own weapons, although we must assume that hundreds of atomic tests conducted above and below ground must have yielded some useful information we can place our faith in.
Bruce Clayton seems to be a person of great faith. He refuses to be numbered among the “disarm or die” proponents he writes so disdainfully of. The author proudly proclaims that in researching his “survivalist” field manual, he “joined the retreat movement” himself. Clayton interviewed experts, “purchased equipment, learned to shoot, hunt, garden, grind grain, bake bread, build fallout shelters,” and so on ad nauseum. He is now prepared for the “greatest social and biological catastrophe our world has ever known.” And he is prepared to survive it.
And so, preparations are what this book is all about. Clayton offers eight, breezily written chapters chock-full of. illustrations telling J.Q. Public about nuclear war, survival foods and skills, how to build bomb shelters, defend them and administer basic medical treatment to those who might be injured. The author skims over natural disasters like floods, earthquakes and hurricanes, spends a few paragraphs discussing religious, economic and political catastrophes and then gets to the heart of the matter-nuclear war.
The author’s chapter on sheltering from the firestorm, “Home Sweet Hole,” offers some useful information on the basics of radiation and thermal protection. Maybe it will be a big seller to residents near shaky nuclear power plants or weapons production facilities. In lieu of possessing a survival-equipped home on the missile range, the reader is also told how to build a temporary shelter on the farm, aboard a boat or even in the air. At a time when U.S. Defense Department planners are desperately trying to figure out whether existing missile silos and VIP shelters dug into mountains in the nation’s capital environs can be sufficiently “hardened” to withstand Soviet nuclear megatonnage, Clayton’s confident comment that “you can protect yourself with a minimum of inconvenience and expense” seems at best self-deluded, and at worst, criminally misleading.
The chapter of Life After Doomsday entitled “To Have and to Hold” exemplifies best of all just how far the shelter-builders of the bygone Cold War era have come. At the outset, Clayton writes that he regrets any “superficial resemblance” between his advice about defending a survivalist refuge and the “militarism of right-wing private armies or left-wing revolutionary cadres.” But the comparisons will be drawn. For a moral lesson in the propriety of fighting for your turf with deadly force, Clayton relies on Aesop’s fable about the grasshopper and the ant. The ant, so the story goes, toiled through the summer socking away provisions for hard winter months while the grasshopper lived for the moment. “Should the person with foresight be obliged to succor the unprepared and foolish neighbor?” Clayton asks rhetorically, and then answers with a firm “no.”
Taking his cue from the ant, Clayton proceeds to suggest a well-prepared survivalist include in doomsday provisions either a Heckler & Koch HK 91 heavy assault rifle, an Armalite AR-180 light assault rifle or a trusty Colt .45 caliber automatic pistol with which to fight off hungry, unprepared grasshoppers. With a bit of luck, the author says, you will be able to buy the weapons you need, stock up on ammunition and prepare the tactical plan for defending your fort before events require “putting your plans to the test. But don’t put it off,” Clayton advises sternly, “weapons and ammunition you need are increasing rapidly in price and the future may hold shortages or restrictive legislation which could fatally hamper your efforts if you wait too long.” The folks at the gun lobby should love this book.
Readers of Life After Doomsday might be tempted to dismiss survivalists as “fanatics” or “crazies.” That’s a mistake. These would-be, post-Doomsday Americans are seriously trying to come to terms with the frightening possibility of nuclear holocaust. What was once considered unthinkable is now government policy. Unfortunately, Clayton waits until the end of his slim volume to ask, only in passing, ”if you are willing to expend the effort getting ready for the war, why not make an effort to help prevent or avoid the war?” But at that point, he runs out of suggestions.
So that Life After Doomsday isn’t totally bleak, Clayton advises taking at least three books as a legacy for the future into your hole with you: a reference book, a textbook and a volume of history, art, religion, science, poetry, philosophy or even fiction. For survivalists, one of the three books taken into the fallout shelter should not be Bruce Clayton’s. Instead, everyone who contemplates surviving nuclear war should read Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain, translators of this extraordinary book about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of the Second World War, could tell Bruce Clayton a few things about what life after doomsday will really be like. This disturbing and frightening compilation of an awesome amount of information is the work of thirty-four Japanese experts who assessed not only the physical effects of atomic warfare, but also the social effects of survival.
For years now, the U.S.-government-supported Radiation Effects Research Foundation—and its predecessor, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission—has been analyzing the after-effects of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, the Foundation’s work and political motivations continue to be suspect, and its scientific analyses are constantly called into question by medical experts and scientists outside the Foundation. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, the authors provide a comprehensive array of data culled from hundreds of scientific studies and firsthand observations. Divided into four parts—Physical Aspects of Destruction, Injury to the Human Body, The Impact on Society and a final section entitled Toward the Abolition of Nuclear Arms—Hiroshima and Nagasaki was some thirty years in the making. Written with the sincerity of sadness, it also shows the immense care and detail that went into it.
For the authors, the compilation alone was a formidable task. For years after the bombing, the Japanese government had avoided developing any system for compensating victims, so no “thorough” surveys were conducted to determine the human damage. Because the atomic bomb was such a new weapon, “What to survey and how to survey it could be judged only in part from previous war damages.” And worst of all, restrictions imposed by the Allied occupation of Japan prohibited “all reports, commentaries, and treatises dealing with A-bomb damages” until 1951.
Despite these obstacles, the authors of this impressive work have made a significant contribution to the literature of the Atomic Age. The descriptions and stark photos illustrating the immediate physical effects of the bombings are at once repulsive and hypnotic. In almost a casual, clinical way the authors describe the slow, certain deaths of those who bore the brunt of the detonations. But the medical litany of the symptoms of acute radiation sickness will haunt readers with images of the progressive effects of nausea, vomiting, fever, blindness, bums and skin epilation. This terrifying chronicle makes it obvious that. for most people in the bomb’s wake there was no retreat from the horror: “The majority of the exposed who had escaped instant or early death,” the authors write, “suffered from secondary injuries (bruises, lacerations, cut wounds and fractures). Although these multiple wounds themselves were not fatal, they caused great pain and agony. With the fall of individual resistance following radiation injury, the wounds became infected and frequently led to gangrenous changes.”
Beyond these grisly images, the dry, straightforward recitation of the latent effects of atomic weapons cannot be shrugged off or easily forgotten: “Leukemia, multiple myeloma, malignant lymphoma, polycythemia vera, myelo-fibrosis and aplastic anemia are all specific blood disorders that are considered to be related to exposure to the atomic bomb.” Eye injuries showed up later along with increased incidence of sterility, infertility and microcephaly among the offspring of survivors.
And along with the physical disaster of the bombings comes the overwhelming evidence of a society laid waste by the atomic bombings: the breakdown of community, the masses of dead, the overwhelming number of those injured, the loss of material wealth and a necessary redefinition of what is valuable in a ravaged land. The Japanese even have a word to describe their own “survivalists.” They call the victims of the bombings “hibakusha,” which seems not to be a term of pity, but rather of derision. “Hibakusha” are shunned—in employment, marriage, parenting—and carry with them psychological if not physical scars of their survival.
The authors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are determined that the promise of the words carved into the stone of the memorial cenotaph in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park will be kept. The inscription reads,
Rest in peace,
for the mistake shall not be repeated.
But, inevitably, even this exhaustive book fails to identify who is at fault, whose mistake should not be repeated, or how the great nuclear “mistake” can be atoned for. Our nation’s survivalists contend that it is a mistake to believe that nuclear war will make our planet unlivable. Prepare now, they argue, and you can live through the holocaust. The authors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suggest, in their section “Toward the Abolition of Nuclear Arms,” that our mistake is ignorance. The task of disarmament activists should be what is known in Japan as “A-bomb education.” It is only through a real knowledge of the effects of nuclear war, they assert, that another Hiroshima or Nagasaki can be averted.
But what is the lesson of the true survivors, the “hibakusha,” the only people with a real knowledge of the effects of nuclear war? Those who haven’t given in to the dark insecurities of what Robert Jay Lifton has called “death in life,” have come instead to view themselves as a “chosen people” with a unique mission—to abolish nuclear weapons, by dedicating their lives to protest. Knowledge, clearly, should not allow any of us to rest, as long as nuclear weapons are loose in the world.
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