Resilience and Resistance: The importance of envisaging the end of the world (and after)

Conventional ideas of nuclear Armageddon may have blinded the peace movement to the idea that much of the world’s population could survive a nuclear war and nuclear winter, as horrific as that would be. Could scenario planning for nuclear survival help us not only to build more resilient, democratic societies, asks Brian Martin, but also to build resistance to these most destructive of weapons?

If there’s a global nuclear war, will anyone survive? Should people in the peace movement be even talking about survival, when the priority is prevention? And how possibly could thinking of post-war survival be relevant to security today?

Ever since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the spectre of nuclear war has haunted human imaginations. War planner Herman Kahn famously pondered scenarios of one nuclear war after another, but the main response by citizens has been horror — and trying not to think about it. Peace movements campaigned against the bomb, most prominently in the late 1950s and early 1980s. Arguably, their efforts have been crucial in restraining nuclear arms races.

Somewhere along the line, it became common in peace movement circles to assume the worst. Nuclear war would be the end of civilisation, or even the end of human life on earth, with cockroaches the likely inheritors. It also became common to reject any thinking about post-war survival, because this would make nuclear war more thinkable.

However, there was never a certainty that nuclear war would mean the end. This is obvious enough if the war is limited. After all, in the 1950s hundreds of bombs were exploded above ground, with human and environmental impacts to be sure, but hardly the end of the world. In a limited nuclear war, perhaps “only” a few cities would be incinerated, not enough to bring societies to a halt.

Even a full-scale nuclear war would most likely leave many human survivors — billions of them. Blast, heat and fallout could kill hundreds of millions of people, depending on targeting choices, especially in North America, Europe and Asia. But this is not enough to destroy “civilisation”, though we might ponder what is so civilised about meticulously preparing for genocidal killing.

Nuclear winter

In the early 1980s, scientists discovered a new cause for concern, dubbed nuclear winter. When a nuclear weapon explodes in an urban area, it can inject vast quantities of dust, soot and smoke into the upper atmosphere, where it lingers, blocking sunlight and leading to darkness and cold. In many scenarios, this leads to the failure of crops, possibly for years, causing famine.

However, this outcome is far from inevitable. The worst nuclear-winter scenarios are based on bombs hitting numerous cities, and the modellers of these scenarios have never used realistic nuclear-targeting information, in which military installations rather than population centres are the priority. Furthermore, the seriousness of nuclear winter effects would depend, among other variables, on the time of year when a war occurred. Finally, nuclear arsenals have never been tested in wartime, and many weapons might fail to launch, miss their targets or not detonate.

Nuclear survivors

These uncertainties mean that even in a full-scale nuclear war, there might be many survivors in the northern hemisphere — perhaps billions of them. In the southern hemisphere, survival is even more likely, because far fewer bombs would likely be detonated there.

One of the safest places to be is assumed to be New Zealand. It is far from likely attack targets, is in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean and thus relatively buffered from nuclear-winter effects, and produces a surplus of food, so starvation is unlikely. But things wouldn’t be easy.

Wren Green was the leader of a New Zealand team of researchers that, back in the 1980s, examined the aftermath of nuclear war. In March this year, he revisited the issue of post-nuclear-war survival in New Zealand, and the picture isn’t pretty. While the food supply is likely to be ample, the effect of nuclear war internationally would have a drastic indirect effect. New Zealand, like many other countries, relies on imports of a wide range of goods. These include motors, computer chips, solar panels and, crucially, fossil fuels and lubricating oils. Much of the economy would gradually grind to a halt, and it would take many years for local manufacturing to gear up to produce agricultural equipment, energy facilities and computers. Life might be very difficult even in this seemingly safest location.

Post-nuclear politics

Even so, there is one other advantage to living in New Zealand: it has a stable political system. Yet, Green suggests it is far from certain what would happen politically after a catastrophic event, and that retaining democratic governance would depend on how well the country was prepared to face such events.

In other parts of the world, there would be a great risk of the declaration of martial law and the imposition of repressive policies. In 1966, a film titled The War Game was released. It portrayed Britain in a fictional aftermath of nuclear war, showing death, devastation and ruthless government control over the surviving population. Since the early years of the Cold War, British governments have prepared for nuclear war, specifically to ensure the survival of the state, including to control the population. This points to one important consequence of nuclear war, even a limited one: political repression.

After the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, governments around the world passed repressive laws and set up extensive surveillance systems. The US government launched a war and set up systems of arrest, detention and torture. Imagine then the political aftermath of a nuclear attack, with extensive measures taken to stop dissent, control suspected enemies and prepare for nuclear war-fighting. The War on Terror might be seen as just a warm-up for the War on Nuclear War Survivors, no matter how nonsensical that might seem.

Survival insurance

Movements against nuclear war have been highly reluctant to consider preparing for post-war survival. In one way, this is reasonable: the priority is prevention, and any thinking about survival seems to make nuclear war more acceptable. In another way, though, this approach is contrary to what happens with planning for other disasters. Fire, for example, is an ever-present risk to life and property. Much effort goes into preventing fires from starting and spreading, including building regulations and alarm systems. But there is also preparation for actual fires, including fire drills and training for putting out fires and caring for burn victims. In comparison, there is almost no preparation for the aftermath of nuclear war.

Wren Green’s study points to the value of considering post-war challenges. New Zealand is vulnerable to the interruption of trade because it lacks domestic capacity to produce vital items, everything from computers to medicines. If we think of preparing for disaster as a type of insurance policy, then preparing for post-nuclear-war survival also has a range of benefits in improving community self-reliance in food, housing, communications and much else.

This is a different way of thinking about preparing for nuclear war. Rather than seeing any discussion of post-war survival as necessarily an acceptance that nuclear war is inevitable, it is an invitation to bring about changes now — changes to make societies more resilient, self-reliant and participatory.

One of these changes is to foster energy self-reliance. In the aftermath of a nuclear crisis, imports of fossil fuels may be curtailed, and spare parts for local generation capacity unavailable. To prepare, the ideal is sustainable local energy production using locally manufactured and repaired technologies. This is a prescription for dealing with climate change holistically, not just substituting one energy source for another but refashioning production and consumption.

Another change concerns decision-making. In the aftermath of a nuclear crisis, in which political authorities impose draconian controls, local communities need skills for collective decision-making and resistance. That is a prescription for participatory alternatives to current elite-dominated political and economic systems.

Perhaps governments prefer that discussion of post-war survival be avoided, because it might make people alarmed about a massive threat to human life, one that could be removed. When citizens start collectively preparing for post-nuclear-war survival, they might start questioning the whole system and how it has made them so vulnerable.

In this picture, security involves two social movements: one to get rid of nuclear weapons, and indeed all weapons of war, and the other to create a self-reliant society, one that can survive and thrive in the face of disaster.

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Brian Martin is Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He has been involved with peace issues for over 40 years and has extensive experience with social movements. He has a PhD in theoretical physics and is the author of 23 books and hundreds of articles in diverse fields including nonviolent action, scientific controversies, whistleblowing, strategies for social movements, democracy and information issues. His website is here.

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The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.

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Image Credit: Jorge Franganillo via Flickr. A ruined piano within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine, Nov 2017.