It is a very comfortable thing to think that the greatest threat to the world is a decision still to be made, which may never be made — that is, the decision to engage in nuclear warfare. Sadly, the truth is quite otherwise. The earth has been under nuclear attack for almost half a century.
Mr. Schell explains that, if a nuclear weapon destroyed a nuclear power plant, the radioactive material from the core and the wastes of the plant would be much more virulent and persistent than fallout from the bomb that destroyed it. Then imagine ripe old cores broken down chemically and poured into the environment through a pipeline, or through chimneys and smokestacks. This happens routinely, along the coasts of England and Scotland, and along the coast of France.
Clearly it is not meaningful to say that any sort of permission giving on the part of the public, such as is implied in the existence of nuclear weapons, according to Mr. Schell, lies behind this waste dumping. The people exposed to it are assured that it is not especially harmful. Books and movements which define nuclear peril primarily and even exclusively in terms of nuclear weapons and superpower rivalry confirm these assurances. British people have no grounds whatever to imagine that their situation, notorious as it is, would not impinge on the awareness of a writer who had undertaken so great a subject as the fate of the earth. They must assume therefore that if their radioactive sea does not merit a mention, it cannot be so great a problem after all. I do not believe that Mr. Schell has intentionally excluded information that would complicate the grand simplicity of his thesis. I think he is among those legions who are emotionally incapable of accepting the historical importance of stupidity and furtiveness.
Mr. Schell locates our problems in national sovereignty, by which he means a sort of national self-love, so potent as to make us contemplate a defense that would destroy us. I locate them in the kind of sovereignty that has always been expressed in exploiting and disposing of the lives over which history and accident have given “governments” authority. The fact is that the world public arrives at this parlous moment with a grinding history behind it, badly educated, starved of information, full of sad old fears and desperate loyalties, injured in its self-regard, acculturated to docility and stoicism. The world’s most favored public, our own, is educated thoroughly and badly, starved of information, and flattered as to its own importance, while it is made incompetent in the use of the power it has. There is no agora, where issues are really sorted out on their merits and decisions are made which, at best and worst, give permission to political leaders to carry out policies the public has approved. This model assumes information of a quality that is by no means readily available to us. It assumes a reasonableness and objectivity which allow information to be taken in and assimilated to our understanding, and in this we are also thoroughly deficient.
If the world were as Mr. Schell represents it, a place where we make our problems and can unmake them, a place where all those warheads represent public hostility toward the Soviet Union, and a new gospel of love can therefore free us of them, the world would be very simple, simpler than any city, or family, or psyche, or dream. The hostility of Americans toward Russians is an invention of polemicists. If the Soviet Union is authoritarian, so are most countries. While atheism is espoused by its government, religion seems to flourish among its people. Western European cultures, by contrast, are atheist in fact, at street level, and that has never struck us as any abomination or unbridgeable divide. Like most things, it has never struck us at all. If Russia ceased to appear to us as a threat, we would probably simply forget it, as we do most of the world most of the time. The tendency of this country to be engrossed in itself makes it ill suited to sustaining large-scale, long-term interest of any kind in the outside world. But we are told constantly that the government of the Soviet Union has aggressive intentions, and we remember just enough modern history to know what that can mean. Presumably the Russian state of mind is some version of this, mutatis mutandis, and people may well unite to eliminate nuclear weapons, at least in the countries that acknowledge having them and, unlike Britain and France, are willing to submit to international agreements to control them.
Nuclear weapons can be produced at short notice by anyone in possession of fissionable materials, of course, but even if they are not simply replaced in secret after they are destroyed in public, fissionable materials will continue to be produced, and toxic and radioactive materials of even greater virulence than those used in bombs, through the routine functioning of nuclear power plants, so many of which were built to produce bomb-grade plutonium as well as electricity, and will continue to produce it for as long as they are used for power generation. So at best these diabolical substances will accumulate as wastes rather than as warheads, but more toxic because they will not be dissipated in the upper atmosphere but will burn or leak into the ground or simply be buried or dumped somewhere, as in fact most wastes have been for forty years. In the long term it will not matter whether national sovereignties destroy their “enemies” or merely themselves and their neighbors. The fate of the earth will be the same.
An October 1987 article in The New York Times56 informed those of its readers capable of absorbing the information that an agreement, classified along with the analysis which supported it, had been signed by our Secretaries of State and Energy, to permit flights carrying plutonium from Britain and France to Japan to land and refuel in Anchorage. This is the kind of situation in which one regrets that there is not more attachment to “national sovereignty,” in Jonathan Schell’s sense of the phrase. The governor of Alaska has sued to have the shipments blocked, and has failed to win a restraining order. How unfortunate for him that the issue arose just when other stories of greater urgency, for example the television evangelism scandals, were filling the front pages of America’s newspapers. The governor’s suit charges that “thousands of pounds” of plutonium will pass through Anchorage, and quotes a physicist from the University of Michigan to the effect that “plutonium is one of the most, ‘if not the most,’ toxic substances known to humans. Inhaling a microscopic speck could lead to cancer.” That is, of course, the usual formula for describing the toxicity of plutonium.
I doubt that our Secretaries of State and Energy have considered and signed such an agreement casually. It is entirely possible that they signed it to prevent the refuelings from occurring in Seattle or Los Angeles, without approval, and without special security measures. After all, this commerce is being run by people who see no harm in “taking a bit of ploot.” Small amounts of plutonium would be easy to conceal, in the absence of any special precautions. A letter to the governor, Steve Cowper, signed by Secretary of State George P. Shultz, said that approval for these flights “will be conditioned upon a number of safety requirements such as transfer exclusively by air (to minimize time spent in international transit), use of a cask certified to withstand a crash, armed guards, redundant communications and detailed contingency plans.” If the conditions the Secretary sets out are not met, how will he know? If they are met in 10 percent of shipments, while the other 90 are stowed away in other passenger or cargo flights, will he be the wiser? Most European power plants are built on national boundaries. Therefore any accident will be half the problem of another government. Aside from its being an interesting comment on their view of the safety of their own industries and a telling comment on all the gasps of surprise, at the time of Chernobyl, that nuclear reactor accidents know no boundaries, it reveals a certain willingness to let foreigners bear the brunt of risky policies. If plutonium burned in an airliner crash, would anyone know? Would the discovery of these residues afterward be laid to a non-domestic source? I suspect the real nature of this “agreement” is simply a plea to the Europeans and Japanese to tell us what they are doing and when they are doing it. The threat to end the permission only threatens us with uncontrolled movement of plutonium through our hemisphere, no problem to the Japanese, who are accustomed to seeing their wastes dumped into European coastal waters, and no problem to the Europeans, who consider this an excellent business to be in despite self-inflicted contamination on a scale no accident could visit on us here.