Is it permissible for someone who is unqualified, helpless, and naïve, yet not entirely unfamiliar with the evils of the world, to say a word or two in an entirely personal capacity, concerning that issue of issues—the looming nuclear threat? Recently Mondadori published the Italian edition of a fundamental, necessary, and terrifying book, The Fate of the Earth, by Jonathan Schell: after reading the book, one emerges stunned, frightened, and yet eager to act, to talk it over, or at least to think it over, which, oddly, is something we do not often do. To put it briefly: in the case of an extended nuclear war, not only will there be neither losers nor winners but the combined effects of the blasts and the subsequent radioactivity will result in the extinction, in the course of days or months, not only of the human race but of all warm-blooded animals; fish might survive a little longer; certainly insects and some plants will. What will the “privileged few” do when they emerge from their extremely expensive and sophisticated nuclear fallout shelters?
As you can see, this is a novel situation: the experience of history, the grim wisdom from recent wars, is in no way helpful. And yet we don’t think about it, or at least we don’t think about it much; young people, apparently, think about it least of all, and, perhaps because they were born in the atomic age, they seem to accept as natural the current balance of terror, even though it offers few assurances of long-term stability. Why? For a number of reasons.
Because we tend to repress all our sources of distress, much as we have all learned, from time immemorial, to repress our distress at our own individual death. Because we all need to focus on more pressing problems, such as world hunger, our impending fate, disease, poverty, the uncertainty of justice and employment. And also because, perhaps, at some more or less conscious level, a modest quantity of optimism persists out of the memory of all that has happened around us since the day, forty years ago, when Fermi’s atomic pile first went into operation, proving at the same time that mankind can in the future rely upon a limitless source of energy, and that the power unleashed by the transmutation of a few grams of matter can be enough to destroy two cities in a matter of seconds, and to create an incalculable measure of human suffering.
From that day to this, over forty years of tense confrontation, cold at times, at other times less so, we have seen that even amid the most serious crises a rudimentary prudence has prevailed: just as during the Second World War poison gasses were not put into use, even though horrifying arsenals of them were available on all sides, likewise during the Cuban Missile Crisis and in the grim morass of Vietnam the opposing sides looked each other straight in the eye and didn’t push the nuclear button.
This is hardly enough to set our minds at rest; still, there is a glaring difference between the style of politics as it has been practiced in the first and the second halves of the twentieth century. In the first half we witnessed (and how many of us contributed to!) the emergence of personalities well outside the measure of man, still poorly deciphered, such as Hitler and Stalin (in certain aspects, and in their ambitions, the same can be said perhaps of the last Kaiser and of Mussolini); they were able to exploit the press, and subsequently the new mass media, to mobilize their people emotionally, and, in the interaction with them and with one another, they unleashed the horrors of two world wars.
Now those mass media have grown in terms of power and broad penetration, and yet, for reasons that elude us, the likelihood that uncontrollable, inhuman individuals, similar to the first two mentioned, might emerge in our midst seems to have diminished. We don’t know why, but these days the world stage seems to be occupied by gray, tentative, fleeting men, who appear and act, but are neither demonic nor charismatic: qualities that only appear to be opposites, and which are equally detestable.
The last charismatic man was, perhaps, Mao, about whom we still know little, and whose pros and cons we cannot weigh. These new men seem chiefly concerned with preserving power for themselves and their followers. They arouse no enthusiasm, but we have learned to beware of enthusiasm: there does not appear to have formed, or to be forming, around the small-scale imitators of those models of the distant past a clot of blind, brainless, fanatical support, such as that which seemed to give power to Hitler and Stalin. The future that these new and happily modest leaders promise us (though they may perhaps be individually disposed to undertake the most despicable acts) is no cause for exaltation, but it is not the apocalypse, which they seem to fear as much as we do, and whose “spontaneous” unleashing they also fear. Instead, it is an indefinitely protracted series of hypocritical negotiations, exhausting, largely secret, yet negotiations nonetheless: it is an interminable stalemate.
And yet it is to these bland masters of our fate—whether they have actually, or only apparently, or by no means at all, been elected by the will of their peoples—that we have entrusted enormous powers of decision making: they and they alone are in the control rooms. It is they whom we must influence, and we must make ourselves clearly heard by them, from every corner of the world, by every means available, with all possible initiatives, even the oddest and most naïve that our imaginations can come up with.
We don’t ask much of them: only that they try to be a little more farsighted. In spite of all our problems, we’re stronger than we’ve ever been. In the space of just a few decades we have expanded to a fabulous extent the boundaries of our knowledge, toward both the immensely large and the immensely small; soon perhaps we shall know whether, how, and when (but not why!) the universe was created. We have timidly set foot on the Moon, defeated the most horrifying pestilences, and concentrated in minuscule silicon chips astonishing “intellectual” capacities; the solutions to the challenges of energy and the population explosion are no longer utopian dreams, and we know that the degradation of our environment is not a fatal and irreversible curse.
As a species, we’re not stupid. Shouldn’t we be able to tear down the barriers of police states, and convey from one people to another our desire for peace? Couldn’t we, for example, put on the table of our international summit conferences an old idea, inspired by the oath that Hippocrates once formulated for physicians? That every young person who intends to dedicate himself to the pursuit of physics, chemistry, or biology should swear not to undertake research and studies that are clearly harmful to the human race? It’s naïve, and I’m aware of it; many will refuse to swear that oath, many will swear falsely, but surely there are a few who will keep the faith, and the number of sorcerers’ apprentices will decline.
It is speech that differentiates us from animals: we must learn to make good use of words. Much cruder minds than ours, thousands and millions of years ago, resolved more daunting problems. We must ensure that the murmur of voices rising from the depths is heard loud and strong, even in countries where murmuring is forbidden. It is a murmur that springs not only from fear but also from a generation’s sense of guilt. We must amplify it. We must suggest, propose, and impose a few clear and simple ideas upon the men who lead us, and they are ideas that any good merchant will understand: that agreement is the best kind of deal, and that in the long term mutual good faith is the most cunning of tricks.