War and Peace in the Nuclear Age. - television program reviews

National Review, Feb 24, 1989 by Kenneth Adelman

The very power nuclear weapons makes them almost impotent

one of the many ironies of the nuclear age.

From the first nuclear blast to the INF treaty,

PBS explores them more honestly than one might have expected.

RACE YOURSELF for gobs of mushroom clouds if you decide to watch the 13-part PBS series War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, which began Monday evening January 23. Don't be put off, though. The series is much better than you'd expect.

This extravaganza-costing $7 million, footed in part by seven separate foundations-is always gripping, continually educational, and mostly accurate. Billed as a blockbuster, it is. For here is television doing what it does best, conveying not information so much as emotion. Snuggled in your living room, you can feel the presence of the Bomb, whose birth and development coincided with that of television itself

So you can undergo the nuclear experience with some immediacy-though nothing like that felt by physicist Philip Morrison, who sat ten miles away from the first atomic blast, just before dawn on July 16, 1945: He poetically described that experience on camera: I'll never forget the sense of heat on my face, as though the noonday sun had appeared across the cold desert morning. To me that was much more important than the flash or even the rumbling, thunderous sound that came and echoed among the mountains a minute later. The real point was the sense of direct, intimate contact through the warming of the skin. But, of course, we were all awed and silenced by the extraordinary power of this thing which we understood in the numbers but not in the true experience.

That's the magic of the series, emotional contact. But just how important is the Bomb? Opinions differ.

The series is explained by PBS thus: "In the years since World War 11, these nations have pushed each other to the brink. They have been willing to risk a nuclear war to preserve other values they believe in. This tension is the story." Gripping words, but are they true?

For what's amazing in our time is "the nuclear curse." Here's the real mushrooming in the nuclear era-the growing preposterousness of using nuclear weapons.

In the opening moments of the first segment, President Dwight D. Eisenhower says straight out, "Now, in any combat where these things can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason they shouldn't be used just exactly as you'd use a bullet or anything else." There's no evidence that Ike's words that day created an uproar. But no President today would whisper such words, fearing to be impeached or institutionalized if he did.

And no congressman would have dared say during the Vietnam War what J. Frank Wilson of Texas said during

K r n W r:

We are dealing with mad dogs who have no regard for morals, human life, or decency. We must treat them accordingly. I urge that the atomic bomb be used if it can be used efficiently. These dirty Communists should be shown how tough war can be. In my books, one American boy is worth more than all of Asia.

Such has become intolerable. During my 12 years in government, I never heard one person mention, hint, or even kid about using nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have become like Banquo at the banquet, overshadowing everything else to some, not regarded at all by others.

The Bomb exists materially, but how about militarily or politically? Again, opinions differ. McGeorge Bundy, who has devoted his life to matters nuclear, has come to believe that the Bomb mattered (and matters) little in international politics. Sure, Eisenhower may have brandished it in Korea, but he wasn't serious. Presidents after him didn't even do that. John F. Kennedy, whose national-security advisor Bundy was, stood clear of any nuclear option even during the Cuban crisis. (And Nikita Khrushchev, evidence increasingly shows, was no closer to using the Bomb than Kennedy was.) Hence Bundy discounts any political or military shadow cast by nuclear weapons,

To me, it seems surprising that they did not have more of an impact in the immediate post war era. Logic dictates that nuclear advantage should make a difference. Yet the Soviets were at their most aggressive when we were at our strongest. They busily gobbled up Eastern Europe when we had not just nuclear superiority, but nuclear monopoly. As a Soviet general I know, Nikolai Chervov, says in this series, "The [American] preponderance was very big, very big . . . The U.S. superiority was absolute. Apart ftom that, U.S. territory was at that time invulnerable." We couldn't have been much safer between 1946 and 1949, but somehow we didn't feel very safe.

This series harps on the nuclear numbers, as if ten thousand of these Things is much worse than eight thousand. The Voice, mellow and authoritative throughout the series, tells us that in today's nuclear arsenals, the equivalent of two and a half tons of dynamite exist for each human being on earth.

Sure, it's bizarre. But is it more frightening than one and a half tons? One ton? Half a ton? Was it much better-was the world so much safer?-before these numbers spiraled? In sum, the series makes too much of nuclear accountancy.