When I entered this world the USA had been a nuclear power for seven years, the Soviet Union for three. Britain would explode its first device the following month off the north west coast of Australia; France and China a few years later in, respectively, the Sahara and a remote province in Xinjiang.
Putting me fair and square in that first generation to grow up in the shadow of the bomb.
Central to the understanding of this nuclear age, axiomatic to all parties even at the height of the cold war, was the bleak but real comfort of MAD – mutually assured destruction. Should any power be so foolhardy as to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on one similarly armed, MAD told us, its own destruction was as certain as that of its target. Ergo, it would not happen. Not by design it wouldn’t, though this did little to calm our nightmares of the world ending through miscalculation, or because some evil genius yet to be thwarted by 007 or Man From Uncle was bent on tricking both Moscow and Washington into believing the other had already launched such a strike.
For helping the USSR get the bomb, so making the world a tad less terrifying, Ethel Rosenberg and husband Julius went to the electric chair but, had he held onto his nuclear monopoly, do you suppose Uncle Sam would have quit his war on the Vietnamese people?
Or would Hanoi have gone the way of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
I’m minded of that Peaky Blinders scene which puts Sam Neill’s Inspector Campbell, and Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby, head to head in a church.
The critical bit starts at 02:50.
Tommy: “I’ve already agreed to do your fucking killing for you …”
Campbell: “Ah well, you see, an agreement is not the same as an assurance …”
Campbell, with War Secretary Churchill his line manager, had procured Tommy on pain of death to do the Crown’s work by blowing up a train and planting ‘evidence’ of Kremlin involvement. Tommy having neutralised that threat with one of his own, Campbell needed new leverage. The purpose of their clandestine meeting in a House of God was so the Calvinist from Belfast could inform the part papist/part gypsy heathen that MAD no longer applied, and it was on this basis rather than any ‘agreement’ that Tommy would do his bidding.
At risk of spelling out the obvious, for current purposes Campbell is an Uncle Sam who, since Reagan and ‘Star Wars‘ at least, has sought to shred mutually assured destruction while urging us with the slick smile of the used car salesman – no slight intended on that noble calling – to rejoice at such initiatives for their advancement of world peace.
Like in the good old days when only America had the bomb.
Tommy Shelby got a ‘weapon’ of his own to neutralise Campbell’s hold over him. Beijing and Moscow, fans of the Blinders, did likewise. Their hypersonic missile superiority, on show last November with the Oreshnik strike, effectively neuters US capacity to hit a nuclear enemy with a pre-emptive first strike which takes out most of its response capability, confident that its Star Wars shields can cope with any dead hand retaliation.
But a space shield capable of downing incoming missiles at Mach 10 has yet to be devised. Like Inspector Campbell, Uncle Sam needs a new way of bypassing MAD. Here to take up the tale, using as ever the devil’s own words, is Brian Berletic …
* * *