Looking Away from Looming Disaster

I was in fourth grade in the fall of 1962 and I was in a good place: I liked my new school, P.S. 196, and I really liked my teacher, Mrs. Rose Drayson, who—in my nine-year-old opinion—was the ideal pedagogue: friendly, apparently all-knowing, encouraging, patient, and kind. I can’t quite recall what precisely we were learning or studying in the fall of that year, but the part I do remember totally clearly has to do with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which unfolded in October of that year just as we were settling into a classroom routine and I was getting used to my new class in my new school. (I attended P.S. 3 from kindergarten through third grade, then was obliged to move on and attend P.S. 196, which was much further from my parents’ apartment house, but which I was still allowed to walk all the way to and all the way back from on my own without parental supervision. It truly was a different world!)

And so there we were in Mrs. Drayson’s class, practicing daily the routine she taught us so that we would be safe in case of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. We all took it very seriously, but the procedure itself was not that complicated and mostly involved pulling our chairs out from under our desks and crawling under the desks ourselves with our hands clasped over the tops of our heads to wait for the all-clear to come, presumably either after the bomb had been dropped and it was again safe to move around or after the whole thing turned out to be a false alarm. The thought of New York being leveled, its residents either pulverized or contaminated with radiation, and its buildings demolished in the way Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated just seventeen years earlier was not part of our thinking at all: instead, the idea—as best I can recall—was that the Russian bomb we so feared, if it somehow managed to hit P.S. 196, would possibly make the roof of our school building collapse and so, to save ourselves from being hit by falling roof-debris, we were to remain safely ensconced in the space beneath our desks until we got the all-clear and could safely return to our studies.

How naïve that all sounds now! For a long time, I supposed it was just a sign of our relentless American optimism finding it simply unimaginable that a nuclear war would or even could truly make uninhabitable large parts of North America or, even less likely, that the effects of an all-out nuclear war could cost scores of millions their lives and permanently alter the course of our nation’s history. And so, preferring to imagine an all-out nuclear strike as nothing really more than a super-sized “regular” attack to which our brave soldiers would respond quickly and effectively, the nation apparently found it reasonable to protect American schoolchildren by having them hide under their desks with their hands tightly clasped over their innocent heads. If Mrs. Drayson knew better, she didn’t let on.

When I think back now on those strange days all those many years ago, however, it seems to me that our nation’s bizarrely casual response to the possibility of Russia using nuclear weaponry to advance its own aggressive agenda against the West had to do less with our native optimism and more with our fundamental assumption that, no matter how hostile the rhetoric, no nation—not even the evil Soviet Union—would really use nuclear weapons to advance its agenda. Our nation, of course, did do precisely that once…but that was before we truly understood the possibilities inherent in an all-out nuclear war between the world’s two superpowers. And also, of course, because President Truman was certain that Japan didn’t possess nuclear weapons that they could use in response to our attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So the chances of an all-out nuclear war with Japan were precisely zero. Was the same true with respect to the Soviet Union? We told ourselves that it was, that even the Russians would never really risk the kind of mutually-assured devastation a nuclear war would inevitably bring in its radioactive wake. And so, finding comfort in the fantasy that the fear of nuclear attack was theoretically real but only barely so…we had our children hide under their desks and hoped for the best.

And now, all these many years later, we are back to square one, back to wondering if Vladimir Putin could possibly be crazy enough to use nuclear weaponry decisively to defeat Ukraine. Or cagey enough, since it almost goes without saying that—despite the deliberate vagueness our American leaders and their European counterparts have enshrouded their responses to Putin’s assertion the other day when he ordered the immediate mobilization of 300,000 fresh recruits that a full collapse of the Soviet front in Ukraine would not be permitted to occur even if that required the use of nuclear arms—it more or less goes without saying that the West would not respond by attacking Russia full-on with nuclear weaponry even if the Russians did use a nuclear device of some sort to attempt a last-ditch attempt to win in Ukraine.

But the results would be truly devastating for the world as we have come to know it. First and foremost for Ukraine, obviously. But also for Russia itself as the world mobilizes in a way not really seen since the Second World War. And for the nations of Europe as well as nuclear dust spreads over Europe, thus making the chances of the rest of the world consciously choosing to look away plummet to almost zero. And the Russian people themselves too, who have a long history of rising up successfully against tyranny, would surely also be heard from. Putin himself would be finished. A new Russia would emerge. But Ukraine would be still be devastated, as would large portions of Russia. There would be no winners at all, only losers.

Most of the scenarios I’ve read just lately—particularly in The Atlantic and in the Washington Post—have suggested that the use of some small nuclear devices against Ukraine would instantly trigger a concerted effort by Western nations to arm Ukraine with the most sophisticated non-nuclear weapons that exist, thus turning the tide of the war by pushing the Russians back across the border and then daring them to use “real” nuclear devices to seize back the territory they would have lost. Most of our officials are still supposing that Putin’s fiery threats are meant merely to terrify but not truly to signal his intent to use nuclear weaponry to win this war he himself started. I’d like to think that too. But I’ve learned over the years to take at face value even the most exaggerated threats when made by people whose basic commitment to decency and peaceful coexistence cannot be presumed. That was true of Hitler long before the Second World War and it was also true of Bin Laden before 9/11. That is why I take the regular threats by the Iranian leadership to attack Israel seriously…and why everybody should. And it is also why I take Vladimir Putin’s threats fully seriously…and why everybody also should.

As we approach Yom Kippur, Jews all over the world will be gearing up to spend a day in prayer and repentance. To be true to one’s own ideals and not to work at cross-purposes with one’s own better angels—these are the twin goals of the day’s work for those brave enough to adopt them for their own. This year, part of that work of self-analysis should include the painful question of whether we have underestimated the importance of Vladimir Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons to defeat Ukraine and have therefore failed adequately to respond to it. Now I am a grown man but I was once a little boy hiding under a wooden desk in Mrs. Drayson’s classroom, so I feel qualified to answer that question clearly on behalf of both of us, boy-me and grown-up-me: we have, but we shouldn’t. To be amazed when irrational people do irrational things is, to say the least, irrational.