Preparing to Survive a Nuclear War, Or Not

In 1977, one of my additional duties as a tank commander in West Germany was CBR NCO. I was the Chemical, Biological, Radiation Weapons Sergeant for our unit.  Each month I gave and hour-long class in a different weapon of mass destruction and how to survive if the Soviets attacked using them.  Although we tank soldiers had a better chance of surviving than ground troops, everyone knew that in a war with nerve gas and nukes and weaponized bugs, we were going to die. 

At the end of each class I would yell, "On your feet!"  The room stood up and I presented the doomsday scenario of the month.  For instance, what should we do if a nuclear weapon detonates directly over or on our position? 

The soldiers answered in unison, "Sergeant Gussman, we will put our heads firmly between our legs and kiss our asses goodbye!" 

We walked out laughing, but no one thought these weapons were anything but terrifying. They still are.
If we knew the nuclear bomb or nerve gas was coming, the main defensive action was to move the unit to safety, if a safe place was available.  

Forty years later, the rest of the world is waking up to what Cold War soldiers assumed could or would be their future, or the end of their future.  

Book Report, Part 2, Nuclear War and a Monastery

Before I turn from war to peace, I will add one more book to the war list in which the war is seen only in its effects. That book is A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I re-read for the fourth time this year.  The book is set in the Utah desert in an Abbey hundreds of years after “The Flame Deluge” of the 1960s, a nuclear war. Most of the world was killed. Those that survived had mutant children, the misborn. 

Shortly after the nuclear holocaust, the world turned on the scientists and intellectuals who the survivors believed caused the war.  One of the scientists, before being killed, called the mob “Simpletons.” They took the name as a badge of honor, like the Breitbart followers who embraced being “Deplorables.”  They called themselves “Simpletons from Simpletown.” They burned books as well as killing the learned. They ushered in the “Age of Simplification.”

Some of the survivors started hiding books. The Church hid books in monasteries in the desert.  One of the people who hid books was a nuclear scientist named Isaac Edward Leibowitz.  He was eventually caught and martyred—hung over a burning pile of books.  The Abbey was named for Leibowitz who has been nominated for sainthood when the book opens. 

The book follows life in the Abbey from that time until civilization is reborn. This darkly ironic book is one of my favorites.  With nuclear threats in the air, mistrust of intellectuals common and Deplorables now a moniker for millions, this 1950s book seems sadly contemporary. 

Curl up and wait for the mushroom cloud.  You won’t be disappointed! The New Yorker published a long and thorough review of the book and how it came to be written.