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.  

Cold War Hero Who Served After 1991

Armand Lattes, Professor Emeritus of the University Paul Sabatier, Toulouse

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the world faced a plethora of problems. In retrospect, the world did not handle the demise very well. Russia and the other former Soviet states were broke and in collapse and armed with uncountable Weapons of Mass Destruction.  

In the 1940s and 50s, before the Soviets had nuclear weapons, their counter weapon to American and European nukes was nerve gas and other chemical weapons.  The Soviets manufactured thousands and thousands of tons of chemical weapons and stored them for the Doomsday attack.

In 1992 these un-dropped bombs and un-fired shells were rusting and leaking in storage across the former empire that had no money.  If these chemicals leaked into waterways and into the air, illness and death would spread through and out of the former Soviet Union. 

The answer to the problem was a massive, long-term decontamination program.  One of the chemists who volunteered for this dangerous work was Professor Armand Lattes of the University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. Every September from 1992 until I met him in 2006, Lattes flew to secret sites in the former Soviet Union and worked with international volunteers to neutralize this terrible stockpile of weapons.  Lattes continued his unheralded work for several years after we met until his  retirement.  

I kept in touch with Armand in the years since and still hope to visit him and his wife Isabelle at their home in Toulouse. I almost made it to Toulouse on my trip around Europe last summer, but never got to that part of France.  

When we hear of the latest terrorist attack on the news, we know that dozens more attacks were foiled by law enforcement working secretly to disrupt the terrorists.  Armand and the men and women he worked with saved countless lives and the world itself from the disaster of chemical weapons leaking into the air and water or being stolen and used by terrorists.  

Armand did his part to keep the weapons of the Cold War from killing after the demise of the Soviet Union.

Field Guide to Flying Death: MAD--Mutually Assured Destruction

The 60s was the heyday of “Mad Magazine” and MAD as the centerpiece of our Cold War strategy. MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction—became the plan to preserve the future of the world once the Soviet Union first tested a hydrogen bomb in 1953. 

The US and the Soviets amassed so many nuclear weapons during the 50s and 60s that using them could only result in the destruction of the entire world, as we know it. 

Since the end of the Cold War, nuclear war remains in the unthinkable category, but for the fundamentalists who see the world as the stage for their own particular apocalypse, the unthinkable is not so unthinkable.

The Russian Federation still controls thousands of nuclear weapons, but the danger has shifted away from the Cold War scenario of one of the superpowers attacking the other. Then the world worried about living under the threat of a Superpower nuclear war.  Now the world worries about nations and terrorists who don’t care about MAD setting off a nuke because they want to kill everybody who does not see the world as they do. 

In the midst of Cold War, Hannah Arendt wrote the book “On Revolutions” talking about the rise in revolutionary thinking from the Reformation through the American and French Revolutions to the permanent state of revolution that characterizes the modern world.  We can no longer rely on MAD to constrain the nuclear arsenal. Superpowers cannot divide the world into client states they can control. 

MAD will not protect us. The overwhelming nuclear arsenal we have is not a threat to someone happy to die to bring on their personal apocalypse, or to the thug in charge of North Korea who will happily sacrifice his people on the altar of his own ego. 

In a world of revolutions, our security agencies have to doggedly keep track of all existing nuclear weapons to make sure a terrorist never gets one. 

I liked the Cold War draft army I served in better than the current all-volunteer army and, I admit, I liked the MAD world a lot better than the current threat of a nuke delivered in a truck or a shipping container.