Wednesday, July 8, 2009

In favor of not going about armed


By JOHN REMBER

In 1962, during my sixth-grade year at Ketchum Elementary School, the Cold War came to town. The Soviets had begun constructing deep shelters in their cities, and developing procedures their citizens would follow once those cities had been destroyed in a nuclear war. In response to that program and to the Cuban Missile Crisis, a similar civil defense program was developed for this country.

In Ketchum, free pamphlets appeared on a low bookcase that divided the adult and children's sections of the old Community Library. One pamphlet showed the effects of a one-megaton weapon detonated 100 yards above street level. Rings around ground zero designated areas of total destruction, severe but survivable destruction, and, 15 or so miles out, little destruction of non-flammable structures. You hoped your house would be 16 miles out, and made of brick, though the small print in the pamphlet explained that a roof over your head wouldn't protect against severe radiation sickness and early death.

Another pamphlet advised farmers to push the top six inches of their soil into piles once the war was over, to prevent nuclear contamination of their crops. The people who gave this advice had no idea how big a dirt pile the top six inches of 160 acres would make. Farmers who had passed high school geometry laughed at official plans that explained how they could grow unpoisoned food.

More pamphlets gave plans for backyard shelters, the fanciest being buried Quonset huts with wells, hand-operated pumps, sewage systems and air filters.

In the Sun Valley ski bus garage, 50-gallon drums of crackers and water were placed against the outside walls. The water was supposed to soak up stray neutrons from atomic fallout. The crackers were supposed to be equally effective against postwar starvation.

In Ketchum Elementary School, everybody in the sixth grade had to designate which classmate he or she would go home with if his or her parents were already dead. Civil defense in 1962 meant instant foster parents, and I was supposed to go home with Raymond Brooks, whose parents owned Brooks Welding, if they weren't dead yet. He was to go home with me if my parents weren't dead.

Of course, a one-megaton weapon detonated 100 yards above the ground anywhere in the Wood River Valley would have killed all the parents, not just some. It was a useless precaution that in retrospect looks like institutionalized child abuse, but at the time I was cheered by the thought that Raymond's parents might feed me as long as I swept up around the shop.

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In what I now recognize as a juvenile variety of the Stockholm Syndrome, I decided to become a nuclear physicist if and when I grew up.

Such memories help put current insanities into context. When Sarah Palin starts hallucinating Russia from her kitchen window, remember this: She was raised by people who imagined the Soviet Union to the point of tangible nightmare.

When Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, heads off to Argentina, remember that high Andean lakes were one of the few places where people could survive a nuclear war. If you sense that your world is ending, his parents must have told him, go to Argentina and go fishing.

When Dick Cheney went to that undisclosed location during 9/11, he was checking his cache of water and crackers, which is what he always does when he gets stressed.

The current economic crisis, human population overshoot, recombinant Ebola swine flu and even Yellowstone going off like a giant Roman candle all pale in comparison to the 9,400 atomic bombs the United States still has and the 13,000 atomic bombs Russia still has. We could still end up as globules of carbon stuck to heat-glazed sidewalks. At least we've gotten over the civil defense craziness, so 11-year-olds aren't waking up in the night and wondering who their parents will be tomorrow.

There are psychological parallels between what this country was thinking in 1962 and the current nationwide rush to buy guns and ammunition for personal survival. The most obvious parallel is that having a button to push or a trigger to pull can damage more than just the target. Every weapons purchase is an act of deep and abiding imagination, one that can terrorize the people it's supposed to protect.




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