By Mel Murphy
There is no later. This is later. – Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Growing up in rural northern Nevada in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I didn’t give the test site in the south a second thought. Las Vegas was as foreign as Paris to my 12-year-old mind. People in dust-blasted hamlets like Battle Mountain and Elko treated the Nevada Test Site like people in Utah did; they ignored it. It was over a five-and-a-half-hour drive from Battle Mountain just to Beatty, canted on a hill northeast of Death Valley. I remember coworkers and ranchers at my Mom’s work muttering ‘Don’t let her wander too far out there, Evie.’ I always assumed it was because of rattlesnakes or dehydration. The dust that blew in clouds through our trailer park was haunted by lost dreams and dead pioneers but it never occurred to me it could be full of something more concrete though just as difficult to discern.
Like most latch-key GenXers, the TV was my after-school babysitter. Post-nuclear earth was just another sci-fi playground for George Pepard to roll around in. Damnation Alley was giant scorpions galloping across the nuclear desert while Pepard ran them over in a landmaster ATV.
I don’t remember the first time I saw the grainy footage of one of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. I do remember my mother telling me to pay attention and that my father had been near there. Both my parents were Greatest Generation. My father had been in the Marines during WWII. I was a late menopause baby. But atomic bombs meant nothing to me. Like rape, they were too awful to comprehend and just like rape, the destruction they wreaked was dismissed as overblown. It was all some vague sci-fi thing that happened Over There and Long Ago.
A few years later there was a thing called MX and they were probably going to build it in Nevada, with nuclear missiles rumbling around on train tracks in Stanley Kubrick-inspired madness. This was around the same time newly-elected Ronald Reagan implied he was not above using the bomb to get the Iranians to release the embassy hostages. Someone had to remind Dutch that doing that would kill the hostages. I don’t blame Reagan or other gung-ho presidents for forgetting what a modern nuclear weapon could do. Most of us don’t know.
It wasn’t until a dozen years later in September 1992 that I realized how profound the damage was in the area around Mercury, Nevada. The Healing Global Wounds protest was a massive encampment hunkered down just west of highway 95 and the Nevada Test Site. There were college students like myself there from UNR and UNLV in addition to about 5,000 protesters from: Germany, Belgium, Poland, the UK, Kazakhstan, Australia, the South Pacific and Japan. Senior members of the Western Shoshone and Paiute tribes led morning prayers and evening sweats in Newe Sogobia, the name for their ancestral lands straddling most of the Great Basin Desert. Dozens of down winders from the four corners region of the Southwest (Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona) joined other protesters in the heat and dust. A media blackout by most Las Vegas news outlets ignored the size of the protest encampment partly because NBC was owned by GE at the time. General Electric, along with Bechtel, was one of the top military contractors at the Nevada Test Site. Later, it was Halliburton.
Even then, while getting tackled by a Nevada Highway Patrol officer trying to take my reporter’s camera away from me, I had yet to comprehend what nuclear weapons were. This wasn’t a laser beam or a bomb dropped by an X-wing fighter in Star Wars, this was the Death Star. Each of the 5,224 nuclear warheads sitting in silos in places like Montana or New Mexico or Missouri is a Death Star. They now deter nothing but rather speed the clock towards oblivion. Like the Death Star, they can take everything into the hereafter. No more baby orcas, penguins, dogs, cats, trophy bass, beef or dairy cattle. Goodbye pretentious golf courses, working-class bowling alleys and high school football fields. Sayonara Chicago Sears Tower, Denver International Airport and Los Angeles Griffith Observatory. A nuclear winter would take the listing table of the environment and pitch it over. Goodbye, African elephants, North American bald eagles and Siberian tigers. Goodbye school children ala 1984’s Terminator. No more Palestinians or Israelis fighting an endless real estate dispute over a patch of land that looks like Tempe, Arizona. No more anything.
“World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones,” Albert Einstein said. Russia has 4,489 nuclear warheads aimed at the United States. Like an awning of death, they have shaded our lives for decades. And that country has been run by a vicious autocrat since 1999. An autocrat who, in 2018, risked poisoning 41,000 British civilians trying to assassinate one errant KGB spy with Novichok, a nerve toxin that has a half life of roughly 50 years.
Even a limited nuclear war is not survivable, not long-term. The film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road presented the austerity of this like no other movie. The Man has to explain to the Boy what a dog is, what fruit trees are, and it’s all past tense for the Boy. Life was before his time. His childhood has exceeded civilization. While The Great Gatsby was Hunter Thompson’s favorite story, mine is The Road. One story is about grandiose deception and the other is about the fruits of a lie. The film version has Viggo Mortensen reading from the book in voice-over which only underscores how devastating McCarthy’s prose is in showing us an earth where ‘the last tree is falling’. America isn’t just kaput, the human race is.
The China Syndrome heralded the paranoia of the 1980s and was released in theaters just 12 days before an actual malfunction at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania released clouds of radioactive steam on civilians.
A quick note about nuclear energy: most of the nuclear power plants built between the 1950s and 1980s were pushed through federal and state governments because the powers that be, with the assurance of the Department of Defense believed, in a nuclear war, the rods in a reactor could be used to make more nuclear weapons. Literally, we could say ‘STOP! OKAY, RELOAD!’ to the Soviet Union like it was some 1700s duel with muskets.
Testament and The Day After heaped more hopelessness on reluctant public awareness of nuclear war. Jane Alexander cried and Jason Robards played shocked disbelief while mushroom clouds formed.
Silkwood was Meryl Streep as a power plant grunt who figures out too late how insane the military-industrial complex surrounding radioactive elements is. No one can really control this power, not unless our society evolves beyond road rage and corporate greed.
One of the noble gases vented in 1979 on the two million people near Three Mile Island is literally called krypton. Pop culture has been a funhouse mirror reflecting reality for ages and radioactive elements make even Superman weak.
1988’s Miracle Mile had ER’s Anthony Edwards and bratpacker, Mare Winningham, finding love at the literal end of the world. This was the smoke-em-if-you-got-em phase of the public perception of nuclear war. For all its nihilism, at least the 1980s were an honest era in their assumption that humanity would never come back once the button was pushed.
The Road in 2009 obliterated all other post-nuclear apocalypse films. Cormac McCarthy, who spent years living and writing in Los Alamos, New Mexico, presented a pitch-black future to the American psyche. At last, we see the bomb not just ending life but compassion, law, and sanity.
Nobody was ready to ponder the most terrifying force on earth again until a thoughtful UK thriller, War Book, in 2014. A handful of parliament bureaucrats are given a war book to do a government drill. The mock drill is to determine if administrators can work to de-escalate a global event when Pakistan detonates a nuclear warhead in Mumbai instantly killing hundreds of thousands of people. All the government employees are given fictitious roles and Ben Chaplin, now gray-haired, is the pretend prime minister. The secondary story is his attempted seduction of a young parliament aide. He’s not cute in this, he’s lecherous. It’s a distracting metaphor for how the older generation has foisted the mess of nuclear proliferation on Millennials and GenZers with no way out. Essentially, younger generations have been raped of a future without the fear of manufactured annihilation.
In 2016, PBS aired Command and Control, a documentary about a 1980 accident involving a Titan II rocket in a missile silo in Arkansas. In this documentary, there is no hero to root for, just proof the US Air Force barely has any control over a 9-megaton nuclear weapon and needs to sweep all accidents under the rug. One airman died and 21 others were seriously injured. The warhead pogoed into an adjacent cow pasture without detonating, surely a sign angels or aliens were watching over us or just dumb luck. Retired engineers from Sandia Labs wonder when our luck will end.
After 33 years, and the fall of the Iron Curtain (before Vladimir Putin propped it back up), it felt like enough time had passed to examine the worst nuclear reactor disaster in modern history. In HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries, Jared Harris delivers the line “Every atom of uranium is like a bullet penetrating everything in its path. In three days to three weeks, you’re dead.” Spectators from Pripyat watch from a nearby overpass as the exposed reactor set fire to the atmosphere above it. Many of the citizens of Pripyat who gawked as the meltdown occurred are now dead and Russia continues to suppress actual fatality numbers. To this day, because of the dirty bomb physics of the accident, a vast swath of Ukraine and southwestern Russia is uninhabitable. It will stay that way for at least one thousand years.
In April 2024, Fallout, a TV series based on a successful video game set the American family in an alternative post-nuclear apocalypse future. The characters and plot are goofy but compelling. At one point, the lead character, Lucy, takes a medicine called RadAway and is instantly healed. RadAway is a fictional drug based on the video game where a player can re-up their character. It’s a fictional cure based on a fictional story in a wholly fictional nuclear holocaust. There is nothing that can fix radiation poisoning in real life when it un-knits a victim’s DNA but the show playfully urges people to ignore reality. How many Millennials and GenZers who have played the video game or watched the TV series know this?
All of this fomenting of real fear in the public psyche seems for naught since Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a blockbuster about the most morally ambivalent moment in American history. Oppenheimer obscures the jet black shadow the invention of the atom bomb cast over the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, Japanese internment camps, civil rights, everything. Ultimately, the film assures us, America did the right thing allowing Robert Oppenheimer to let the genie out of the bottle. My father, a Marine, fought in Bougainville and Guam. He was at Camp Pendleton in California when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was 22 years old. He got to come home. He got to go to college on the GI Bill. He got to father my older brothers and then, later, me. All the while, the genie just keeps getting bigger and the bottle smaller. And the jet black awning shadowing our lives now stretches from pole to pole.