A Thermonuclear Fairy Tale (Part One)
Topic: Must Read
I recently had the pleasure of rereading Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald.
Roshwald is a man of the Left, so it was no surprise to discover in retrospect that his grim little parable of nuclear war, published in 1959, harps on all the favorite strings of the old Ban-the-Bomb movement. I doubt that when I originally read Level 7 in the late Sixties, Roshwald’s position on the ideological spectrum was very obvious to me. At that time, the apocalyptic vision of a world laid waste by atomic war was the nightmare that haunted us all. And Level 7, for all its implausibility, moral posturing and stilted writing, gave form and voice to that vision.
Most of the time, of course, the world and I went about our business with no thought for the looming nuclear apocalypse to which people like Roshwald were pointing with such alarm. Everybody recognized that nuclear war was a possibility, but some built-in psychological self-defense mechanism prevented us from believing that it could actually happen. Books like Level 7 made a powerful impression precisely because they challenged that refusal to believe. Such books were disquieting. It could happen, they insisted. It could.
Yet the collective unconscious was right and the books were wrong, for despite all the predictions of apocalypse no nuclear war occurred. In retrospect this seems to me to be the chief irony of the Cold War. The “atomic madness” that supposedly dominated the superpowers turned out to be a figment of the antiwar Left’s overheated imagination. At no point during the period when the United States and the Soviet Union both possessed nuclear weapons did the theoretical advantages of deliberately starting a war appear to outweigh the obvious disadvantages. The phrase “balance of terror” seems trite now precisely because it turned out to be such an accurate short description of the international situation created by the Bomb.
That a balance of terror constrained the superpowers became obvious at a relatively early stage of the Cold War, whereupon Roshwald and his compatriots shifted their focus. Perhaps a single madman with access to the nuclear trigger could start a war that neither superpower really wanted. That was the thesis of Red Alert, the 1958 novel by Peter Bryant that was adapted by Stanley Kubrick for his comedic masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove. Or perhaps a mechanical failure could result in the accidental release of nuclear weapons, followed by all-out war. That was the thesis of Fail-Safe, the best-selling 1962 novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, which was also made into a film.
Level 7, though less realistic in background than Red Alert and Fail-Safe, is in some ways more interesting. It depicts a military mechanism so highly automated as to make human participation all but redundant. When the war begins, the officers of PBX (Push-Button X) Command launch thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles against the enemy merely by pushing a few buttons. And except for their fingers on the buttons of the PBX console, the entire process is managed by machines. Why human beings are required at all is something of a puzzle to both the novel’s protagonist, Officer X-127, and to the reader.
Roshwald believed that the ever-increasing automation of the machinery of nuclear war would eventually reach a culminating point similar to that depicted in Level 7. At that point, “atomic madness” would not simply be institutionalized—it would be hard-wired into the machine itself. Thus he depicts a world that has handed its fate over to the autonomous, even godlike machinery of death. But this god, having been created by human beings, is like them capable of error.
When the inevitable happens—when X-127 and his fellow officers are called upon to push their buttons—it turns out the war was started by mistake. Twelve of the enemy’s missiles escape their controls, destroying a couple of cities. The machinery reads this as the first move of an all-out attack and orders immediate retaliation. Two and a half hours later, the world lies in ruins and most of humanity had perished. Only those in the deep subterranean shelters like Level 7 still survive.
Implausible? Of course. But somehow, despite all the baloney, Roshwald’s thermonuclear fairy tale has stood the test of time. Why it has will be the subject of my next post about Level 7.
Posted by tmg110
at 11:43 AM EDT
Updated: Thursday, 11 April 2013 10:01 PM EDT
