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I’m excited to have taken a position at a human rights grantmaking organization. I’m thrilled to be able to contribute in this area.
It means I’m taking a break to recuperate and focus on my new responsibilities.
I’ll be back soon with more reviews…
–Deji Olukotun
Photo by Anna Louedec (c) 2008.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Tracy Reed, Slim Pickens
Black and white, 1964. 93 minutes.
Beyond our imagination
The sun experiences nuclear explosions every single second, creating the raw material for life. But when these explosions happen on Earth they pass beyond the realm of our imagination. Our brains are capable of understanding how to trigger a nuclear reaction — and how to harness its energy for peaceful means — but the sheer power of nuclear energy is, in many senses, too complex for us to fathom. We are biological organisms tottering about on the planet Earth yet we have learned how to imitate the sun.
There is something inherently absurd in this vast difference of scale and power. And the fact that we are capable of blowing all life on earth to smithereens at any given moment of the day — even now — is even more absurd.
Absurdity onscreen
If there is one film that captures the utter absurdity of our methods of administering nuclear power, it is Dr. Strangelove. This black and white 1964 satire examines a strategic mishap in the midst of the Cold War. The U.S. and the Soviet Union are locked in a policy of nuclear deterrence, with each country amassing a nuclear arsenal so large as to discourage the other side from attacking. The rationale is that no country will attack the other for fear of triggering a nuclear holocaust. The solution: build more bombs.
A former colleague of mine was stationed on a nuclear submarine during the attacks in New York on September 11, 2001. I’ll never forget when he told me that his submarine had misinterpreted orders and nearly launched nuclear missiles from the bottom of the sea. At the last minute, the orders were corrected and the missiles were powered down. Nuclear war had been narrowly averted.
Needless to say, I didn’t sleep that night.
The world changed forever with the deployment of the first atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. A new weapon with awesome destructive power had been unleashed. Yet the U.S. military considered nuclear weapons just another weapon. Dwight Eisenhower compared A-bombs to ‘bullets’ that could be shot like any other ordnance, wielded strategically to further military objectives.
This complacent attitude changed with the detonation of the first thermonuclear bomb. Popularly called a hydrogen bomb, the American H-bomb test obliterated a Pacific island. A Soviet test some nine months later gouged a hole in the Kazakh desert, singeing birds along the way and raining radioactive fallout for 6,000 square miles. These 15 megaton weapons were several hundreds of times more powerful than the A-bomb.
The standard nuclear warhead today is less than 500 kilotons and no new weapons have been developed in the U.S. since 1992. However, some 30,000 remain, down from 68,000 in the 1980s. The detonation of 100 megatons will be enough to create a nuclear winter and destroy all life on earth. We are still in danger.
Large nuclear warheads are incapable of discriminating between civilian and military targets, making them inherently violate of the Geneva conventions and other principles of war law, including proportionality. Nuclear weapons are therefore one of the world’s most primary human rights concerns.
Like it or not, nuclear weapons have captured our imagination — just like this strip from the inimitable Calvin & Hobbes — for over fifty years.
I’ll be reviewing stories about nuclear weapons over the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, check out John Lewis Gaddis’ phenomenal book The Cold War for an excellent survey of nuclear warfare.
Or read manga legend Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s graphic short story Hell on-line for free at the PEN American Journal.
–Deji Olukotun
Photo credits: Spectators, wikipedia; Bill Watterson, Homocidal Psycho Jungle Cat (1994)
Berlin: City of Stones
by Jason Lutes
Drawn & Quarterly, 1999. 212 pages.
Jason Lutes’ Berlin: City of Stones is a timely read in light of the troubled world economy. The graphic novel imagines Germany between the world wars before Adolf Hitler stormed to power.
Germany had lost World War I just a decade before and the severe economic sanctions imposed by the victors had crippled the country. The weak Weimar Republic suffered from rampant unemployment, causing angry German citizens to join political parties with vastly different ideological bents. War veterans with amputated limbs hobbled through the streets as the nation attempted to rebuild. People were hungry, confused, and angry. And they needed someone to blame.
Berlin is a timely read because today’s economic climate gives a tiny, frightening taste of the frustrations that could give rise to the Nazi regime. The book suggests that the Germans were not all passive citizens waiting for an authority figure, but also active dissidents who were violently silenced.
The National Socialists were committed to order and authority; the Communists to a worker run state; the rich, to sustaining their wealth. The country was ripe with tension, with riots and protests liable to explode at any moment.
Sometimes human rights issues can feel very far away. That’s why one of the aims of this site is to make them relevant in our daily lives.
Esy Casey’s Monday boldly bridges the global and the local. Originally written as a short (and tiny) graphic narrative, the story follows a day in the life of a girl in San Francisco and a woman in Baghdad. The two figures are separated by time zones but connected by something else entirely.
This is the very first piece of fiction on this site. Enjoy.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE WHOLE STORY.
–D.O.
Esy Casey © 2009
