This article is a preview from the Winter 2014 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.
I grew up expecting to live until the end of the world. Born one week before the Greenham Common protests began, some of my earliest memories are the throb of nuclear terror. I read When the Wind Blows (Raymond Briggs’s 1982 post-fallout picture book) at the library and fretted about a slow, greenish, bloat-fleshed demise in the dismal confines of a fallout shelter, every cell of the body poisoned as life futilely exceeds hope. I asked my mum what would happen if the bomb dropped. “We wouldn’t need to worry about that,” said my mum. “We live near the RAF base so we’d probably be dead before we knew about it.” I asked my mum if God was a man or a woman. “A man,” said my mum, with surprising certainty for someone who showed little sign of believing in a god of any sex. “A woman wouldn’t have made such a mess of things.”
It’s a strange sort of fear, the nuclear fear. Totally rational, utterly futile, a clawing surge of fight-or-flight with nothing to fight, nowhere to flee. It’s similar to the feeling I had when the car I was in crashed, spinning towards a ditch off the A1, my mouth locked open mid-word and my eyes closed against the circling world; or like the way I felt when waiting for the results of a test for a rare, incurable genetic disorder. Like the way I feel now when the rivers swell fat in summer and autumn is mild and spring starts in February and butterflies are rare flecks of brightness, not thick clouds of wonder. A useless dread I cannot act on. Hold it back. Stamp it down.
I’m not afraid of the bomb any more. Perhaps I should be – there are still 4,200 operational nuclear warheads in the world, apparently – but it is no longer the form of destruction on which the world seems poised. So antiquated, in fact, is the A-bomb apocalypse that when Channel 4’s conspiracy-thriller Utopia wove a tight-plotted horror from the threads of recent history, the nuclear threat was completely forgotten. Real-life assassinations, riots and upheavals are all entangled in the story, but only one plot-point revolves around a nuclear incident – in Utopia, the Three Mile Island accident was staged as cover for a character’s escape. No one in Utopia was ever really afraid of the atom splitting.
What the characters do fear, however – what drives the conspiracy at the heart of the drama – is an excess of humanity. We are too many, our resources too few. “The sun throws a certain amount of energy onto this planet,” explains the scientist Carvel to sympathetic MI5 agent Milner, when they meet in 1974. “We turn it into food, clothing, shelter etcetera. It supports a certain amount of us and it took 30,000 years for that number to become one billion. Then we found a way to use ancient sunlight, sunlight trapped in oil and coal. We started to live off that. What happened? In just 130 years, our population doubled. The next billion took 30 years. The fourth billion has taken just 14. So here’s the question: what do you think will happen when there’s 10 billion living on a planet that can only support one?” “I think we’re going to tear each other to shreds,” says Milner, coolly.
A plan is agreed: in order to preserve the species, the human race must be decimated, and a secretive organisation called the Network will accomplish this by rendering most of the population infertile. It is, of course, a morally appalling scheme. It is also one with a great deal of logic going for it. The way Carvel outlines it, it appears that we cannot be sustained at this rate. In Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker, set in a straggling human civilisation centuries after a nuclear winter, the characters speak wonderingly of the “boats in the air and picters on the wind” that their ancestors commanded. Air travel and broadcasting are the miracles lost. In Utopia, they’re more like original sins.
In one scene, a Network operative listens to a mother explain how she’s “doing her bit” for the environment by travelling to France by coach, then evenly berates her for her selfishness in reproducing. “Having him was the equivalent of six and a half thousand flights to Paris,” says the operative. “His birth was a selfish act. It was brutal. You have condemned others to suffering. In fact, if you really cared, what you’d do is cut his throat open. Right now.”
I watch this, horrified and with no good argument against what is said, on a huge flatscreen panel. It pulses with colours conjured from electricity made from burning fossil fuel made from plants that grew on and stored the ancient light from our sun, irreplaceable energy that flickers briefly and dies on my eyes. I live as though there is nothing to fear, or nothing to be done – ignorance and fatalism have much the same effect, and anyway, how else is there to live? Carvel’s argument about sustainable population levels may be a subject for debate, but the destructive effects of our fossil-fuel consumption are real. It is madness as a species to eat beef, turn up the heating, leave the lights on; but it is also normal.
Anti-nuclear activists in the early ’80s had two labours of invention. The first was to conceive of the worst, and enable others to conceive of it too. In a 1983 lecture delivered in Cardiff entitled “Byron and the Bomb”, Michael Foot recited the poem “Darkness” as an approximation of the aftermath of the one big one: “the icy earth/Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.” In “the attempt to grasp and imagine what a nuclear holocaust might mean,” said Foot, “we must use our imagination in a way that has not been attempted before.” And the creative class applied itself to the task with brio, though imagination often seemed to stall at the fatal moment. In pop music, we got songs such as “London Calling” by the Clash (1979), “99 Luftballons” by Nena (1983) and “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1984), which all found a kind of nihilistic ecstasy of release in the instant of apocalypse.
Other works tried to see beyond the explosion, into the misery beyond. These included When the Wind Blows, Riddley Walker and – perhaps most traumatically for British people of a certain age – the docudrama Threads, which chronicles the likely outcome for the city of Sheffield following a nuclear war. The title refers to the “threads” of society, which, once broken, cannot be repaired: in unfussy social realist style, humanity is shown failing to prepare for nuclear holocaust, and then failing to survive it. There’s a subtle but unignorable emphasis on gender throughout: main character Ruth becomes pregnant at the beginning, enduring by what is implied to be a sort of maternal ultra-determination; by the end, her daughter is alone in a savage, language-less world, giving birth to a child conceived by rape. Yet after the original broadcast the BBC presented a special Newsnight debate on nuclear winter in which every single participant was male: whatever Threads had to say about women and war had been quickly forgotten.
This omission of half the species is even more remarkable because, from 1981 onwards, the most visible anti-nuclear protest in Britain had been the women-only camp on Greenham Common. The decision to exclude men from the camps was directly linked to the Greenham women’s feminist analysis of war: in a world of male dominance enforced by male violence, cruise missiles were simply the most obvious and extravagantly destructive example of patriarchy. “The connections between the nuclear arms race and the structure of our society need to be clarified,” announces a 1983 collection of polemic writings from Greenham called Women at the Wire. “Within a male-dominated society, male-dominated institutions and stereotyped male values have determined how our resources will be used.” The Greenham women understood violence, not only as acts of direct aggression, but also as the entire network of hostile relations in which exploitation of both people and planet takes place.
The camps themselves represented the second and rarest kind of imaginative work in anti-nuclear politics. These women had already done as Foot urged and grasped the enormity of apocalypse. Now they went further: the camps were an explicit attempt to invent an alternative to the kind of society in which mutually assured destruction had become not just a possibility but a policy. Non-violent and non-hierarchical, the camps offered a challenge to militarism at the deepest level. And for that, the women were hated with an almost untold intensity. Journalist Caroline Blackwood reported from Greenham Common in a 1984 book, On the Perimeter, and she lists the indignities heaped on the women in the camp. They were damned in the press as bad mothers and described as smelling of “fish paste and bad oysters”, a gynaecologically loaded implication of filth; their makeshift tents were penetrated with red-hot pokers; menstrual buckets of pigs’ blood were tipped on them by youths from Newbury; soldiers kept the women awake at night by shouting sexual insults.
The experiment of Greenham ended where it started. Ultimately, the feminist argument of the camps was never addressed: however urgently we need to confront increasing carbon levels, soil depletion and the inevitable exhaustion of fossil fuels, there is no imaginative project on a par with Greenham attempting to create an alternative to the manifest disaster of capitalist patriarchy. (The mixed-sex Occupy camps, established after the 2007 financial crisis, were the closest thing. One of the things that led to Occupy’s implosion was widely-reported sexual violence committed by male protesters against the women who were supposed to be their sisters.) Exploitation is taken for granted as the underlying principle of existence, even though all objective criteria confirm that unchecked exploitation is profoundly incompatible with a continued existence of any kind.
We need desperately to settle on different terms of life, yet we have barely embarked on the effort of imagining what we are trying to avoid: even in Utopia, we’re only told that the conspiring characters have imagined what an overpopulated, overheated, depleted earth will be like. We never see this horror for ourselves in the way, say, Threads shows us Sheffield buckling and burning under the force of the bomb. So far, few works have managed to put the unthinkable in front of our eyes – and if we cannot see something, it is difficult to know how we can possibly begin to devise ways to avoid it. It is time to attend to this generation’s apocalypse, and to do so we must recover both the fear and the hope of early ’80s politics. There has to be another way, and this time it must include all of humanity, and all of our planet.
Utopia is available to watch at www.channel4.com
