I'm obsessed with nuclear war. Friends and family mock me for it, especially when I spent £37 on a blue Bakelite bowl and spoon from eBay. The seller claimed these hard-wearing, heat-resistant plates were produced for Government nuclear bunkers in the 80s.
Well, just think: if the end had come, the Prime Minster himself may have been crouched on his bunk, spooning tinned pears out of this very receptacle. I was surely holding Bakelite history in my hands! But no, my Dad wasn't having that. The eBay seller will have bought this plastic bowl in a pound shop, he said, flogging it for a huge profit to some mad, nuke-obsessed weirdos. Like you, wee pal.
But my Dad can't blame me for being constantly and horribly obsessed with nuclear war. He's the one who let me kneel in front of the TV, as an impressionable and confused four-year old, to watch Threads. That's where my obsession started, and that's what done me out of £37 on eBay.
Channel 4 entertained my obsession this evening with End Of The World Night, a programme looking at the ten most plausible ways in which the world might end. In case that sounded too bleak for Saturday night TV, especially given that it's Easter, a time of hope, renewal and bunnies, they paired the horror up with Hollywood. Each method of death and destruction was prefaced by relevant clips from famous disaster movies, like The War of the Worlds, Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow. We were presented with a cinematic scenario, which was then examined, and its likelihood assessed, by various academics and science writers.
We started off in prime Hollywood territory with the action film, Armageddon, which imagined a catastrophic asteroid strike. But how likely is it? We all know a whopper hit the earth 65 million years ago but, if it happened again, could we blast it off its trajectory, as happens in the film?
Firstly, the scientists told us debris is constantly whizzing through space. We imagine it as a black void of silence, but apparently it's very busy up there. Astronauts, as they drift off to sleep on the International Space Station, are often kept awake by 'pinging sounds' on the outside of the craft, as rocks and other space clutter bounce and clatter onto them.
With all that stuff streaking through space, it's only a matter of time before something heads in our direction - again - but could we shoot it out of the sky? The Rosetta Mission showed it's possible to guide a craft onto another planet, so it's feasible we could use such a thing to 'nudge' an asteroid aside. Lawrence Rees advised nudging rather than nuking, as Bruce Willis's approach would be too dangerous: blowing up an asteroid puts us at risk of the rocky spray exploding from it.
Nuclear accidents were also considered, as in the film, The China Syndrome. Incidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl show that such things can and do happen, though the scientists Channel 4 spoke to in this segment were surprisingly pro-nuclear. One, rather callously, said Chernobyl was the worst we can expect from a civil nuclear accident and yet the number of deaths was 'only' 50. Maybe so, but what about the indirect deaths, years later, and the terrible deformities, years later still, and the contamination of the land for generations? Still, it was 'only' 50…
And what of killer robots - or artificial intelligence - as in Terminator films. It seems this is horribly plausible. Indeed, Stephen Hawking has warned it could 'spell the end of the human race'. Intelligent robots are no longer just sliding components together in factories; they're up there rolling across the cracks and bumps of Mars. Clever little devils, then? Maybe too clever. Are we able to keep up with them and, crucially, are we able to stay ahead of them?
To my grim delight (take that, Dad! At least I have a plastic bowl to eat my tinned goods from) nuclear war was given as the most likely way the world will end. Nuclear war, which is so horrific, you can only truly contemplate it in troubled, white-lipped silence. I've always thought Martin Amis summed up the horror best in his introduction to Einstein's Monsters, when he says the worst thing about nuclear war won't be the firestorms, the radiation sickness or the slow slide back into barbarism. It'll be the fact that, if and when he finds his wife and children, he will have to kill them.
It was refreshing - but also chilling - to have these horrors presented coolly and clearly from science geeks and professors, rather than from hysterical Hollywood or a shirtless Bruce Willis. It's easy to dismiss frightening scenarios when they're presented amidst popcorn, elbows and sticky cinema floors, but not when they're coming from the men in stern glasses. Imagine 9/11 - how utterly unbelievable that would have been until it actually happened. Suddenly, men in suits were discussing planes crashing into skyscrapers, not Hollywood producers.
So the most frightening thing is how mentally sluggish we are. As one of the scientists said of catastrophic climate change, we have to 'battle to get the public to take the danger seriously.' It seems we need the paternal, sensible men in suits to tell us what to think because our imaginations won't take us that far on their own. Hollywood can churn out endless disaster movies showing what might happen if we don't start taking care of the planet, but we'll shrug and carry on as normal. We can't imagine it until, like 9/11, the unbelievable happens and is given the terrible stamp of reality. We need to see it before we can believe it, but by then it'll be too late.
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