MIM Notes 35 Jan 23 1989 The Day After World War III Edward Zuckerman Viking Press, 1984 By MC2 United States Government and corporate executives have elaborate plans in case of a nuclear war, according to this valuable study by Edward Zuckerman. For example, AT&T has an underground command center protected by forty feet of concrete and rock. (p. 273) Exxon's corporate bylaws contain special provisions for management of the company after a nuclear war. (p. 282) The Federal Reserve system has a number of plans for keeping the capitalist economy running after World War III. The Federal Reserve will guarantee payment of checks drawn on destroyed banks. (p. 289) To protect bank records, a copy is buried in a salt mine 650 feet below the ground in rural Hutchinson, Kansas. (pp. 289-292) "I would like to emphasize," said Maxwell McKnight, a Socony Mobil Oil Company emergency planner, back in 1963, "that our emergency planning is predicated on the idea that it is possible for our nation to survive, recover, and win, and that our way of life, including free enterprise, the oil industry, and the Socony Mobil Oil Company, can survive, recover, and win with it." (p. 292) You'll be glad to know that the U.S. Postal Service will have a special center to forward mail to people whose old addresses no longer exist and will return to sender mail addressed to dead people. (pp. 5-7) This book contains a good history of the development of nuclear weapons and U.S. strategy for using them. The weakest part of this book is its discussion of the Soviet Union. Like many liberal journalists, Zuckerman assumes that the Soviet Union under Brezhnev was socialist. U.S. conservatives have charged that the Soviet Union's leaders believe that a nuclear war is winnable and that the Soviets are way ahead of the United States in civil defense. Zuckerman shows that many Soviet official publications in the 1960s and 70s acknowledged that a nuclear world war would be devastating. (pp. 239-72) Soviet civil defense plans look good on paper, but include many unrealistic assumptions about people walking from cities into the countryside before the missiles hit. (pp. 252-3) Zuckerman's book contains much interesting information, but is based on a liberal framework. Mao during the 1960s argued that the power of nuclear weapons had been exaggerated. "The United States is a paper tiger. Don't believe in it. One thrust and it's punctured. Revisionist Soviet Union is a paper tiger too." From a talk by Chairperson Mao in January 1964, Mao clearly wanted to make the point that the Third World peasants and workers could defeat the big imperialist countries. Vietnam and Afghanistan are obvious examples. New evidence in the 1980s suggests that nuclear weapons are more destructive than was commonly believed in the 1960s. Blast effects and radiation might kill only half of the people in the United States and Soviet Union; although cancer rates would greatly increase and there would be a tremendous increase in mutations. Many people in countries not directly involved in a nuclear war would survive the immediate impact of the war. Thus, based on knowledge available in the 1960s it seemed possible that something would survive in the wake of a nuclear war and that Maoist communism might well triumph after the United States and U.S.S.R. finished each other off. New scientific evidence, which is discussed in Zuckerman's book, suggests that a nuclear war could destroy the ozone layer that protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. Without the ozone protection people would go blind in the sun and would develop blisters after being exposed to the sun for ten minutes. Jonathan Schell discusses the ozone issue in depth in his 1982 book, The Fate of the Earth. Recently, Carl Sagan and many other scientists have raised the possibility of a nuclear winter in the wake of a nuclear war. Such a war might place so much dust in the air as to block out the sun for a period of months. In 1816 a huge volcanic explosion in the Pacific Ocean resulted in winter like conditions in the United States and Europe during the summer of 1816. Nuclear winter could be so bad that all crops and food animals would die and so would almost every human being. Revolutionaries and everyone else has an interest in not being blown up. The problem is that when imperialists are fighting over who is going to control the Middle East or Central America or Europe they make threats with nuclear weapons to get what they want. One day they could miscalculate and destroy the planet.