The Forgotten Horror: Why We No Longer Fear the Bomb — And What Happens When the Taboo Breaks

A great deal has been written about the technical and environmental consequences of nuclear war. Mostly, it's acknowledged that these consequences will be catastrophic in nature. The dependence is linear: the larger the conflict, the more severe the aftermath. True, even here you can find those who claim nothing particularly terrible will happen. (Big deal — the death of millions and contamination of territories.)

But I can't understand why scientists and politicians think so much less often about the social consequences. In civilizational terms, they could turn out to be even more serious.

Since 1945, the very possibility of using nuclear weapons has been one of the most heavily tabooed subjects. It's no coincidence that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the planet experienced genuine horror — the memories of 1939–1945 and the reports from those two small Japanese cities, which experienced the effects of charges that seem tiny by today's standards, were still too fresh.

But several decades passed, and the fear began to fade. By now, it has almost completely disappeared, surviving only among the enlightened and emotionally alive segment of society.

Strange as it may sound, the progress in information technologies may have a very specific role in this process.

The horror of the last great war has been erased; living witnesses are gone; historical documents are gradually (with active participation from politicians) being replaced by propaganda materials; historically truthful and humane works of art are being supplanted by action films and glamorous knock-offs that portray war as an adventure or a light heroic feat. Almost no witnesses remain of that ancient nuclear catastrophe either.

The void gets filled with imagined details. But human imagination has a peculiar property: it doesn't create pictures out of nothing. The foundation for imagined worlds is some kind of existing experience — and if there's none, a movie or a computer game will do. Both have achieved stunning realism in recent years, and the accessibility and speed of computer networks spread these invented images in multimillion copies.

Pseudo-experience forms a belief in the possibility of surviving a nuclear war, a light — I'd even say casual — attitude toward human suffering.

Those who, with eager anticipation, think about the “red button,” guided by a faith built on the products of the entertainment industry, make several mistakes at once. The main one is the illusion of impunity and the continuation of the old life.

Pressing that infamous button won't just wipe out cities, factories, and human lives. It will zero out the entire set of rules that humanity has followed for the last several thousand years.

This will be worse than a shift of the magnetic poles. Seeing the result not on a game console monitor but with their own eyes, the survivors will decide that all previous human experience, all actions, and all laws are worthless — since they led to such a catastrophe. If they contained the possibility of universal horror, then why are they needed at all?

People will start writing history from a clean slate, completely erasing from the face of the Earth all the authors of the tragedy — physically and even from memory. And then everything that existed before the catastrophe will be declared outlawed: morality, state borders, social hierarchy, economic rules.

You ask where I know this from? From books and films, of course. But in this sense, the mad “Mad Max” is far more plausible than the sugary “Independence Day.” Truth in life is usually served without sugar.