Maybe Doom Isn’t Scary Enough

Image from Bulletin From Atomic Scientists

I interviewed three anti-nuke activists to understand the Doomsday Clock and how our society thinks about the very real threat of nuclear war.

“Dear young people who have never experienced war, ‘Wars begin covertly. If you sense it coming, it may be too late.’” -Takato Michishita, survivor of the bombing of Nagasaki.

On a rainy Saturday afternoon in the Catskill Mountains where New Yorkers went for the summer to escape the city heat, Alice Slater’s mother took her to go see a movie in town. It was late summer in 1945, and the second World War had just ended. Alice remembers parading around the Catskills town a few weeks earlier as everyone celebrated the end of the war. When I asked her when she first became aware of nuclear weapons, the first thing she thought to tell me was about her trip to the theater with her mom. Instead of trailers before the movies they used to show news reels. The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima projected across the screen and Alice asked her mom, “What is that?”

“That’s a wonderful new weapon and now all the boys would come home,” her mom answered.

Between what they showed on the screen and what her mom had told her, at that moment Alice had no real idea what a nuclear bomb was, or what it did to the people it was used on. It was only a mushroom cloud, and the mushroom cloud meant the war was over.

Seventeen years later, Alice was a young mom who had moved to the suburbs of New York City. Her husband was working for CBS and one day he didn’t come home – he had to stay at work to deal with breaking news for a handful of days. The world had just found out that the Soviet Union, bringing us to the height of the Cold War between Washington and Moscow, put nukes just 90 miles off the coast of the United States in Cuba. Alice, even with close proximity to someone who worked in the news, had no idea what was happening. Americans didn’t know the US had nukes near the Russian border in Turkey, too. All they knew was that the communists were threatening them with nuclear bombs. We are far removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis now, but Alice said it was probably the most afraid she’s ever been. People really thought we were about to enter another war and send the entire world into a nuclear winter. Later people found out Kennedy had negotiated to move US nukes out of Turkey. But now they’re back, and scattered all over Europe.

Carol Gilbert, around the same week Alice’s husband didn’t come home from CBS, was at her aunt’s house in Michigan. She was around fifteen years old at the time and she remembered that it must have been during the school year – it was special that she got to go stay there that day, she loved spending time with her cousin. “I remember my mom calling my aunt and saying she was going to come pick us up because they were worried about the bomb,” Carole continued, “At some point I think we knew something bad was happening, but I don’t think I fully understood what was going on.”

On the other side of Lake Michigan from Carol, Kathy Kelly was in her home in Garfield Ridge, Chicago when her mother started putting stuff down in the basement on the day the news broke. Kathy’s parents lived in London during World War II, and tried every way they could to keep her sheltered from the trauma of war, but in the face of nuclear war – what are parents to do?

All three women recall the Cuban Missile Crisis as a time of uncertainty. Where people were freaked out and didn’t know what to do. Alice was afraid for her kids, and Carol’s and Kathy’s moms were clearly afraid for their children too. Then the missiles were taken out of Cuba, and the panic disappeared.

I chose Alice, Kathy, and Carol to interview on this topic because they are anti-war activists I deeply admire. I figured the concern over nuclear weapons amongst my peers may be less than older generations because of things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, or even becoming conscious in the years right after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the more elders I talked to, the more I realized how little it may have impacted their trajectory as activists. Alice didn’t become an anti-nuke activist after the missile crisis, and neither Carol nor Kathy mentioned it as a moment they remembered in the awakening of their conscience. Kathy was radicalized on the issue of nukes by the women who worked at the bookshop in downtown Chicago that she would stop into on her way to work as a teenager. Alice was pulled into the movement by the war in Vietnam.

On January 28th, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the Doomsday Clock in 1947, will reveal how close we are to midnight, or “doom”. Since the clock was made, nukes have proliferated all over the world. First it was the US, and then US and Russia – now nine countries have a nuclear weapons stockpile. It would only take a fraction of that firepower to send us into a nuclear winter, wiping out all life as we know it. The Doomsday Clock was created as a warning – a warning that the most powerful people in the world are playing God. It’s not an exaggeration in the slightest, because of a handful of people, one political misstep or accident and our whole planet is destroyed along with every precious life on it. Governments continue to pour trillions of dollars into developing these weapons while people they are supposed to care about sleep out on the street.

With tensions between the US, Russia, China, and Iran at a high, we should all be putting things in the basement, picking our kids up from their playdates, and preparing for disaster. Instead, we walk around like a bomb was never dropped. Like hundreds of thousands of Japanese people didn’t have their lives taken or destroyed. With no reason to believe so, we act like our government would never do it again. While our leaders have bombed a dozen countries to oblivion since World War II ended, we still act like we are the civilians the world ought to care about, like we are untouchable. We aren’t. Mutually assured destruction might be useful if the people with their fingers on the buttons cared for the people they governed, but oftentimes they don’t.

I asked Carol why she thinks no one is really freaked out about nuclear weapons like they ought to be, whether they be my age or hers. She said, “We have too much.” She was talking specifically about Americans, whose lives are inherently made more comfortable because of the conquest and wars of our past and present. Whether we would like to admit it or not, the United States and the entire modern life it provides is built on war. When I asked Alice, specifically in relation to the Cuban Missile Crisis, if people were scared into becoming anti-nuke activists she said, “You’re asking me if I was scared…I just kept hoping that democracy would prevail in some way, I guess.”

Carol, a Roman Catholic sister, along with two other Dominican nuns were convicted of sabotage after pouring their blood into a Minuteman III missile loaded with a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb in Colorado. She spent two and a half years in federal prison for drawing attention to the real weapons of mass destruction while George W. Bush and Dick Cheney made up fake ones in Iraq. In the eighties, Kathy was greeted by four armed soldiers riding in a large military vehicle after she planted corn on top of a nuclear missile silo in Missouri. A soldier was left behind with Kathy while she was handcuffed, kneeling on the ground. “Do you think the corn will grow?” she asked him. “I don’t know ma’am,” he responded, but I sure hope so.” Following a trial, Kathy spent nine months in maximum security prison.

Whether or not the Doomsday Clock reveals we are inching closer to midnight or staying where we are, the fear around nuclear armageddon seems to freeze most of us in our tracks. If the whole world is going to be annihilated and suffering is imminent anyways, why think about it at all? We can cross that bridge to hell when we get there. If there wasn’t a nuclear stockpile that could end life at any moment, maybe people would feel more inspired. Afterall, preventing doom isn’t a particularly motivating notion. On the other side of doom is just life as we’ve been living it, which isn’t that great for a lot of people.

Alice, Carol and Kathy are all inspired activists. When you talk to them you don’t really ever get the sense that they will stop pushing ahead for what they believe in. I met Carol in the halls of Congress last February, despite being over fifty years older than me she was leaving me in the dust. After 12,000 steps on Capitol Hill, she walked with me to a vigil for Aaron Bushnell, an active duty airman who self-immolated over the genocide in Gaza. Never once in any of my conversations with them did I ever get the sense they did what they did out of fear – whether it be fear of war, nuclear winter, or overall doom. They all talk about a world that gives people what they need to survive and thrive. Kathy talked to me about international cooperation and laughed at the idea of borders, “When there’s a nuclear energy accident like Chernobyl or Fukushima, the poison that floats around in the air doesn’t care about your borders.” And she made note of the brilliant atomic scientists, and how quickly they’d figure out how to address the climate catastrophe if only we were to change our priorities. They talk at length about how the world ought to be, and their vision for a better future is what propels them ahead, not doom. Doom isn’t good enough to get us to where we need to go.

Planting corn over a nuclear silo, disrupting a weapons manufacturer, and creating a community of war resisters are steps we can take toward something much more impactful. A world that is mindful about nuclear weapons can push towards their elimination, and we absolutely must. If you’re not moved away from doom, be moved towards peace. At CODEPINK, we’ve created a Peace Clock to give us ways not to just move away from doom, but to bring us closer to the kind of world we want to see. It’s something that’s been within our sight a thousand times, we have to sprint towards it.

“Dear young people who have never experienced the horrors of war – I fear that some of you may be taking this hard-earned peace for granted.” Takato Michishita

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Danaka Katovich is CODEPINK's National Co-Director. Danaka graduated from DePaul University with a bachelor's degree in Political Science in November 2020.