NO PLACE TO HIDE: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State
GLENN GREENWALD
Hamish Hamilton, 2014, 259 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Glenn Greenwald’s No Place To Hide is not just a thrilling account of the journalist’s “cloak-and-dagger” encounter with National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, but a clinical and impassioned analysis of the danger posed by America’s vast surveillance state.

Greenwald, no tech-head, nearly blew his opportunity for the dramatic scoop because of his dilatoriness in installing a computer encryption program for communication with Snowden until guided mouse-click by mouse-click by the latter.  Only then, in 2013, was the six-decade history of near-invisibility of the NSA, the world’s largest intelligence agency, ready to be definitively breached.

A high-school dropout (intellectually unchallenged by the curriculum) and a US Army discard (ethically challenged by the invasion of Iraq), Snowden’s native computer intelligence saw him swiftly advance from CIA security guard to information technology specialist and then to high-level cyber-spy pulling in $200,000 a year in the NSA.

The faith of this spy-with-a-conscience that President Obama would honour his pledge to reform national security abuses and lead ‘the most transparent administration in history’ was extinguished, however, when Snowden found that the NSA’s powers were being expanded, its mission upgraded, as he told Greenwald, to build ‘a system whose goal was the elimination of all privacy, globally’.  If the President wouldn’t act, then, Snowden concluded, he himself would have to.

The thousands of NSA documents Snowden leaked to Greenwald exposed lie after official lie.  NSA officials had repeatedly said they would not spy on innocent citizens but, with mathematical exactitude down to the last electronic tap of Internet servers, communications satellites, underwater fibre-optic cables, telephone systems and personal computers, the documents showed the NSA eavesdropping on billions of communications by millions of US and global citizens (97 billion emails and 124 billion phone calls globally in just the one month of May in 2013, for example).

This massive data trawl was enabled by the NSA’s corporate ‘partners’ (Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Gmail, Hotmail, Skype, YouTube), as the “richest and most powerful telecommunications providers in the country knowingly committed tens of millions of felonies” in providing the NSA with access to their users’ private data.  Those other theoretical devotees of individual freedom and liberty, the ‘democracies’ of America’s lapdog allies (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), were also eager collaborators with the NSA.

More hypocrisies were revealed by the leaked documents.  Washington, which had been furiously denouncing China for its penetration of the US telecommunications market with hardware allegedly implanted with surveillance devices, was itself using the NSA to intercept American Internet hardware being exported from the US and physically installing spyware – one NSA document crowed that this ‘signals intelligence tradecraft ... is very hands-on (literally!)’.

The documents also punctured the flimsy cover for the NSA’s mass surveillance – the “threat of terrorism”.  The most productive spying was actually global economic and diplomatic espionage on behalf of NSA ‘customers’ such as the US trade, agriculture, treasury, commerce and state departments.  Thwarting terror “is clearly a pretext”, says Greenwald, especially when official reviews have shown that conventional, and more democratically answerable, policing is much better at preventing terrorist incidents than the NSA which is yet to trouble the ‘War on Terror’ scorekeeper.

Even if the NSA were effective at its stated, anti-terrorist, job, there is less chance, notes Greenwald, of being killed in a terrorist attack than being struck by lightning, which makes the mass population surveillance and huge expense (domestic homeland security spending has increased by US$1 trillion since 9/11) a grossly irrational response to a terrorist possibility that has been exaggerated for interests that are political (watching dissidents, winding back civil liberties, diversion from domestic political unpopularity) and vested (commercial surveillance industries).

Essential to keeping the ‘national security’ panic inflated is the establishment media, says Greenwald, an unsparing critic of such media’s “excessive closeness to government, reverence for the institutions of the national security state, and routine exclusion of dissenting voices”.  Briefly dazzled by the glittering new story revealed by the NSA leaks, many journalists turned a long-forgotten sceptical eye on the NSA but quickly reminded themselves of where their political values and corporate paychecks lay and reverted to form as “loyal servants to the government” whilst predictably rounding on the whistle-blower and his conduit.

The tame media downplayed the substantive issues of NSA spying in favour of personalising the story and psychologising political dissent.  Snowden was portrayed as a strange coot, Greenwald discredited as an obsessive with a damning past including the heinous crime of having a dog over the weight limit allowed in his condominium apartment.  Media stars joined right-wing politicians in calling for the criminal indictment of both men as traitors. 

Greenwald’s journalist credentials were denied, his media peers labelling him a mere blogger, a reprehensible ‘activist’.  The inflammatory stoking of terrorist dread, and the concomitant cheerleading for a strong government not too prissy about democratic niceties, by the tabloid ink-slingers is, in their universe, not activism of course whilst the national security reporting of the more ‘professional’, ‘objective’ reporters, the “the opinion-less, colour-less, soul-less” journalists as Greenwald calls them, neuters the impact of critical stories with a ‘balance’ that treats the official government voice with uncritical deference.  Both species of journalist are “a threat to nobody powerful” which ensures their access to, and membership of, the political elite.

By depicting Snowden and Greenwald as weird deviants, the establishment media reinforce the message that “obedience to authority is implicitly deemed the natural state” whilst those who radically, and actively, depart from the political norm are unnatural.  Remain boring and you will be safe, runs the political sedative - only bad people with something to hide should fear NSA surveillance.  Limitless spying, however, is certain to be abused, says Greenwald, with the historical surveillance record crammed with targets overwhelmingly drawn from left and progressive dissidents, and from whatever marginalised population subgroup is ripe for vilification.

With an unaccountable NSA, Washington set up a “one-way mirror” in which “the US government sees what everyone else in the world does … while no one sees its own actions”.  It takes the life-altering courage of rebels like Snowden, and committed journalists like Greenwald, to shatter this mirror - ‘I have’, said Snowden, ‘been to the darkest corners of government and what they fear is light’.

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE COLD WAR, DADDY? Curthoys & Damousi

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE COLD WAR, DADDY? Personal Stories From a Troubled Time
ANN CURTHOYS & JOY DAMOUSI (eds)
NewSouth, 2014, 297 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The Cold War (1946 - 1991) affected everything, so how did the conflict between the capitalist West and the Soviet East play out at the personal level, ask Ann Curthoys and Joy Damousi (History professors at Sydney and Melbourne universities) in What Did You Do In The Cold War, Daddy?  The book’s contributors try to recreate how their families experienced the Cold War in Australia.

Patrick Stalin Brislan (fortunately, this classical musician’s middle initial now stands for Sean) was the wartime son of a father who was, not surprisingly, a Communist Party of Australia (CPA) organiser, and he recalls the trouble his middle name threatened on top of the “personal physical violence” he already received from his school peers.

George Zangalis, of Greek anti-fascist familial origins, found support as a migrant worker in the CPA  as he encountered double Cold War jeopardy, being told by a police officer when arrested as a CPA election candidate in Victoria in 1973 that ‘What’s worse than a commo bastard is a dago commo bastard’.

John Docker (culture academic) remembers the struggle between doctrinal purity and friendship as political rifts split the Old Left, including his own arguments over the New Left with his father, Ted, a founding member of the CPA.

Children of both the expelled and the expellers sense an emotionally fraught atmosphere in a party which was often enough the author of its own misfortunes because of its slavish adherence to a Moscow-imposed party line.

The temperature was cooler over at the Australian Labor Party (ALP).  Rodney Cavalier (party ‘machine operative’) was the son of an ‘unthinking Liberal’ and was unmoved by the sixties in university until, in 1968, he joined the ALP, not the  students who were ripping up Parisian cobblestones and capitalist verities.  ‘Never attracted to Marxism’, he found the serenity of often inquorate but career-smoothing ALP branch meetings more comforting.

For the ALP more broadly, the Cold War meant the wary and stumbling choreography between its Right and ‘Left’ factions, and the CPA, for union influence in the face of ‘The Movement’, B. A. Santamaria’s visceral anti-communist, anti-Labor, Catholic organisation.  The political manifestation of ‘The Movement’ was the Democratic Labor Party which housed Peter Manning (ABC and commercial journalist), from a conservative Catholic family, during his time at Sydney University, and it took many years for him to see that, at least on the Vietnam War, it might be better to be red than dead.

With Professor Martin Krygier, the historically sloppy and politically lazy equating of the left (all shades) with Stalinist authoritarianism is on display as he inherited the stale anti-communist formula which justified the switch of his father, Richard, from Polish socialist to leading Australian anti-communist and founder of the CIA-funded magazine, Quadrant.

For conservatives like the Krygiers, the Cold War was always about the class war, no matter how they dressed it up as a fight between tyranny and ‘liberal democracy’.   Stalin’s gulags and ‘the God that failed’ were only ever excuses for the reactionary social policies, intellectual conformity and ‘free enterprise’ economy that were their true religion.

Few contributors, alas, meet the, admittedly difficult, brief of the book’s editors.  As young children, informed political awareness of the Cold War was not possible so their contributions rarely bring off a successful merger of history with memoir, anecdote with analysis.

Nevertheless, their chapters can be productively compared to show that, for all its self-inflicted faults, the historical communist left in Australia, and not the Cold War Right, were on the truly right side, the side of the exploited and oppressed many, not the powerful and wealthy few.  The Cold War may be over but the class war goes on.

SERVING THE REICH: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler by PHILIP BALL

SERVING THE REICH: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler
PHILIP BALL
Vintage, 2014, 320 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Nuclear physicists in Nazi Germany did not build an atomic bomb but, as the science writer, Philip Ball, shows in Serving the Reich, this was more by good fortune than by clever (mis)management by the likes of one of the regime’s favourite scientists, Werner Heisenberg, whose reputation-salvaging claim to have deliberately ‘falsified the mathematics’ to sabotage Hitler’s nuclear war option has been roundly discredited.

Such self-exoneration, says Ball, was common to almost an entire cohort of non-Jewish German physicists who, although rarely Nazi sympathisers or anti-Semites, colluded with the Nazi regime’s military ambitions and racial ‘cleansing’ policies.

The physicists either carried out the required dismissals of their Jewish colleagues, did not resign their academic posts or emigrate in protest, or self-interestedly welcomed the career advancement opportunities suddenly opened up by the purge of Jewish physicists.  Expressions of dismay were voiced privately not publicly whilst disapproval of Nazism was at best symbolic – Professor Max von Laue, Einstein’s friend, never went outdoors without a parcel under each arm to avoid having to give the obligatory, raised-arm ‘Heil Hitler’ salute.

The over-riding motive for the physicists’ “lethal indifference” was to maintain the intellectual status of German science and the best way to do this, they reasoned, was by protecting themselves from the Gestapo’s gaze.  Their social position and consciousness, however, also predisposed them to collaboration, however reluctant.  Intensely patriotic, they were privileged members of a conservative intellectual elite that was often “favourably disposed towards some elements of a totalitarian state”.  They believed that their first duty was obedience to the German state, including a genocidal, warring Nazi one.  The law was the law, reasoned the physicists’’ intellectual and institutional leader, Max Planck, and if respectful petitioning through official channels proved inadequate then there was nothing to be done.

The physicists were, writes Ball, “more tragic than despicable” in seriously misapprehending, or selectively denying, the true nature of Nazism but some were also compromised by mixed attitudes to fascism, like Heisenberg who believed that, over time, ‘the splendid things will separate from the hateful’.

Whilst it is understandable that fear of reprisal made a heads-down silence attractive, what is ultimately damning about the physicists’ behaviour was their “almost universal inability … to acknowledge, or even recognise, their failures in retrospect” when the concentration camp no longer threatened.

As electronic bugging of their conversations, when prisoners in England after the war, revealed, there was an almost total lack of remorse or moral self-examination.  Some even took the perverse moral high ground by arguing that the ‘democratic’ Allies actually built and used a nuclear bomb but totalitarian Germany did not.  This ignores the main reasons for the Nazis’ nuclear tardiness – the purge of Jewish physics talent (one quarter of the profession) which seriously depleted the relevant skills base, and the Nazi rulers opting for their V1 and V2 rocket program as more technically feasible than atomic bombs in a fast-narrowing timeframe.

Nazi Germany, says Ball, exposed the ‘apolitical’ stance of the German physicists as a delusion.  It prevented them from criticising their governmental paymasters and turned their retreat to ‘pure’ science into de facto professional support for the regime’s political program.  Their failure to see that science can not be “morally neutral” resulted in their political failure to resist Nazism.

The social and political implications of scientific research are inescapable, says Ball, not just in the specialist field of nuclear physics, with its still deadly applications of nuclear energy and weapons, but equally as much, concludes Ball, in contemporary, and potentially calamitous, technologies such as genetically modified crops, nano-technology, fossil fuels and all things military.  Contemporary scientists supporting such research may care to reflect on the damage done to society by Hitler’s physicists who tried, and failed, to remain ‘above’ politics.

HELL-BENT: Australia’s Leap into the Great War by DOUGLAS NEWTON

HELL-BENT: Australia’s Leap into the Great War
DOUGLAS NEWTON
Scribe, 2014, 344 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Behind all the froth, then and now, about the noble cause of the first world war (defence of freedom by Britain and its allies against German aggression) lay a far less exalted reality, writes Douglas Newton, retired University of Western Sydney historian.   The war’s “grand plan” for Britain, called, candidly enough, ‘The Spoils’, by the British Colonial Secretary, was to divvy the world up amongst the victors.

Territorial claims by Britain and its allies (France, Italy and Tsarist Russia) were pegged out in the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific, with the British Dominions (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa) instructed to begin the conquest of the German colonies in these regions as, in the words of a secret British cable, an ‘Imperial service’ on behalf of London.  Australia was given carriage of New Guinea, the Marshall Islands and Nauru in what Newton aptly calls a “war of brigandage”. 

Australia’s war role was tied to London’s war aims through the bonds of Empire loyalty.  So devoted was the Australian Government, in fact, that its commitment of its entire Navy and some 20,000 expeditionary troops was made forty hours ahead of the British Cabinet decision to declare war on Germany.  Australia’s generous, early gift strengthened the hand of the warmongers in the British Liberal government which was sharply split between ‘Liberal Imperialists’ and neutralists.

Newton documents the eagerness with which Australian politicians made a “rapid and reckless leap, without any conditions or limits” into the looming conflagration that was to claim 18 million lives.  Although Australia’s decision was made by just four Cabinet members of Joseph Cook’s federal Liberal government, the entire Australian political establishment was war-minded.

The British Governor-General to Australia happily noted that both the Cook Liberals and Andrew Fisher’s Labor Opposition were ‘full of zeal’ for war.  Engaged in a national election campaign at the time, they competed in what Newton calls a “love-of-empire” auction.  Labor boasted its support for conscription and its defence spending when in government from 1910-13, with Fisher now pledging to help and defend Britain “to our last man and our last shilling”.  ‘In times of emergency’, he declared, the Labor Opposition would ‘stand behind the government in all measures ... to assist the Mother Country’.

Labor’s unity pledge on war was partly driven by a concern for “political safety” in response to the Liberals’ electoral opportunism, summed up by a Liberal Senate candidate who noted that ‘the European situation affords Liberals in Australia excellent material for a good war-cry during the current campaign’ allowing them, writes Newton, to attack Labor in a “khaki election” as “traitorous, a friend of Germany and a nest of Irishmen disloyal to Empire”, no matter how fanciful this description was.   As symbolised by Labor’s most hawkish figurehead, Billy Hughes, the party’s fundamental political values were in alignment with the needs of the “rich men, corporate lawyers, mining tycoons, bankers and reactionary publicists” who, says Newton, formed Hughes’ ultra-patriotic Australian National Defence League.

Labor’s decision to back the war dealt the official ALP Opposition, and its affiliated trade unions, out of influence at a time when there was “no sign that Australians were being eaten up with anxiety that they might miss the war”.  The real opposition, says Newton, was left to the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, socialists, and anti-militarist radicals, feminists and Christians.  An internationalist, working class, anti-war party would have responded differently to the war but the Australian Labor Party politicians were no Bolsheviks.

Neither is Newton, who argues that the Great War was not escapable for Australia, “nor should Australia have stood aside from it”.  This may be true but only for a country under capitalist management accepting its role as a regional branch obedient to the Head Office of the imperialist British Empire brand.

Nevertheless, Newton’s book, despite adding copiously to the already-mountainous documentary heights of high diplomatic manoeuvring, has useful context.  Sounding almost like Lenin explaining the old axiom that war is politics by other means, Newton notes that the Australian military “fought for the empire, and all it stood for – class distinction, reservoirs of cheap labour … captured markets and resources …”.

Newton also, thankfully, plays truant from that school of Australian war history which glories in the current celebratory clamour of the centenary of the ‘Great War’ whilst, most valuably, arguing that we should “think critically about the nation’s descent into war – in the past, in the present, and in the future”.  Such radical reflection, it is abundantly clear, will come, not from the descendants of the political, military and media elites which took us to calamity in 1914, but from the heirs of the war’s dissenters.

AN OFFICER AND A SPY Robert Harris

AN OFFICER AND A SPY
ROBERT HARRIS
Hutchinson, 2013, 483 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

What do you do when you are a national security official with access to secret intelligence and find that the shonky information and tenuous evidence in it has been corruptly used to convict an innocent man of treason?  Join in the suppression of the case?  Or expose the injustice?  Major Georges Picquart, commander of France’s secret police in 1895, faced exactly this dilemma in the Dreyfus Affair and, at great risk of his own victimisation, chose to expose the frame-up of the French Army Captain, Alfred Dreyfus.  Robert Harris’ historical novel dramatically reconstructs the transformation of Picquart from loyal military officer to crusading whistle-blower. 

After France’s colossal defeat by Germany in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, a scapegoat-hungry French military and political elite found, amongst France’s vilified ‘Jews and Traitors’, a convenient fall-guy in Dreyfus, a military officer and a Jew with German cultural roots in the German-occupied French territories of Alsace-Lorraine.

Picquart had many misgivings about Dreyfus’ conviction for espionage which resulted in his exile to France’s isolated Devil’s Island hell-hole.  Dreyfus, thought Picquart, had no apparent motive.  The prosecution illegally (via Picquart) provided to the court-martial judges a secret file which “wouldn’t withstand ten minutes’ cross examination by a halfway decent attorney”, says a repentant Picquart once he sights the material in his newly-promoted capacity as secret police chief.  The spy was identified solely by the letter ‘D’ (for ‘Dreyfus’, that’ll do, thought his framers) on the one incriminating sheet of paper allegedly in Dreyfus’ handwriting.

With resourcefulness, guile and irresistible obsession, Picquart dug into the case and discovered that the real agent was a French Army Major, Esterhazy, selling military secrets to pay off his gambling and mistress debts.  Making his superiors aware of the true situation, Picquart is ordered off his personal investigation to prevent the certain embarrassment and career ruin of Dreyfus’ judicial, military and political persecutors, including five of France’s most senior Army Generals.

When Picquart defies his bosses, a ‘desperate and vindictive army’ attempts to silence him.  He is spied on, interrogated, arrested, held in indefinite detention without trial, transferred to effective exile in France’s African colonies, then dismissed from the Army.  But Picquart is never put on trial.  The ‘founder of the school of Dreyfus studies: its leading scholar’ who knows ‘every letter and telegram, every personality, every forgery, every lie’ of the Dreyfus Affair would be too dangerous to its perpetrators and apologists if given a platform in court.

The limelight-shunning Picquart eventually finds his ‘solitary burden of secrecy’ lifted when he connects with the broad and vigorous mobilisation of social forces (led by intellectuals, left-wing politicians and socialists) that was the essential crux on which turned the eventual victory of the ‘Dreyfusards’ against France’s establishment conspirators, perjurers, forgers and anti-Semites.  Picquart and Dreyfus were both exonerated in 1906, after a decade of seemingly hopeless struggle. 

The relevance of this historic triumph, well-narrated by an industrious Harris despite some sluggish passages of weighty detail, has not dimmed – of never giving up the slog of campaigning against heavy institutional odds, and of the value of the system’s insiders who, with moral courage, forensic diligence and the dogged pursuit of getting the truth out, blow the whistle on the abuse of official power and secrecy.

CORAL BATTLEGROUND Judith Wright

THE CORAL BATTLEGROUND
JUDITH WRIGHT
Spinifex, 2014, 203 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

From the days when Captain Cook’s Endeavour tangled with the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, humans had learnt to fear the Reef with its “treacherous waters and weather” but  now the Reef “should fear us more”, writes Judith Wright in The Coral Battleground, a reprint of her 1977 account of the campaign to save the largest and most spectacular marine coral ecosystem in the world from oil drilling.  “We were opposing wealthy interests, entrenched government policies, and political forces that seemed immovable”, she writes, yet the environmentalists won.

One of Australia’s pre-eminent poets, Wright (who passed away in 2000) was a founder of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (WPSQ) in 1962 and became its influential public voice.  ‘Progress’ and ‘development’ – “we learned”, she writes, “to dislike the sound of those two words” which came freely from the mouths of  the Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and the rest of his Cabinet, most of whom held substantial shares in oil and mining companies.

With 80% of the Reef leased by the government for oil and mineral exploration, the WPSQ, buoyed by their recent win to halt limestone mining in the Reef, erected the barricades against the offshore oil industry’s environmental threat (oil-well blow-outs, tanker accidents and ‘normal’ operational spills, detergent treatments and mud discharge).

The government rang familiar alarms about how saving coral polyps would spook a ‘flight of capital from the state’, threaten investment, jobs and government revenue, and drive up the price of petrol.  They appointed a dodgy expert (a geologist with no biological qualifications) who would give the required verdict in favour of ‘controlled exploitation’.  The state conservatives’ federal government colleagues called a Royal Commission with terms of reference loaded towards where and how the Reef could be drilled and not whether it should be drilled.   

This delaying and defusing tactic, however, also allowed time for the election of a federal Labor Government, which responding to the popular environmental momentum and sniffing the “political capital’ to be made from banning oil-drilling, declared the Reef in 1975 a Marine National Park off-limits to oil-drilling.

Before this legislative end-game, however, came the crucial turning point in 1968 when Queensland’s’ trade unions placed a black-ban on oil-drilling in the Reef.  The conservationists had won the scientific argument, the aesthetic argument and the popular argument but now they had the winning muscle – the ‘Green Ban’ “held the key to stopping drilling”, says an elated Wright.

A “small, voluntary, spare-time organisation” had turned popular feeling into a stunning victory against economic and political forces, casting off the weighty anchor of the moderate environmentalists in the Australian Conservation Foundation whose silence and foot-dragging had been bought by government subsidy and corporate membership fees.

As the book’s new publishers note, however, whilst oil drilling has been banned, the threat from the use of the fossil fuel, and its climate change cousin, coal, continues - coral reef ecosystems can not survive higher water temperatures and sea levels, increased extreme weather variability and ocean acidification.  Government inaction and apathy also waves through other mining dangers (nitrogen-laden waste-water from Clive Palmer’s nickel mine, and the recently-approved dumping of three million cubic metres of seabed sludge from expanded shipping terminals as part of Australia’s new, and largest, coal port at Gladstone).  Pesticide and fertiliser pollution from banana and sugarcane farming, and coastal industry, urbanisation and tourism, round out a dire threat assessment which has the United Nations pondering declaring the World Heritage Area to be in danger.

The historic triumph over oil drilling, however, shows how to win against corporate and political environmental vandalism.  Wright’s re-issued book, a self-confessed “unadorned, bare chronological account”, whose prose is often more plodding than poetic, is perfectly timed.

Command & Control, A Short History of Nuclear Folly, Atomic Comics

COMMAND AND CONTROL
ERIC SCHLOSSER
Allen Lane, 2013, 632 pages

A SHORT HISTORY OF NUCLEAR FOLLY

RUDOLPH HERZOG
Melville House, 2014, 252 pages

ATOMIC COMICS: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear Age

FERENC SZASZ
University of Nevada Press, 2013, 179 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Atomic bombs have only ever been used twice but they have nearly been detonated, through accident or mistake, many more times, writes Eric Schlosser in his book on nuclear weapons mishaps.  With one modern thermo-nuclear bomb packing three times the force of all the bombs used in World war 11, an unintended catastrophic detonation or scattering of deadly plutonium has been too close, too often, for any complacency.

Nuclear bombs have been accidently launched from planes, have been crushed or burned during plane crashes, or have been damaged during storing and loading.  Dropped tools have punched holes in fuel tanks engulfing nuclear weapons in fire, or have been left in missiles during construction causing electrical short-circuits.  Lightning and improperly installed battery chargers have set them on fire.  Electro-magnetic radiation has interfered with missile controls.  Bomb detonators have been set off during routine tests of electrical systems. 

The American nuclear missile command and control centre has mistakenly identified the moon, forest fires and volcanoes as Soviet nuclear missiles heading for the US.  A defective 46-cent computer chip once indicated that 2,200 Russian missiles were on their way.  In 2003, half the US Air Force units responsible for nuclear weapons failed their safety inspections.  In 2007, six thermo-nuclear bombs went missing.

Safety precautions against misadventure have been sacrificed because they would require super-thick casing and padding, making the nuclear bomb four times heavier and thus reducing the number that could be carried by plane or submarine.  Psychiatric disorders, and drug and alcohol abuse afflict alarming numbers of armed forces nuclear weapons personnel. 

Schlosser admits to a profound ignorance of nuclear weapons and the history of nuclear war strategy and unfortunately feels compelled to include all his newly discovered knowledge in his book which trades off analytical depth for lengthy dramatic re-creations.  Nevertheless, he is persuasive that we continue to live on borrowed time regarding “the most dangerous technology ever invented”.

Rudolph Herzog agrees that dozens of accidents in which nuclear bombs were damaged, lost or accidently launched have played Russian roulette with atomic catastrophe but he expands his indictment to include the very real history of other nuclear disasters.

An atmospheric bomb test in Nevada in the 1950s sent a radioactive dust-cloud to neighbouring Utah where the two hundred cast and crew, and five thousand Native American extras, of a John Wayne film breathed in the nuclear carcinogens resulting in cancer rates six times higher than normal.

Pacific islands have been made uninhabitable from US and French nuclear testing.  A decade of British nuclear tests in Australia in the 1950s reduced by twenty years the life expectancy of the twenty thousand British and Australian military personnel involved whilst further cruelling the lives of remote Indigenous inhabitants.

Nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered submarines rust at the bottom of the seas, dozens of nuclear-fuelled military satellites orbit the planet, occasionally returning uncontrollably with their uranium payload, and massive amounts of military atomic waste was covertly dumped at sea by the old Soviet military.

Civilian nuclear power has rolled out its own catalogue of folly, from chart-topping nuclear reactor accidents to its lesser-known hits.  A plutonium-fuelled Russian space-probe bound for Mars burned up over the Pacific in 2006.  A plutonium-powered battery was taken up the Himalayas, near the source of the river Ganges, to power a US weather station and was lost in an avalanche.  Humans have been subjected to involuntary radiation experiments whilst atomic pacemakers irradiate from places unknown following the death of the user.

‘Missing’ weapons-grade uranium and plutonium forms part of the trade portfolio of the Italian, and post-Soviet Russian, mafias.  Uranium mining has contaminated the environment and workers’ bodies.  Nuclear waste waits unavailingly for a solution. We have fortunately been spared the implementation, but not the conception, of proposals for nuclear-powered cars and for giant mining and earthmoving construction projects.  What new chapters of “atomic idiocy” await writing, asks Herzog.

Herzog and Schlosser make no claim to be comprehensive or scholastic, and their politics are routine boilerplate, but, together, their books are, through the power of cumulative example of nuclear lunacy, unnerving.

Altogether more comforting has been the US comics industry.  Ferenc Szasz’s history of atomic-themed comics begins with Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon in the 1930s where the assumed technological wonders of peaceful nuclear energy outweighed any anxiety over atomic war.  Dagwood Bumstead, Mandrake the Magician, Popeye and atomic-enhanced cartoon animals, including Donald Duck, have lent an ‘educational’ hand to the task of reassuring readers that any dangers of nuclear fission were manageable.

A flock of caped heroes (Captain Marvel, Captain America, Superman and Wonder Woman) ensured that atomic bombs would not fall into the wrong hands (terrorists, evil scientists, unreconstructed Nazis, foreign powers, Reds).  It was assumed that the American hands which held The Bomb were the right hands and that nuclear warfare against the Soviet Union could be both limited and winnable.

An “atomic banality”, says Szasz, now reigns in the comics and animation world in which “cynicism, resignation and bland acceptance” of nuclear fission, and the light satire of The Simpsons, coats over the continuing nuclear problems.

The corporate fingerprint is evident in all this cartoon contentedness.  Although Szasz’s book should have developed this crucial issue more, the business giants of the comics industry, Marvel and DC Comics, which control three-quarters of the $700 million a year US comics market, share the supreme value of money-making with those who profit from nuclear energy and weapons.  Capitalism and the nuclear age are no laughing matter.