There’s an old nuclear doomsday novel, “Alas, Babylon” by Pat Frank, that now feels like some warning cry issued long ago to a generation still around in the time of Ukraine: “This could happen to you.”
Are there others out there who still remember the nightmares brought on by “Alas, Babylon?”
The title comes from the Book of Revelation: “Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy judgment come.”
The book came out in 1959, and a year later the old “Playhouse 90” TV series produced a chilling screenplay.
In “Alas, Babylon,” the United States and the Soviet Union have stumbled into full-scale nuclear war. Among the lucky survivors are the people in a small town in Florida called Fort Repose, considered too insignificant for the Russians to waste any bombs.
But the town’s left isolated from whatever remains of the rest of the pulverized world and its millions of victims. Phone lines are down, the CONELRAD radio system barely works. A frantic man in Fort Repose goes to the local Western Union to try to contact his office in Boston.
The telegraph operator tells him, “I’m sorry, sir. There doesn’t seem to be a Boston anymore.”
There’s not much left of America or the Soviet Union when “Alas, Babylon” is done. And now we watch the Russians bully their way into Ukraine, and the old fiction seems ever more real with the news of a fire at a Ukrainian nuclear power plant and the ever-tightening noose around the capital city of Kyiv.
How long before someone says, “There doesn’t seem to be a Kyiv anymore”?
We’ve lived with such fears for a long time now. And the current fighting brings back such terrors, fictional and real, for several generations of rational human beings.
Some of us still remember the Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962 when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev each reached toward the nuclear button.
Or we remember “Fail Safe” or “Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” which offered us caustic laughter to ease our way past our terrors.
Or we remember Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach,” the novel and movie about post-war Australia, the last place on earth not yet contaminated by nuclear fallout. The Aussies are trying to figure out the best way to live the final weeks of their lives.
If that sounds unimaginable, then you weren’t paying attention last week when the Russians nearly blew up that Ukrainian nuclear power plant. Radiation levels are reportedly still “acceptable,” but there are nuclear plants all over Ukraine and each one is a potential target, intentional or otherwise, by the mad Russian Putin.
Already, there are Ukrainian cities cut off from electricity and water. It brings back a line from “Alas, Babylon” – “Thus, the lights went out, and in that moment civilization retreated a hundred years.”
We thought we had learned to live with the bomb. Knowing that nuclear war would mean the obliteration of much, if not all, of the planet, our leaders would surely refrain from pushing any doomsday buttons.
But as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, the mere creation of an atomic bomb revealed a “sickness” in the human soul.
In “Palm Sunday,” Vonnegut wrote, “What other sort of soul would create a new physics based on nightmares, would place into the hands of mere politicians a planet so destabilized that the briefest fit of stupidity could easily guarantee the end of the world?”
That’s what we’re asking now, as we wonder what degree of insanity could have prompted Vladimir Putin to embark on this mass-murder venture of his.
At such moments, there’s another scene from “Alas, Babylon” that stays with me as the fighting continues in Ukraine.
Long months after the U.S.-Soviet Union nuclear war, only sporadic news has reached that isolated town of Fort Repose. They only know that many major cities in America and Russia have been destroyed and vast regions are still deemed off-limits because of nuclear contamination.
A full year after the war, a U.S. Air Force helicopter comes to Fort Repose. It’s the first contact with the outside world. All of the Soviet leadership has been wiped out. The American president and most of his cabinet have been killed, and the new president is a woman who previously served as secretary of health.
The Air Force helicopter pilot informs Fort Repose citizens that only 45 million Americans remain alive.
“But tell us,” somebody asks, “who won the war?”
“Are you kidding?” the pilot says proudly. “We clobbered ‘em.”
Who will do the ultimate “clobbering” in Ukraine, and how much will be left when it’s all over?
Michael Olesker’s newest book, “Boogie: Life on A Merry-Go-Round,” will be published this spring. It’s the life story of Baltimore legend Leonard “Boogie” Weinglass,an original “Diner” guy who grew up to create the Merry-Go-Round clothing chain and donate millions to charity.
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