Kaboom times

Imagining an unprepared North America, post-apocalypse.

‘Sometimes I feel like he’s on a reality show of some kind,” said U.S. Senator Bob Corker. “He doesn’t realize ... we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making.”

The Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was talking to The New York Times about Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy, which includes threats levelled at countries like North Korea. But the idea that the president exists in a sort of television universe explains something else: why that same apocalyptic rhetoric hasn’t created the widespread panic it would seem to warrant.

We may shake our heads and tweet out clever hashtags, but, on some level, we all imagine this is makebelieve. We assume that, should playtime get rowdy, the adults will come to our rescue. When it comes to questions of war and peace, we are children at heart — imagining our leaders as father figures who will ultimately make the right decisions. Or, if Trump fails to deal properly with North Korea, then someone — Mike Pence, James Mattis, the joint chiefs — will act in loco parentis.

That’s just a hope. By law, the U.S. President may order a nuclear strike on his own authority. Like it or not, we live in a world where a man who devotes spare time to publicly attacking NFL football players decides every morning whether millions of people in other countries, and his own, will live to see the sun set.

But there is another reason that the prospect of a nuclear warhead detonating on North American soil seems surreal: Tragedy on this scale has no parallel in our living memory.

A single, 150-kiloton North Korean nuke detonating on the roof of the Vancouver Public Library would kill about 55,000 people. By contrast, the largest disaster to occur on Canadian soil in the last century — the Halifax Explosion of 1917 — killed about 2,000.

Of course, mass-casualty terrorism is part of our larger reality. But even the Twin Tower attacks failed to destroy local transportation and communications networks, emergency-response infrastructure, governmental chain of command, or for that matter most Manhattan retail operations. By September 21, 10 days later, the Mets were back playing their home games at Shea Stadium. And the mayor of New York was telling people to show their civic pride by going out to shops and restaurants.

In post-nuclear Vancouver, by contrast, stores will be quite closed. Downtown, Yaletown and Gastown would all be completely incinerated. As far out as Kitsilano, Shaughnessy, and North Vancouver, residents would have life-threatening third-degree burns. Many people — perhaps most — would die at home or in the streets, as the city’s major downtown hospitals and clinics would lie in ruins. Bridges would collapse, roads would be clogged with debris and abandoned cars, while the shipping infrastructure in English Bay and Vancouver Harbour would be destroyed by gigantic waves. Burnaby and Surrey would be the site of chaos, as hordes of radiation refugees fled east, desperate for care, carrying the dead or dying in carts and strollers. Others might make their way over water to Vancouver Island, where they would forage, or seek help from locals, while awaiting rescue.

Amidst the breakdown in civil order, existing racial suspicions would be expressed in deadly skirmishes over available food, medicine and other necessities, inspired by “fake news” and conspiracy theories circulated on analog broadcast media. Eventually, the Canadian and American governments would establish some kind of presence on the periphery of the blast zone — perhaps in Coquitlam or, if Vancouver International Airport and the roadwork around it could be rehabilitated by military engineers, Richmond. But that would take months. And in the case of multiple blast sites, outside assistance might never come at all — because a weakened federal government would no longer be able to assert control over disasteraffected regions, while the United States border would be slammed shut by Trump (or whatever local paramilitary unit he designates for border defence under martial law).

Aside from the precipitating detail of a nuclear bomb, the sort of horrifically Hobbesian, post-apocalyptic vision I am sketching out here is hardly unknown to the human condition. Great swathes of the planet were consumed by exactly this sort of chaotic horror during the 20th century — especially in South Asia, during the partition of India and Pakistan; in the bloodlands of Eastern Europe from 1933 to 1945; in Anatolia during the Armenian Genocide; and in China during the Second SinoJapanese War, the Second World War and the Communist Revolution.

TRAGEDY ON THIS SCALE HAS NO PARALLEL IN OUR LIVING MEMORY.

But in all of these cases, the affected societies were already marked by some combination of ethnic conflict, extremist politics, colonialization, and a history of communal violence. Most of the Europeans who witnessed the carnage of the Second World War, for instance, had also witnessed the First World War, just as many of those who’d witnessed the First World War had witnessed the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (and, before that, the Revolutions of 1848). Apocalypse wasn’t quite a habit for these societies, but it was a known and recurring part of their history. And so, when the ground shuddered anew, or the Cossacks showed up, there was at least some vestigial cultural instinct for survival and selfpreservation. Before running out the door, people knew what to throw in a bag.

By contrast, here in North America, I expect that most of us would respond to a nuclear attack — or any truly catastrophic regional event — with a show of helplessness and panic that would disgust our forebears. Which is another factor explaining why the threat of attack feels so unreal: We simply don’t possess the visual grammar that would permit us to imagine destruction on this scale.

The U.S. Civil War and the campaigns of extermination waged against Indigenous peoples produced widespread death and horror in parts of North America. But that was more than a century ago — meaning that non-immigrant Canadians generally can be expected to have no living memory of anything except our own freakishly safe society. Most Canadians will go their entire lives without seeing a single dead body outside of a coffin or a gurney. What happens when the graphic artists and cupcake cooks of Vancouver, Seattle or San Francisco see hundreds of them in their own neighbourhood?

In the diaries of men and women who have passed through such historical traumas, one often finds amazing tales of survival — in part because these survivors had training and knowledge that allowed them to hunt for food, navigate the land, build shelter, evade predators, kill or subdue enemies, and fix broken equipment. But urbanization has destroyed this skill set. Most of my friends don’t even know how to jump start their own cars. And it’s impossible to imagine them (or me) suturing small wounds, gutting a fish, finding clean groundwater, or digging a proper grave — all basic skills once commonly found in rural households.

Humans have been slaughtering one another since we lived in trees. But I am aware of no precedent in history for an act of annihilation on a city-wide scale that has taken place in a society as wealthy, helpless, urbanized and historically peaceful as ours. If Donald Trump does stumble into a fission exchange with a rogue state, he will not only be conducting a supreme act of folly, but also perhaps the greatest, and most horrible, social experiment ever conducted.