By now, the bomb has almost no reality and has...

4th September 2012

Quote reblogged from bow tie moustache with 51 notes

By now, the bomb has almost no reality and has become a complete abstraction, represented by a few newsreel shots of mushroom clouds. People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction. The longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying. For this reason, most people have very little interest in nuclear war. It has become even less interesting as a problem than, say, city government, and the longer a nuclear event is postponed, the greater becomes the illusion that we are constantly building up security, like interest at the bank. As time goes on, the danger increases, I believe, because the thing becomes more and more remote in people’s minds. No one can predict the panic that suddenly arises when all the lights go out — that indefinable something that can make a leader abandon his carefully laid plans. A lot of effort has gone into trying to imagine possible nuclear accidents and to protect against them. But whether the human imagination is really capable of encompassing all the subtle permutations and psychological variants of these possibilities, I doubt. The nuclear strategists who make up all those war scenarios are never as inventive as reality, and political and military leaders are never as sophisticated as they think they are.

— Stanley Kubrick, director of “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” profiled in The New Yorker, November 12, 1966. (via bowtiemoustache)

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