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\n\tIndulge me for a moment. This is how \u201cThe Prophecy\u201d in my 1962 high school yearbook began. It was written by some of my classmates in the year we graduated from Friends Seminary in New York City.\n<\/p>\n
\n\t \u201cBeing an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit, but what I saw and experienced two days ago I am sure no one else as civilized as I am will ever see. I am writing for those who shall come a long time from now.
\n\t\u201cFirst of all, let me introduce myself. I am THOMAS M. ENGELHARDT, world-renowned historian of the late twentieth century, should that mean anything to whoever reads this account. After the great invasion, I was maintaining a peaceful, contented existence in the private shelter I had built and was completing the ninth and final volume of my masterpiece, The Influence of the Civil War on Mexican Art of the Twentieth Century<\/em>, when I was seized by a strange desire to emerge from my shelter, have a look at the world, and find some companions. Realizing the risk I was taking, I carefully opened the hatch of the shelter and slowly climbed out. It was morning. To my shock, I was in a wide field overgrown with weeds; there was no sign of the community that had been there\u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\tAs I wander, I finally run into one of my classmates, now \u201ca skinny old man with bushy white hair, wearing a loose deer skin.\u201d And yes, whatever happened (that \u201cgreat invasion\u201d) while I was underground in \u2014 as anyone of that period would have known \u2014 a private nuclear-fallout shelter, is unclear. Still, in the world I find on emerging, all my former classmates, whom I meet one after another in joking fashion, now live in caves. In other words, it had obviously been devastated.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tTrue, in those high school years, I was something of a Civil War nut and my classmates ragged me for it. I couldn\u2019t stop reading grown-up books on the subject. (Thank you, Bruce Catton<\/a>, for your popular histories of that war and for the magazine you founded and edited, American Heritage<\/em>, to which I was a teen subscriber!) They obviously thought I was a history wonk of the first order. But more than 60 years later, it strikes me that we kids who had learned to \u201cduck and cover<\/a>\u201d at school \u2014 to dive under our desks<\/a>, hands over our heads (with CONELRAD<\/a> warnings blaring from the radio on our teacher\u2019s desk) \u2014 in preparation for a Russian nuclear attack, already had a deep sense not of future promise but of doom to come. In those days, it wasn\u2019t that hard to imagine ourselves in a future devastated world returned to the Stone Age or worse.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd at the time, I suspect that was hardly out of the ordinary. After all, there were, in a sense, mushroom clouds everywhere on the horizon of our lives to come. By 1962, America\u2019s victory weapon that, in two blinding flashes in August 1945, took out the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, had become a weapon (in other hands) of potential defeat. Everywhere in our lives there lurked the possibility that \u201cwe,\u201d not \u201cthey,\u201d might be the next victims of nuclear extermination. Consider it an irony indeed that our country\u2019s nukes would chase Americans through the decades to come, infiltrating so many parts of our world and our lives.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tBack in 1954, our Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, already had its own nukes (though as yet little effective way of delivering them). No one thought it worth a comment then that, in Walt Disney\u2019s cinematic retelling of Jules Verne\u2019s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea<\/em>, when Captain Nemo blows up his island, what\u2019s distinctly a mushroom cloud rises over it. Of course, in those years, end-of-the-world movies<\/a> would become everyday affairs.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tIn the 1950s and early 1960s, a now-forgotten bunker-culture mentality enveloped this country and my classmates caught the moment perfectly. In fact, that \u201cshelter\u201d I emerged from would, in 1962, still have been far too recognizable to need further description. After all, we grew up in a time when the Cold War was only intensifying and the very idea of building private nuclear shelters had become a commonplace. As an article in Smithsonian Magazine<\/em> reminds us<\/a>, right after the first Russian nuclear test went off in 1949, \u201c[General] Douglas MacArthur\u2019s ex-wife said she was furnishing the former slave quarters beneath her Georgetown mansion as a bomb shelter\u201d and, only six years later, the head of Civil Defense began urging every single American \u201cto build an underground shelter right now.’\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n\tBy 1961, faced with a crisis<\/a> over a divided Berlin, President John F. Kennedy himself urged<\/a> Americans to do just that. (\u201cThe time is now,\u201d he insisted.) In those years, Life<\/em> magazine typically ran a feature on constructing \u201can H-bomb Hideaway<\/a>\u201d for a mere $3,000! And real-estate ads even promised \u201cgood bomb immunity,\u201d while Science News<\/em> warned of \u201chucksters who were peddling backyard shelters, burn ointments, dog tags, flashbags, and \u2018decontaminating agents.’\u201d Naturally, once you had built your private shelter, there was the question of whether, should a nuclear war be about to begin, you should let the neighbors in or arm yourself<\/a> to stop them from doing so. (A friend of mine still remembers one of his schoolmates and neighbors warning him that, in a crisis, according to his parents, his family better not try to come to their nuclear shelter or they would regret it.)\n<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd that yearbook passage of mine was written in the winter or spring of 1962, months before the Cuban missile crisis<\/a> shook us all to our bones. That October, I remember fearing the East Coast, where I was then attending my freshman year of college, might indeed go up in a giant mushroom cloud. And keep in mind that, in those years, from popular magazines to sci-fi novels to the movies, the bomb either exploded or threatened to do so again and again. In my youth, atomic war was, culturally speaking, all around us. It was even in outer space, as in the 1955 film This Island Earth<\/em><\/a> in which another planet goes up in a version of radioactive flames, scaring the living hell out of the 11-year-old Thomas M. Engelhardt.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tSo, yes, my classmates were messing around and having fun, but underneath it all lurked a sensibility (probably only half-grasped at the time) about the world we were to graduate into that was anything but upbeat. The planet that our leaders were then assuring us was ours for the taking seemed to us anything but.\n<\/p>\n
\nWorld-Endings, Part Two<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s true that, in the years between then and now, the world didn\u2019t go up in a mushroom cloud (with an accompanying nuclear winter<\/a> killing billions more of us, a probability we knew nothing about in 1962). Still, whether you\u2019re talking about actual war or potential nuclear catastrophe<\/a>, it\u2019s certainly looking mighty ugly right now.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tWorse yet, if you\u2019re 18 as I was then (and not 78, as I am now), you undoubtedly know that the future isn\u2019t looking cheery these days either, even without a nuclear war. Sadly, in the years since I graduated high school, we discovered that humanity had managed to come up with a second slower but potentially no less devastating way to make this world unlivable. I\u2019m thinking, of course, of climate change, a subject deeply on the minds<\/a> of the young on this embattled planet of ours.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tI mean, from unparalleled floods<\/a> to unprecedented melting ice<\/a>, staggering megadroughts<\/a> to record wildfires<\/a>, sweltering heat waves<\/a> and ever fiercer storms<\/a> to\u2026 well, increasingly extreme weather<\/a> of almost any imaginable sort, this planet is an ever less comfortable place on which to live, even without a mushroom cloud on the horizon. And that\u2019s especially true, given how humanity is dealing with the crisis to come. After all, what makes more sense right now than a never-ending war in Europe to create an energy crisis (though that crisis is also helping fuel<\/a> the rapid growth of alternative energy)? What makes more sense than an escalating arms race globally<\/a> or the world\u2019s two greatest greenhouse gas producers, the United States and China, facing off<\/a> against each other in an increasingly militarized fashion rather than cooperating to stop our planet from burning up?\n<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat makes more sense than the Biden administration giving the nod to an oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska expected to produce<\/a> an estimated 576 million barrels of oil over the next 30 years, despite the president\u2019s previous promise<\/a> not to do such a thing? (\u201cNo more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.\u201d) What makes more sense than China using more coal<\/a>, that monstrous greenhouse-gas producer, than the rest of the world combined? What makes more sense than the major oil companies garnering greater profits<\/a> in 2022 than in any previous moment in history as they broil the planet without mercy? What makes more sense than, as the Guardian<\/em> reported<\/a>, more than 1,000 \u201csuper-emitter\u201d sites, mostly at oil and natural gas facilities, continuing to gush the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the worst of those sites spewing \u201cthe pollution at a rate equivalent to 67 million running cars\u201d?\n<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd no less daunting, so Michael Birnbaum reported<\/a> at the Washington Post<\/em> recently, as various countries begin to explore the possibility of \u201csolar geoengineering\u201d (spraying a sun-blocking mist into the earth\u2019s atmosphere to cool their overheating countries), they might also end up messing with atmospheric conditions in other lands in a fashion that could lead to\u2026 yes, as the \u201cU.S. intelligence community\u201d has come to fear, war. So add potential climate wars to your list of future horrors.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s true that alternative energy sources are also ramping up significantly, just not yet fast enough<\/a>, but there\u2019s certainly still hope that, in some fashion, humanity will once again figure out how to come up short of The End. Still, if you\u2019re young today and looking at the world, I suspect it\u2019s not a pretty sight.\n<\/p>\n
\nProphesies to Come<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n
\n\tLet me now offer my own little summary of the very future that I, like so many of my classmates, did live through to this moment: No, Thomas M. Engelhardt never wrote that classic book The Influence of the Civil War on Mexican Art of the Twentieth Century<\/em>, but he did author The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation<\/em><\/a> (published in 1995) in which he wrote about the victory weapon of World War II, the \u201cbunker culture\u201d of the 1950s and 1960s that it produced, and what (as best he could tell) to make of it all.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tIn addition, with that end-of-the-world sensibility still in mind, while an editor at the publishing house Pantheon Books<\/a>, he would make more visible something Americans had largely been prevented from seeing after August 1945. As it happened, a friend would show him a book put out by a Japanese publisher that collected the memories of some of the survivors of Hiroshima along with drawings they had done of that experience. Yes, in his childhood, Thomas M. Engelhardt had indeed seen giant irradiated ants<\/a> and an incredible shrinking man<\/a> on screen in science-fictionalized versions of an irradiated future. But missing<\/a> from his all-American world had been any vision of what had actually happened to the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that all-American past.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tIn 1979, not long before an antinuclear movement that would make use of it revved up in this country, he published that Japanese book, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors<\/em><\/a>, which all too vividly laid out the memories of those who had experienced world\u2019s end in an up-close-and-personal fashion. And several years later, thanks to that book\u2019s Japanese editor (amazed that any American would have considered publishing it), he actually went to Hiroshima and visited the Peace Memorial Museum, something he\u2019s never forgotten.\n<\/p>\n