After
Vladimir Putin launched the Russian invasion of Ukraine and
encountered unexpectedly fierce resistance on ground and
the united opposition of NATO and most of the rest of the world,
he was stung by crippling economic sanctions and defensive military
aid to Ukraine. To scare off
Western action he pointedly announced that he had ordered a full nuclear
alert and let unnamed “sources” hint that he was willing to use battlefield
nukes if Russian territorial integrity was threatened. Stunned commentators were aghast
at the threat and everybody had a flashback to the bad old days of
the Cold War when atomic Armageddon seemed just around the corner. None were more deeply affected than aging
Baby Boomers like me who grew up under what I have called “the inevitable
umbra of the mushroom cloud.”
Luckily,
President Joe Biden and other members of the nuclear club did not
take Putin’s bait. They did not place
our enormous, planet killing nuclear forces on a matching alert
in which a miscalculation or mistake on either side could launch
an unstoppable catastrophe. After
a few days hand-wringing over the threat subsided and most experts decided that
even Putin was not crazy enough to pull the trigger.
But
now almost six weeks into the invasion with Russian forces disastrously
routed around Kyiv and a massive new offensive in the east
despite stubborn resistance, Russian military analysts are
reminding the Western press that the use of battlefield nukes has always
been part of Russia’s ground war doctrine and that chemical weapons although
banned by international law were “used effectively” in Syria. In fact, the new Russian commander was
known as the Butcher of Syria for his relentless attacks on civilian
populations including gas and possible biological attacks.
Given
that background Portside, an on-line
journal of “material of interest to people on the Left,”
thought that a memoir poem by Joe Rossi about growing up
under nuclear threat was an important reminder.
Like
Rossi I remembered 1955 bomb tests in the Nevada desert. Thanks to the new television set in
the living room of my family’s Cheyenne, Wyoming home, the
photos in Mom’s Life magazine, and whispered
conversations between my parents, I was fully aware of what was
going on. I was only six years old but
still had dreams of mushroom clouds.
The dread would only become worse in a few years when Francis
E. Warren Airforce Base was selected at the site of America’s
first operational Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) base. Folks in Cheyenne even bragged about
being a Top Ten Target for obliteration in a Soviet attack. The trajectory of my life as an anti-war
activist was set in motion by the lingering terror.
Lee
Rossi was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied 5 years for the Roman
Catholic priesthood before leaving the seminary and devoting himself
to the study of failure. He draws inspiration from poets
living and dead. He is the author
of three books of poetry and has appeared in numerous anthologies. His
poems, reviews, and essays have been published in journals
throughout the country, including The Harvard Review, Poetry
Northwest, The North American Review, Main Street
Rag, Tar River Poetry, The Spoon River Poetry
Review, The Southeast Review, The Atlanta Review,
The Green Mountains Review, The Sun, Poetry
East, Chelsea, The Wormwood Review, Nimrod,
the Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, Pedestal,
The Southern Poetry Review, and The Southern Indiana Review.
He is a winner of the Sense of Site poetry contest
sponsored by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. From 1986 to
1992, he edited Tsunami, a journal of contemporary
poetry based in Los Angeles. He is currently Staff Reviewer and Interviewer
for Pedestal, an on-line magazine based in North Carolina.
Rossi’s poetry collections include Ghost Diary in 2003, Wheelchair
Samurai in 2010, and Darwin's Garden in 2019 from which
today’s featured poem was taken.
1955 (12 Miles
from Ground Zero)
We didn’t have much education,
eight grades for mom and dad,
even fewer for me, but we read
all the time, the daily Globe,
Time and U.S. News, every week
another article on the nuclear threat.
With Russia only thirty minutes
over the horizon, we’d have almost
no warning before fifty megatons
vaporized downtown,
and with downtown only 12 miles
away, who knew if we’d be vapor
too. I knew, of course, having studied
the diagrams, downtown the center
of the target, concentric rings spread-
ing out into the city and suburbs,
the houses, parks, grass and trees,
the animals and pets, the schools
filled with thoughtful children.
We’d survive, I decided, radio-
active perhaps, glowing with
a plutonium tan, but only if the Russians
could hit what they were aiming at.
In the meantime, I checked our fruit cellar,
the jars of pickles and peach preserves,
rank on rank, what we had to eat
and drink after the firestorm.
—Lee Rossi
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