Good News for the Practicing Paranoid

The greatest enemy to man is man.--Robert Burton, "The Anatomy of Melancholy"

Don't let it bother you.--Fats Waller

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are no longer Famine, War, Pestilence and Death. They have become Exhaustion of Resources, Holocaust, Genetic Mutation and Poisoning of the Environment. Exhaustion of Resources is a gaunt specter. Holocaust is as plump as the head of a nuclear cloud. Genetic Mutation looks like a cubist painting of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Poisoning of the Environment is a shrouded figure whose cowl hides a skull.

The first two Horsemen are familiar fiends who have stalked the planet for years, though Holocaust can wear many disguises--for example, Sabotage and Terrorism. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, there were 128 threats to nuclear facilities, 14 security breaches, 117 cases of vandalism and sabotage and 11 attacks between 1966 and 1976. Not long ago, the United States Energy Research and Development Administration (now the Department of Energy) reported that the Government had lost over 8000 pounds of plutonium and enriched uranium, enough to make 500 bombs, each with the blast power of the one dropped on Hiroshima. Since both Princeton and Harvard students have independently demonstrated how anyone can build a nuclear bomb (the Princeton bomb costs only about $2000, plus plutonium), some of those 500 bombs--if the nuclear material has reached the wrong hands--could be a terrorist group's trump.

The third Horseman, Genetic Mutation, spends much of its time prowling universities that have sponsored recombinant-DNA research, genetic mix-and-match experiments that could lead to the creation of new forms of life. The scientific community is divided over whether or not such work could loose an Andromeda Strain on the world, but the possibility is great enough for the National Institutes of Health in 1976 to have issued a set of rules governing genetic engineering--even though, at that time, 17 drug and chemical companies said they would rather not comply with those rules. They wanted to keep their work secret, patent the results and make profits. Recently, the Government's rules have--incredibly--been relaxed. The restrictions no longer cover one third of the kinds of experiments previously included under the guidelines.

Even if scientists don't create bacterial Frankenstein monsters, radioactivity from fallout, from nuclear material both at power plants and in transit (in 1975 alone, there were 2,500,000 shipments of radioactive substances within the United States, a third of which were exempt from standard safety regulations; more recently, four casks of weapons-grade uranium with broken seals passed through Kennedy Airport in New York) and from accidents (radioactive wastes have polluted the drinking water of a number of Colorado towns) may have already slipped enough jokers into the gene pool to haunt us for generations to come. By then, however, female space pioneers may be giving birth to freakish children who were conceived and brought to term in unearthly environments--a problem Dr. Neal Bricker of the University of Miami was asked to study by NASA.

The fourth Horseman, Poisoning of the Environment, is the most pervasive horror of all, a Mephistopheles who offers us dreams and gives us nightmares. Yes, this monster says, you can have preserved meats, but you may get cancer from the nitrates used for preservative. You can use antibiotics to promote the growth of cattle, increasing the world's meat supply, but you'll create antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can cause untreatable diseases. You can use fire-retardant foam for insulation, hoping to escape immolation, but the fumes of the heated foam may give you seizures or kill you. You can eat saccharine so you won't get fat, but you may get bladder cancer. Your aspirin will cure headaches, but it may cause internal bleeding. Your paint remover makes redecorating a cinch, but one kind may give you a heart attack and the other kind might cause leukemia. Estrogen in birth-control pills may keep a woman from having unwanted kids, but after 40 its residual effects may cause cancer of the lining of the womb. Progestins may stem abnormal vaginal bleeding in women, but if pregnant women take them, they may cause heart defects or deformed limbs in their children. Plastic soda bottles are convenient, but they may cause liver cancer. Hexachlorophene kills bacteria but may lead to brain damage. Chloroform makes tooth paste taste good but can cause cancer. You can have air conditioners, but the aluminum particles from the corroded metal that may be spewed out can leave you gasping for breath. You can style your hair with a drier, but the asbestos particles from the insulation liners that some blow into the air may give you cancer. You can control your pest problems on farms with mercury, vinyl chloride and dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, but mercury can twist your hands into claws and cause paralysis and blindness, vinyl chloride can cause stillbirths and miscarriages and dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (the use of which is at a world-wide high) is poisoning our streams, our rivers, our oceans, and even nursing mothers' milk, which is also tainted by polybrominated biphenyl.

DDT, PBB, DMCC, CMME, PPB, TCDD, PCB, DES, DDVP, PVB, TDI-- an alphabet of death. We are like ancient Celts carving mysterious runes, not on stones and trees but on chains of molecules. We are arrogant magicians who conjure up chemical demons we can't control. When the U. S. Department of Agriculture decided to solve the fire-ant problem in the South, it found the perfect anti-fire-ant agent, Mirex, which since 1962 has been used to destroy the pests. In spring 1975, the USDA sprayed the insecticide over 6,000,000 of the 133,000,000 infested acres in Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and Arkansas. The Mirex controlled the increase of fire ants (which do not significantly hurt crops); but the chemical lodged in at least 25 percent of the population living in the sprayed areas. Since Mirex may be a cancer-causing toxin and since two to five percent of it in time turns into Kepone (a roach killer that is poisoning fish and people from Chesapeake Bay to Sheepshead Bay), the USDA may have traded a fire-ant sting, equivalent to that of a bee, for cancer, paralysis and death for people in four states.

No, we're not arrogant magicians, after all; we're still at the level of the sorcerer's apprentice, fumbling our spells and creating havoc. But no sorcerer will return to cancel the clumsy charms and rescue us. We are trapped in a world out of control. We eat margarine to avoid the cholesterol and saturated fatty acids found in butter, which may cause hardening of the arteries and heart disease; but margarine, according to a University of Illinois chemist, may do more damage to the arteries than butter. We're the buffoons of fate, the fools of our own cleverness.

One of our common anesthetics, halo-thane, not only may cause liver damage in patients but may create behavioral and learning problems in doctors, nurses and anesthesiologists who use the stuff, a comforting thought for the operating room. We replace the carcinogenic Red Dye Number Two with Red Dye Number 40--which also may be carcinogenic. To avoid flies and mosquito bites, we might risk genetic damage by hanging toxic insect-killing strips in our homes. We're spewing so much lead into the environment that the number of children in the U. S. suffering from lead poisoning increased in one year (from 1974 to 1975) by 76.2 percent. Last December, the EPA announced that our country was blighted with about 32,254 chemical dumps that could become health hazards.

There are at least 150 cancer-causing chemicals contaminating factories and offices in our country. The Labor Department has proposed a 90-decibel standard for noise in workplaces, which means half the workers subjected may suffer hearing loss. And low-frequency vibrations, particularly five cycles per second, produced by many machines (including trucks) may cause circulatory, digestive, respiratory and muscular problems in workers. A 1977 Government study claimed that one out of every four Americans who work is exposed to disease or death-causing substances. But we have made our Faustian bargain. We are an industrial nation with one of the highest standards of living in the history of the world. And, anyway, the situation can't be that bad; the people in charge wouldn't let things get out of control. Would they?

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Shortly after the Second World War, a friend of my father's, a science teacher at a local high school, started cutting a bomb shelter out of a granite hill next to his house. When he finished, he invited my family over to inspect his work. We climbed on top of the hill and squinted down the air shaft. We slithered down the side of the hill and edged into the narrow corridor that led to a cold, damp chamber the size of a closet--the room where his family would huddle, their portable radio tuned to the civil-defense station, while the world above them exploded and burned.

I was 11 and a child of the times--that is to say, a paranoid. Once a day, at school, my classmates and I got on our knees and bowed our heads under our desks as though in prayer--our civildefense drill--while our teacher recited the nuclear catechism:

What's the first sign?

Short blasts on the warning siren.

What do you do?

Crouch under the desk and put your hands over your head.

Where do you look?

Away from the windows.

Why?

So you won't be blinded by the flash of light before the explosion.

How long do you stay under the desk?

About five minutes--until the all-clear signal.

Like natives in an afternoon television movie praying to a volcano not to erupt, we prayed to the bomb not to fall. But, if it did, I knew all about radiation. Radiation was more dangerous than the bomb blast and the fire storm that followed. Radiation--I knew this from movies--might cause ants to grow to be the size of airplanes or might thaw the ice block inside of which a prehistoric monster slumbered. Radiation, like poison, could make you very sick. To be prepared, I clipped and carried in my wallet the section on radiation from the civil-defense pamphlet our teacher had given us to take home to our parents, which recommended the following to those exposed to radiation: rest, aspirin for headache, Dramamine for nausea, water, and table salt for sore gums. I may have been young, but I wasn't stupid. They were treating radiation sickness like a cold. I knew it was worse. But our teacher, our local civil-defense sibyl, priestess of our atomic coven, dismissed my distrust.

"They know what they're doing," she said.

"They know what they're doing" alternated with "There's nothing to worry about" and "That's just your imagination"--magic phrases adults used to quiet my childhood fears. After seeing a production of The Skin of Our Teeth, I became obsessed with the inevitability of a new ice age. On winter nights in Massachusetts, when I saw the northern lights flickering up from the rim of the horizon, I was sure they were reflections from a gigantic glacier that was working its way down from the Arctic Circle.

When I warned my parents, they said, "There will never be another ice age. There's nothing to worry about."

Having watched the Pods take over everyone but Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I became convinced that aliens were lurking somewhere out beyond the moon's orbit. I started clipping newspaper items that reported UFO sightings and started reading books by George Adamski who continued on page 160) Good News (continued from page 132) claimed to have ridden in a flying saucer) and Gray Barker (whose book They Knew Too Much ... told what happened to saucer investigators who got too close to the truth).

I became a suppertime Jeremiah, raving about space people and flying saucers and the possible danger to earth they posed. I rattled off the probable number of planets in the universe that could support life. I went over the experiences of unimpeachable witnesses to saucer landings: state patrolmen, small-town mayors, Air Force officers. I constructed foolproof logical traps as though I thought I could capture an alien by luring it into the dining room with arguments proving the existence of UFOs.

My parents, unimpressed, said, "Flying saucers don't exist. That's just your imagination. When you grow up, you'll see we're right."

Well, 22 years have passed. I'm now 33--more or less grown up. A couple of years ago, I picked up The New York Times and found a two-column headline: "Astronomer Fears Hostile Attack; Would Keep Life on Earth a Secret." Britain's Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Ryle, a Nobel laureate in physics, had issued an appeal to radio astronomers, asking them not to try to communicate with extraterrestrials, because, if anyone were out there, they might decide to discover us the way Europeans discovered the American Indians.

Within a week of running across the article on Sir Martin, I found an item in the paper about Dr. James D. Hays of Columbia University, who (according to the Times) said that it may be possible to predict the next ice age. In fact, the earth has already begun cooling down and "this cooling trend should continue for on the order of 20,000 years. In that length of time, I think there is not much doubt that we will build substantial ice on the Northern Hemisphere continents."

That still leaves us plenty of time to get the thermal underwear out of storage, but an article published in Science News around the time I saw the items on Sir Martin and Dr. Hays took an even gloomier view. Not only may the earth be at the end of an interglacial cycle, "with the approach of a full-blown 10,000-year ice age a real possibility," but this change "can be rather sudden--a matter of centuries--with ice packs building up relatively quickly from local snow-fall that ceases to melt from winter to winter." A spokesman from the National Center for Atmospheric Research not long ago suggested that Ice Age climates could start within 100 years.

But a true connoisseur of angst doesn't need a major ice age. Even a little ice age, like the one that chilled the Northern Hemisphere from the early 1400s to the mid-1800s, could disrupt agriculture enough to create massive famines, plagues, wars to control fertile land and a world-wide depression that would make what happened in the Thirties look like a gentle slump in the economy.

A report published a few years ago by the CIA warned that climate changes soon will create serious agricultural problems in China, Canada, the U.S.S.R. and India. It predicts India will have a severe drought every four years. The report has been frequently criticized--no one believes the weatherman--but few scientists argue that Europe recently suffered the worst dry spell in 500 years. Crops withered. Forest fires broke out all over the continent. Thousands of people suffered heat strokes. (One British bus driver, addled by the suffocating weather, hallucinated Jesus and distributed the fares he'd collected to his passengers.) The three decades from 1930 to 1960 were the best years for farming in a millennium. Deserts are now spreading at a rate of 14,000,000 acres a year.

While new climate conditions produce skimpier and skimpier harvests, the increase in the world's population creates a growing demand for food. (In about 40 years, there may be twice as many people on earth as there are now.) Over 450,000,000 people are currently starving to death on this planet, and it's been estimated that by the year 2000, another 500,000,000 children in developing nations will die of malnutrition and related diseases.

Instead of mobilizing to meet this crisis, the industrial nations act like cartoon characters ripping up the hull of their boat to feed the boat's furnace. In our country (which is one of the greatest food exporters, producing half of the world's corn and two thirds of the world's soybean supply), we are building on or paving over nearly 600,000 acres of farmland a year. Even if we were reclaiming that much fertile soil instead of losing it, crop yields would still be reduced, not only by the natural climate change but by a man-made chill. Dust, puffed into the air by farming and construction machinery, and sulphur compounds released into the atmosphere when coal and oil are burned, reflect sunlight back into space. In heavily polluted areas, like the Northeast of the United States, perhaps as much as 50 percent of the sunlight that enters the atmosphere is lost. The chill above smoggy cities seeps over the hemisphere and eventually all over the world. In a little over a quarter of a century, the earth's temperature has cooled 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Civilization is about to hit a patch of ice that will send it skidding uncontrolled into the future.

UFOs, ice ages and, of course, nuclear radiation (which the Chinese generously sent us twice in the fall of 1976); all my childhood terrors have stalked me for the past two decades and, hidden around some corner in my present, have waited--apocalyptic flashers--to surprise me.

"They know what they're doing."

"There's nothing to worry about."

"That's just your imagination."

There's small consolation in saying "I told you so."

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Consolation, however, comes to the practicing paranoid in the apparent limitless supply of things to worry about. Every newspaper is a Pandora's box waiting to discharge its dreadful load. A true virtuoso of foreboding can (like Caesar trisecting Gaul) divide the modern map of horrors into three territories: natural (like ice ages), unnatural (like UFOs) and man-made (like radiation).

Radiation has always been my favorite. It's a Lucifer among terrors, a fallen, glowing angel. Nuclear power was, after all, supposed to bring mankind such wonderful benefits. But, as though under some Midas curse, everything it touches is poisoned. Nuclear power is to us what sex was to the Elizabethans. The Elizabethans believed that every orgasm shortened a man's life by a day, but they couldn't keep from screwing. We believe that radiation can destroy life (I suspect we are more correct than the Elizabethans were), but we continue to build reactors and bombs and to store radioactive wastes that have lifetimes of tens of thousands (in some cases hundreds of thousands) of years in containers that are liable to corrode and crack in about four decades.

At the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington, where over 50,000,000 gallons of nuclear waste are stored, at least ten of the 140 tanks have leaks, and one tank has spilled over 100,000 gallons of radioactive material into the soil. The Hanford reactor itself had to be shut down a few years ago when it accidentally drained radioactive water into the Columbia River.

Leaks and discharges are not uncommon. In Connecticut, Colorado and, more recently--and more seriously--in Pennsylvania at Three Mile Island, nuclear plants have sprayed radioactive mist into the air. In Kentucky, Vermont and New York, nuclear power plants have spewed wastes into water tables and rivers. In fact, the cesium 137 and cobalt 60 that Columbia University geologists found concentrated (in some places 100 times above normal) in the Hudson River were evidently discharged from the Indian Point nuclear power station as part of the normal functioning of the plant. Scientists had assumed that the current would carry the wastes out to sea. They were wrong.

High levels of plutonium waste have been found in what had previously been considered uncontaminated areas of the Pacific Ocean, and in another part of the Pacific, giant sponges have been discovered feeding on radioactive wastes that are seeping from cracked tanks. While it's a relief to know radiation won't kill all life on earth, it's discouraging to think that the planet will be inherited by creatures whose skeletons humans use to scrub their backs.

Detroit was almost vaporized when a nuclear plant there had a partial core meltdown. (The words are not as ominous as the reality they signify: Meltdown sounds no more tragic than the loss of a snowman on a sunny day. Nuclear technocrats hide grisly facts behind rouged and powdered phrases as though it were the language that needed to be decontaminated, not the nuclear wastes.) In March 1975, an electrician held a lit candle to an electrical cable in the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant to check for an air leak. The candle flame ignited the cable's insulation. The fire spread through the cable to the electrical control room and, through the electrical control room, to the room housing the reactor. Both the main and the backup smoke-detection systems failed, and workers tried to smother the fire with dry chemicals, which only fed the flames.

Our tragedies insist on becoming farces. We live like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, in a house that is teetering on the edge of an abyss--except we are even deprived of Chaplin's dignity. We have Moe, Larry and Curly guarding our safety (trying to douse a fire at a nuclear power plant with chemicals that burn). In what could be the last days of our lives (there are 70 nuclear plants operating in the United States, an average of more than one catastrophe per state, and some 200 more plants planned for the near future), we can't even take noble poses, standing as heroic as Hugo in exile, our faces turned toward the apocalypse, our hair streaming in the radioactive wind, because the people in charge of safety at nuclear plants are--um--less than candid with us.

Seven fires that broke out at the Browns Ferry plant since the March 1975 blaze were not reported. They were discovered only when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (formerly known as the Atomic Energy Commission) investigated a rumor that, well before March 1975, its own staff members had warned of the clanger of fire at the Browns Ferry plant and had been ignored.

A few years ago, three General Electric engineers and two Nuclear Regulatory Commission engineers quit their jobs to protest inadequate safety standards in the nuclear-energy industry; and one of the two NRC engineers, Ronald M. Fluegge, charged that not only was the commission covering up potentially disastrous malfunctions at the Indian Point plant (which is only 30 miles north of New York City) but there were at least 28 cases in which pressure in reactors had been allowed to build higher than NRC standards allow. Around that time, Jack Anderson said that 11 other NRC engineers and scientists claimed that the nuclear-power industry was forcing the NRC to accept designs that "don't meet even the commission's own dubious safety regulations."

But we are told the nuclear-power industry knows what it's doing; there's nothing to worry about; any dangers we think exist are just our imagination. A report published by the AEC a few years ago (the Rasmussen Report) fixed the odds of a serious accident in a nuclear power plant at one in 20,000 per plant per year. Critics of the report have pointed out that that means with 100 plants in operation, a major accident could happen somewhere once every 200 years. In 40 years, when there might be 1000 nuclear power plants in operation, a major accident could happen once every 20 years. (In 40 years, scientists may have developed new safety devices and perhaps the safety devices may even be in use, though given the charges of the NRC dissidents and the reality of human and design error at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania, we can't count on that. Still, no matter how accidentproof the reactors are, there will be other Moes, Larrys and Curlys around ready to light candles in order to check electrical cables, and to fight fire with fuel.)

Thinking about nuclear energy is like living in a skewed room in an amusement-park fun house. Perspectives are subtly altered, surfaces are slightly slanted, angles are a little awry. If you try to stand upright, you'll go tilting across the floor. To function, you've got to accept the craziness. The fact is--at least until we've developed adequate systems of solar, tidal, wind or geothermal energy--we need nuclear power. Our known supply of oil and gas will give out about the turn of the century. About 100 years after that, if our energy demands continue to increase at their current rate, our coal will be exhausted. By then, we'll also be short on or out of aluminum, iron, chromite, cobalt, manganese, copper, nickel, gold and tin.

In another 100 to 150 years, the waste heat from all the burning fuels--this is our one chance against the glaciers--may have begun melting the world's icecaps. Of course, we might cook ourselves or--through a rise in ocean levels from melting ice--swamp our coastal cities long before that. By the year 2000, we will have pumped enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to raise the planet's temperature by half a degree. (A major ice age involves a lowering of the earth's temperature by only two or three degrees; a corresponding rise in temperature could be catastrophic.) Oil spilled on ice increases the ability of ice to absorb sunlight by over 90 percent. One split supertanker and the affected ice cover will melt like an Eskimo Pie in an oven; an oil-rig blowout off Alaska's coast might melt enough arctic ice to put Chris-Craft into the ark-building business.

Civilization, of course, has been pouring oil onto untroubled waters for years--about 6,100,000 tons every year, to be exact, mostly sluiced from crippled tankers. If for every major oil slick you were to draw a black blot on a map of the world's oceans, it would look as if the seas had contracted a kind of liquid leprosy, with dozens of dead spots blotching the globe from the Strait of Magellan (where oil from a 1974 spill will foul beaches for at least another decade) to a 55-mile strip off the New Jersey coast line that sometime during the past ten years quietly died. Divers who recently examined the sea bottom along that area found dead fish, dead mussels, dead starfish, dead anemones ... everything dead, the corpses settled on a petroleum goop that covered the sand. Half a dozen years ago. scientists at Cape Cod's Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution figured that more oil floated in the seas than photo-synthetic plants. Since most of the oxygen we breathe is produced by marine photo-synthetic plants, we may already have our thumbs on the global windpipe.

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But we may be about to suffocate ourselves more quickly than that. A few years ago, an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists suggested that "an atomic weapon might ignite a thermonuclear reaction in the atmosphere." Those who escaped the fire storm would be left flopping on the floors of their shelters, gasping for the burned-up oxygen.

Over 30 years ago, before the first atomic-bomb test, scientists at Los Alamos made bets on whether or not the (continued on page 226) Good News (continued from page 162) atmosphere would ignite. It didn't. But just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it won't.

The bomb is a security blanket for the paranoid, a familiar terror. We who have grown up in the post--World War Two years have always had it to curl up with at night. There is something attractive about the prospect of a nuclear holocaust. Photographs of A- and H-bomb blasts are beautiful: The clouds are as shapely as Romanesque arches; the light is as uncanny as the halos around saints' heads in illuminated manuscripts. When we detonate a nuclear bomb, we are once more proving ourselves to be children of Adam, both fearful and proud of our acquisition of knowledge. Destroying the world, in a way, is a triumph of humanism: We are incontrovertibly proving humankind's mastery of and control over the elements; we are saying, we not only can understand nature and, by understanding, control it, we also can defeat nature--which the rebellious Adam in us interprets as defeating the architect of nature, God. Mano a mano with Divinity. We may not be able to win such a cosmic arm wrestle honestly, but we can blow up the room in which the struggle takes place. Even a Pyrrhic victory is a victory.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, our flirtation with the holocaust is turning serious. We will soon go all the way. Not too long ago, they predicted that within a decade, about 35 countries will have joined the nuclear club. Nuclear war, says the S.I.P.R.I., is probably inevitable.

The war will be launched, most likely, when one nation feels it has a first-strike capability or an effective civil-defense program. A little nation with a couple of nuclear warheads cannot carry its weight in the balance of power. If a superpower is pushed too far by one of those small states with big bombs, one of those Nukettes, it may not feel the restraint imposed on it in its relations with an equally matched superpower. It may charge in all ablast.

A few casually scattered H-bombs in an out-of-the-way country may, like dragon's teeth sown in fertile soil, produce a bumper crop of battles--may, in fact, free everyone of his thermonuclear inhibitions. According to The Progressive magazine, the United States was ready to use the bomb in the Berlin blockade of 1948 (we shipped bombs in B-29s to England), in the Korean War in 1953 (Eisenhower said we would use them enough to win), in the French Vietnam war in 1954 (Dulles offered Paris one to be dropped on Chinese troops near the Indochina border and two to be dropped at Dien Bien Phu), in the Quemoy-Matsu crisis in 1958 (the Joint Chiefs said, if we wanted to face down the Chinese, we had to be willing to use the bomb), twice in 1961 (in the Laotian and Berlin crises) and, of course, in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Who knows how many times we were on the brink of using nuclear weapons during the Vietnam war, and how many times other nations were ready to risk the holocaust?

If we've avoided nuclear war so far, it's because use of the bomb has been--ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki--taboo. We are savages afraid to walk on sacred ground. But taboos can be broken, and broken taboos are as hard as Humpty Dumpty to put back together again.

Today, the United States and the other nuclear powers have 16,000 megatons' worth of nuclear weapons stockpiled. That's the equivalent of 1,230,770 Hiroshima-sized bombs. Let's see: The bomb at Hiroshima killed 78,000 people and injured 84,000 more. Multiply that by ... hmm: oh, six, carry the five, one, carry the six ... comes to 96 billion, 60,000 people killed and 103 billion, 384,680,000 wounded in an all-out nuclear war. Since there are only 4.3 billion people alive on earth, that leaves us with 91 billion, 700,060,000 spare deaths unclaimed and no one to collect the wounds. This tally doesn't even add in the effects of non-nuclear weapons: conventional armaments, lasers, ultraviolet lasers, X-ray lasers, gamma-ray lasers, chemical and biological weapons, ultrasonic weapons, neutron bombs that have small blasts and lots of fallout, RRR ("reduced residual radiation" bombs) that have large blasts and small amounts of fallout, and a new nerve gas--called a binary nerve gas--that the Carter Administration was promoting in the fall of 1978. We're such an ingenious species. Whenever I think about the holocaust, the film that runs in the screening room of my mind is not a war or science-fiction story. I think of it as a children's story, because only in fairy tales does evil exist in so unex-plainable and unredeemable a form. The bomb is the big bad wolf ready to blow all our houses down. Except, unlike a kid who can turn on the light and see that the shadowy wolf in his bedroom is really a shirt tossed over a chair, we find that the bomb is the bomb, and no matter how many lights we turn on, it won't go away.

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The growing conviction that things are out of control is a kind of creeping paralysis that feels like sodium pentothal seeping into your system, an icicle sliding up a vein; first your forearm gets cold, then your biceps, then--a cloying panic; you can't stop what's happening--your shoulder goes numb, then, just when your terror is most intense, you relax and, enjoying it, drop into oblivion.

So what if there are carcinogens in our tap water and our deodorant sprays destroy the ozone layer? So what if smog can become fatal, as it did in London in 1952, when it killed 4000? So what if carbon-monoxide levels in Las Vegas have increased for the past several years? And inhaled carbon monoxide may interfere with the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen?

So what if fluorescent light, the light in most offices, produces toxic substances when its rays hit human cells and might kill living tissue? Or if, according to recent studies by photobiologist John Ott, that light aggravates hyperactivity in children? So what if, as medical nutritionist H. L. Newbold claims, artificial light or sunlight filtered through ordinary window glass disrupts the functioning of the hypothalamus, which controls growth? So what if the electromagnetic waves from TV and radio signals, power lines, motors and microwave ovens might affect the nervous system?

We should imitate the nobles of Florence who, during the plague of 1348, shut themselves in pleasure palaces and fought the disease with ease: good food, good drink and good entertainment. Except the plague we are trying to ward off is man and man's works. No, more--it's life itself and all life contains. When humans lay waste to their world, they are only aping nature, which is constantly destroying itself. Unfortunately, we have only half the routine perfected. While nature destroys, it also renews.

Death and rebirth. Everything is transitory, and we can't stand that. We want to hang on to the moment and the sensations the moment brings. I--like you--am so in love with life, when I feel life slipping away, when I sense my mortality, I'm ready for a lover's pact, a double suicide; me and the world! That the world can continue without us enrages us, and in a secret pocket of the soul lives a madman who wants to drag the world down into the grave with him. When laced with death, even the most dreary moment seems precious. We want to cry, "Stop!" The Instant Replay may be the most characteristic expression of human desire.

But we can't reverse time, stop it and run experience again. All we can do is wander through our lives, as amiable as Krazy Kat and just as certain to get a brick in the back of the head. Or we can--like a kid who breaks his toys when he's mad--throw a tantrum and ruin our planet. We eat, and we drink, and we keep ourselves merry with the knowledge that whatever we come in contact with that wasn't harmful before, now probably is. Thinking about apocalypse can't help but raise a goose-pimple of satisfaction akin to what kids get when they plan suicides and mutter, "Now they'll be sorry." They, in this case, are all the generations who will never be born. So enjoy the plague. Pull your chair up to the crowded table and feast.

Extremely high doses of caffeine from coffee, tea or colas can cause dizziness, shakiness and chronic anxiety. Salt may lead to hypertension. Tobacco is verboten. Disco music, blaring at a typical 120 to 125 decibels, impairs hearing--and alcohol, which reduces the effectiveness of the natural mechanism protecting the ear from loud noises, is commonly consumed at discos. But you shouldn't drink wine, anyway, because some French vineyards filter their products through asbestos and, according to one study, some American wines contain four times as much arsenic as the law allows. Not only has a new penicillin-resistant gonorrhea been found in 11 states but, according to Claes Henning and Lisbeth Jakobsen of Stockholm's Sundsvaal Hospital, gonorrhea can be contracted--yes, the old wives told true tales--from toilet seats (and flush handles and doorknobs and light switches). You can get the clap without even the memory of a sweet screw to console you. Even the candle you burn at both ends--if it has a lead-wick core--may be unhealthy.

There is no escape. The world is rotten around us. Rabies in Alaska. Plague in Colorado. Legion fevers. Swine flus. Mystery viruses in Sudan and Zaïre. We're besieged by old diseases like meningitis, new diseases like Serratia endocarditis (which first appeared in 1951 in San Francisco) and nondiseases like iatrogenic disorders (illnesses caused by excessive medication that upsets the body's natural functioning).

Arson in the United States has increased over 400 percent in ten years. Nazis flourish in California. There is a suicide epidemic among teenagers, who are killing themselves at a rate of between 35,000 and 100,000 per year. Preschoolers, two to eight years old, according to The Journal of the American Medical Association, commit enough murders to be recognized as a distinct class of killers. Mental illness is on the rise. Over 60,000,000 families in America own 90,000,000 guns. Or is it 200,000,000 guns? No one knows the exact figure. But they need the guns. We live in a dangerous land. Eight hundred thousand Americans have been shot dead outside of wars since 1900. Not too long ago, one report found that, during one recent year, one of every 10,000 Americans had been murdered. For recreation, we can now go into penny arcades and play a game called Death Race, in which the player, driving an imaginary car, tries to run down imaginary pedestrians who scamper across a television screen.

Governments are increasingly repressive. Freedom House reported a couple of years ago that the score stands at Free Countries--61, Unfree Countries--71. Eighty countries, territories and dependencies are a tossup. This accounting, however, assumes that our nation is free. While we are undoubtedly freer than most, possibly among the freest, we are a country with a Central Intelligence Agency (which, in the past, has screened 28,000,000 letters and carried on a secret drug behavior-modification program and keeps 300,000 names in its computer), a National Security Agency, an Internal Revenue Service (which has dossiers on 465,000 citizens), a Federal Bureau of Investigation (which has wiretapped or bugged 10,665 times in a quarter century and has broken into hundreds of homes and offices) and dozens of local Red Squads. We've tried to assassinate foreign leaders and have destabilized governments, perhaps including our own.

To control our citizens--and many think that the danger of nuclear terrorism or sabotage makes control imperative--we have experimented in our prisons with psychosurgery (mind-control operations) and Clockwork Orange--type aversion therapy (which uses nausea-inducing drugs, clamps to keep the eyes from closing and film loops of behavior to be discouraged). We have even toyed with electrode implants in the brain that enable us to change behavior at a flick of a switch. Our synapses are seen as fifth columnists who must be conquered. Maybe an early apocalypse will be a blessing, aborting the coming horrors.

What can we do in a world that is so fouled that the Government once considered using coughing fish to measure water pollution? A world in which the rain (because of the sulphur dioxide spewed into the air) has turned acid? Can we organize committees? Write our Congressmen? Pray?

•

I once met an old man who was heralding the End of the World. A bad rash covered his face. His skin was blistered, his hair, matted, his eyes, swollen, the pouches below them soft and red like chicken livers. He was having trouble focusing. He talked about the Saving Remnant, the few good people who kept the world from being destroyed. Every generation must have 36, he said.

The Saving Remnant. A pleasant fable. I tried to joke with him. I tried to make small talk. I tried to tell him some of the facts I've mentioned here. He waited for me to finish.

I wanted, suddenly, to justify my failure in not being one of the Saving Remnant. I tried to steer myself back into the role of objective reporter, but the compulsion to explain, a mutt of conscience on a short leash, kept dragging me further in my role of confessor. I dumped my life in front of him like a desperate salesman emptying his sample case and, piece by piece, I tried to sell him my dubious past. Finally, in an ecstasy of humiliation, feeling like the worst snake-oil pitchman who ever drummed up business east of the Hudson River, I packed my life away and tried to justify my embarrassing display by using it as an example from which I would draw a moral:

"We get what we deserve."

"That's right," he said. "God's judgment."

God help us.

"Civilization is about to hit a patch of ice that will send it skidding uncontrolled into the future."

"Our flirtation with the holocaust is turning serious. We will soon go all the way."