Billions will die; a few breeding-capable humans will live in the Arctic

Apocalyptic talk about global warming has stirred the sediment of old fears - the mushroom cloud has returned to haunt us. But, Thornton McCamish writes, the last great fright was a little different from the new one.

LAST year felt a bit like Armageddon all over again. It began on TV. Jericho was first: the sinister snickering of geiger-counters, the ICMBs flaming across the American evening sky. Then came Heroes, in which one of the characters, who can paint prophetic images, starts depicting New York under nuclear attack. On the latest 24, the terrorists upgraded to A-bombs.

It spread to literature. One of last year's most celebrated novels, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, is an awesomely bleak epic set in the ashen aftermath of what seems to be a nuclear war.

The Bomb was back, like the ghost at a banquet of anxiety. And it wasn't just explicit imagery that evoked nukes. It was all the stuff about the world ending. From Al Gore to the International Panel on Climate Change, everyone had grim news for the planet.

At the leading edge of climate pessimism, the prognoses were frankly apocalyptic. "Before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic," predicted James Lovelock, a renowned environmental scientist.

In his book The Weather Makers, Tim Flannery puts aside his essential optimism for long enough to write: "If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilisation due to climate change becomes inevitable."

We shouldn't be surprised that when planetary destruction is on the mind, we start seeing nukes again. Climate change has stirred the lees of old fears.

It makes sense that the mushroom cloud, the great spectre of the 20th century, would return to spook the 21st. Bill McKibben, author of a foundation text of the climate change era, The End of Nature (1990), explicitly links the last great fright to the new one. Climate change is "the single biggest challenge facing the planet, the equal in every way to the nuclear threat that transfixed us during the past half-century", he wrote last year.

Some don't buy any of this "climate porn", as a UK think tank recently described such talk. Al Gore's movie is "bullshit from beginning to end", according to Ray Evans, a former Western Mining executive and author of the Lavoisier Group's Nine Facts About Climate Change (2006). For Evans and many others, man-made climate change panic is a bugaboo, perhaps even a hoax.

Either way, the debate over climate change is now about fear. How afraid should we be? It's a valid question, because a sensible reaction to any threat begins with fear. Fear can help propel us towards solutions, as it did in the case of ozone-depleting CFCs. But we don't want to respond to a threat with asymmetric alarm.

Unfortunately, allowing the old threat of nuclear war to haunt our anxiety about climate change is not going to help, for the simple reason that the nuclear holocaust never happened. This happy fact tends to foster a blithe optimism about the past: look — nuclear doomsday was a beat-up! This is false logic, of course. The fact that we survived the nuclear threat doesn't mean it was always inevitable that we would. But people believe it, nonetheless, and you can see why they'd want to.

This is the age of dire prophecy, after all. If it's not melting icecaps, it's a terrorist mega-strike, an avian flu pandemic or collision with a titanic near-Earth object. Yet you look up from your paper and there are the family photos, still on the shelf; outside the sun's still coming up, the fridge still hums. We haven't had any of these catastrophes yet, so there's not much point getting worked up about the next one. For those in the ostrich position, the pairing of nuclear apocalypse and climate change risks by a climate Cassandra like McKibben is therefore more reassuring than anything. In 1999 I saw an article on the Y2K bug by an American columnist, Charles Krauthammer, in which the author scoffed at the "efflorescence of millennial panic" triggered by the escalation of the nuclear arms race in the 1980s.

Pondering the relative calm on the eve of the millennium, he suggested that every generation has only one millennial panic in it, and with nuclear hysteria we'd "already shot our wad".

Apart from sounding weirdly like nuclear porn, this is just too breezy. It's an error of tone, as much as anything; it denies the sheer horror of atomic weapons. So do most of the TV shows currently featuring nukes.

Jericho is entertainment, of course, not science. Even so, the producers only make a token stab at capturing the fantastic destructiveness of nuclear war. In this end-of-the-world soap opera, the bombs just provide the (radioactive) atmosphere for the standard small-town dramas.

TO COMPARE the threat of climate change with the threat of nuclear war is to make a category error. The nuclear threat was unique. We never formed a proportionate fear response to nuclear weapons, because no level of fear was equal to the sickening intensity of the threat. This is the second reason why our reaction to the Bomb shouldn't guide us on our climate change anxiety: fear didn't get us anywhere.

Which isn't to say that it wasn't everywhere. Most people over 30 can probably remember the moment when they first intuited the full meaning of atomic war. "I know exactly what happened to me," Martin Amis wrote in his memoir, Experience. "When I was a child, my form-master regularly told me to get down on the floor and hope that my desk lid would protect me from the end of the world; I sensed violence and absurdity that lay beyond contemplation, and I expelled it from my conscious mind."

My nuclear awakening also came at school. In year 8 English, my teacher was Mr Grey, an intriguingly out-of-place Englishman who had the richest speaking voice I've ever heard. One day in 1984, he lined us up at the window and urged us to focus on the tip of the post office tower in Shepparton, eight kilometres away across the flat paddocks, and to imagine an atomic bomb detonating directly over it, the mushroom, the supernova heat. We might, he said, with leering relish, "have just enough time to see our skin falling off our bodies before our eyes melted and ran down our cheeks".

This was mild as far as Cold War trauma goes. Compare the experience of the six-year-old New Yorker, described in Joanna Bourke's book, Fear: A Cultural History, who in 1951 told a classroom visitor that she had to wear an ID tag "so that people will know who I am if my face is burned away".

I think Mr Grey just wanted to shake up our adolescent complacency. He certainly had our attention. If anything, I was grateful for the heads-up.

As I was to learn, most grown-ups were vague about the end of the world. "To contemplate the threat of nuclear war requires an act of the imagination which is difficult, if not impossible, for most adults," concluded The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, published by the US Institute of Medicine in 1986. "It requires young people to venture into an unknown and uncertain territory, into which many of the adults around them will not travel."

It's probably true that the threat of nuclear war transfixed certain types more than others: survivalists, the paranoid, the over-imaginative, nerds, young people. In 1984, I was at least three of those things. I immersed myself in apocalypse primers such as Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth. "It may be only by descending into this hell in imagination now that we can hope to escape descending into it in reality at some later time," was Schell's view, and I agreed.

There was plenty of data around to help shape the dread. I remember going to Melbourne to see The Day After, an American telemovie released here in cinemas. At least 200 million people saw this film. When it was shown on TV in the US, Krauthammer notes in his Y2K piece, it traumatised so many children that therapists were dispatched to schools around the country to deal with the panic. Me, I just stumbled out into grey Russell Street afternoon, numb and appalled.

Yet anyone could see that The Day After painted too sunny a picture, what with all that optimistic rebuilding at the end. Nuclear war didn't mean that 100 million people would be destroyed; it meant that the entire globe would be stripped of life several times over. Back then, the long, extraordinary story of humankind was going to end in a fatalistic auto da fe. Reagan kept saying so. Sixty Minutes kept saying so. The doomsday clock said so.

The closest to midnight the doomsday clock has ever come was two minutes. That was 1953, when the USSR tested a hydrogen bomb. In hindsight, that was probably a beginner's overreaction to the sheer novelty of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Like everyone else, the clock soon became accustomed to the status quo. Over the next couple of decades, doomsday eased out to nine and even 11 minutes to midnight.

In 1984, the grim folk at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whose job it is to set the clock's hands, wound the minute hand in to three minutes to 12.

I remember using a fallout chart from the weekend paper to assess our survival chances in Victoria's north-east. I studied the grey, toxic circles rippling from the blast epicentre. Southerly winds would mean the end; persistent northerlies would give us time to start digging.

It was sometime around then that my father suggested we could have our two underground water tanks lined with lead for use as bomb shelters. Now I realise he was probably joking. At the time, I gave the idea a lot of thought. The tanks had been drained not long before, so I knew they had slimy walls and that there were dead grey frogs among the sodden leaves at the bottom. Still. End of the world and everything.

Clearly, the Russians weren't going to leave the blackened planet to the mercy of a capitalist city the size of Melbourne. No, all traces of the other side, even the bit-players huddled under America's umbrella, had to go. (I didn't know it then, but the US State Department agreed with my assessment. In a scenario prepared in the mid-1980s, the department's strategic wonks predicted that in a full atomic doozy, Australia would be the unwitting addressee of 12 Russian warheads.)

Shepparton wasn't a guaranteed haven either, thanks to its Radio Australia facility. In 1986, the International Year of Peace, the city's junior council actually debated whether or not Radio Australia would have put Shep on the Kremlin's map of the apocalypse.

Other kids didn't waste time debating. Alarmed by a children's book on nuclear Armageddon, one friend dropped the idea of building a cubby house and got to work on a bomb shelter instead. He dug a hole, lined it with concrete bricks and then stocked it with water and tinned food. It was built to last, and it's still there. Another friend remembers deciding, during a particularly tense Cold War moment, that if things got any worse he would ask his 13-year-old girlfriend if she wanted to go to second, third or even fourth base, given that there wasn't much time left. He was enormously relieved when the superpower tension eased, since the idea of fourth base unnerved him almost as much as global annihilation.

But then, for obvious reasons, the years of MADness weren't renowned for clear thinking. Carl Jung believed that the epidemic of UFO sightings that began after World War II were related to the spectre of atomic war.

Simple avoidance was the main symptom, though. "Most people go on living their everyday life," Einstein wrote in The Menace of Mass Destruction (1947). Half-frightened, half-indifferent, they behold the ghastly tragi-comedy that is being performed on the international stage.

Most, but not all. Millions of people around the world fiercely resisted the nuclear reality, protesting and campaigning. But their morality and heroism made no difference to the bombs.

My wife, who is the same age as me, never really noticed nuclear weapons. I was astonished when I learnt recently that she didn't realise that the USSR had not only been in-principle willing to nuke Melbourne in the mid-1980s, but perfectly capable of it as well. Oh yes, my love. Let me sing you a song of the SS-19 Stiletto ICBM, which could have done the job: 10,000-kilometre range, 6 x 550-kilotonne warhead.

Today, should the desire to eliminate all Western states arise again in Moscow, the task would fall to the SS-27 Topol M, though someone would probably have to rifle through a few desk drawers before they found the right red button.

My wife's admission struck me as a dereliction of her duty to fear. Yet the fear I'd nursed and stoked with facts never did any good. Until recently, I'd pretty much forgotten all about it myself. The strangest thing about watching Armageddon-lite in Jericho was how much like an old bad dream it seemed. Where did it all go, that awesome reality? The bombs themselves didn't go anywhere. The superpowers had 50,000 warheads in 1980; today they still have around 20,000. Only a year ago, nearly half of the facilities in the former USSR containing weapons-ready nuclear material still weren't secure.

THIS is just one of the more literal, non-fiction reasons why atomic nervousness returned last year. North Korea and Iran made proliferation news again. We discovered, too late, that A. Q. Khan, father of Pakistan's nuclear program, had spent the 1990s wandering the globe peddling enrichment technology from his briefcase, like some travelling salesman of megadeath.

In his new book Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, American writer Joseph Cirincione argues that if the non-proliferation regime falls apart it could bring the world back to the brink of annihilation for the first time in 20 years. The doomsday clock, incidentally, was reset in January: the big hand was brought in from seven to five minutes to midnight.

Proliferation is scary. For the first time the world is at the mercy of leaders with pre-modern beliefs armed with postmodern weapons. But nonproliferation is susceptible to diplomacy and mass opinion in a way that MAD's geopolitical suicide pact never was.

And so is climate change. Nuclear weapons just got more meaningless the closer you looked at them. But the risks of climate change related to human activity will only become clearer, despite attempts to muddy the science.

The ambient fear those dangers produce is real, but it's not mind-emptying. It's actually a humane and energising anxiety. The risk of disastrous climate change makes us worry not just for ourselves, but for others; for animals and plants, too. What's really cheering about climate change anxiety is that it's about the deep future, a place the Bomb managed to obliterate without a single missile leaving its silo. This time, our fear means something because we can act on it.