36 THE NEW REVIEW | 01. 1 0. 17 | The Observer
Books
nevertheless, Confederates managed to
recast themselves as Christ-like victims
exalted by defeat. A mood of spiritual
defi ance accordingly prevailed among
the Confederates and Trump-voting
extremists at the Charlottesville
marches in August as they clashed
with representatives of the Y ankee
liberal north.
For all its belligerence and bluster,
Donald Trump’s threat to “totally
destroy” North Korea suggests the US
is united at least in its determination
to continue to be the guarantor of
world order and negotiate in all future
nuclear confl icts.
Should it be necessary, Trump’s
nuclear strike against “rocket
man” Kim Jong-un will ideally be a
disarming fi rst strike. In a climate of
mutual suspicion and fear, a surprise
attack is needed to land the knockout
blow. No doubt Trump could wipe out
North Korea’s capital of Pyongyang
in a day, yet in some ways the currentstand off is more serious than the
Cuban missile crisis half a century ago,
in 1962. The potential for both sides
to misjudge each other’s intentions is
signifi cantly greater. John F Kennedy,
after a military briefi ng, was able to
imagine something of the human
catastrophe that a nuclear war might
unleash. The Russian president, Nikita
Khrushchev, for his part, had survived
two world wars and understood it was
important to save lives. So, at the 11th
hour, the ballistic Armageddon was
averted through the moral sympathy of
two ideologically opposed statesmen.
It is a lesson that might have echoed
down the generations to reach parts
of Trump.
Nuclear weapons transformed
the way we think about war, saysLawrence Freedman. Such weapons
were introduced to end a war that had
undermined the Judaeo-Christian
morality of compassion for the weak
and annihilated entire innocent
peoples. A violent social Darwinism- nature as bleak survivalism –
served Hitler as justifi cation for the
extermination of European Jewry.
Man’s wilful and destructive misuse
of science brought unprecedented
mass destruction to the 1939-1945
confl ict. Not only the industrialised
killing of Treblinka and Sobibor , but
the atomic holocaust of Hiroshima and
Stalin’s technocratic Russia showed
how far man could go in the pursuit
of power. Even HG Wells, with his
uncanny gift of scientifi c foresight,
could not predict the blinding fl ash
over Hiroshima. Never before had
a government planned the atomic
annihilation of an entire city and
its inhabitants.
Freedman, one of Britain’s foremost
military thinkers, cites Dr Strangelove
as the pre-eminent nuclear war anxiety
fi lm. His study of warfare from the 19th
century to the present day, The Future
of War, considers how man’s fear of
“push-button” catastrophe infl uenced
the dystopian imaginations, variously,
of Wells, Jules Verne, Nevil Shute and,
not least, Kubrick. The book’s title is a
bit of a misnomer, though, as Freedman
nowhere predicts what future wars
might look like. In all likelihood,
“mass-casualty terrorism” will take the
place of old-fashioned interstate wars.
Certainly it is now rare for states to
come directly to blows; instead, states
Between anxiety
and Armageddon
WAR
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 cold war
satire, Dr Strangelove , contains the
immortally silly line: “Gentlemen,
you can’t fi ght in here! This is the
war room!” Kubrick brings east-
west tensions down to the level of
a playground tussle, as a Russian
ambassador slugs it out with a cigar-
chomping US army general.
Most wars happen because the
ones who start them think they can
win. Even so, defeat is never quite
straightforward, because downfall
often brings with it a kind of
posthumous victory. A case in point is
the collapse of the Confederacy at the
end of the American civil war in 1865.
The slave-holding south was so utterly
devastated by U nion armies that it
lost 20% of its white male population;
A new study sees signs of Dr Strangelove in
today’s nuclear standoff , says Ian Th omson
Th is photograph from Pyongyang’s
offi cial Korean Central News Agency
purports to show Kim Jong-un watching
a missile launch. AFPTh e Future of War: A History
Lawrence Freedman
Allen Lane £25, pp376
face the threat of hard line Islamist
movements, shadowy Islamist militias,
angry Islamist mobs and cynical
Islamist warlords. Using butcher’s
knives, axes and other old-fashioned
weapons that might have been
“recognised by earlier generations”,
Islamist terrorists are able to instil
signifi cant levels of fear.
After al-Qa ida’s attack on the US
in September 2001, more books were
published on Islam and war than had
been published in “all prior human
history”, Freedman reports. Greater
levels of empathy and self-control,
however, seem to have made people in
the west less violent. Computer games
and fi lms may be saturated in violence,
but there has been no commensurate
enthusiasm for participating in
ritualised mass murder.
Few things better illustrate the shift
in sensibility than capital punishment.
The last time anyone was hanged
in England was 1 964. The spectacle
of state-sanctioned execution was
reckoned to refl ect the barbarism of
another age, so it was abolished. Public
stonings, hangings and amputations
are, of course, still greatly enjoyed in
Saudi Arabia and countries subjected
to Islamic State governance. Perhaps
it is no coincidence that the Latin for
war, bellum, is a homonymous near-
miss to the word for beauty, bellus.
Mankind is too fond of violence to give
it up without a fi ght.To order The Future of War: A History
for £21.25 go to guardianbookshop.com
or call 0330 333 6846NATURE
Th e Lost Words
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
Hamish Hamilton £20, pp128
Words brought in from the wilderness
In 2007 , the new edition of the
Oxford Junior Dictionary introduced
new words such as “broadband”
while others, describing the natural
world , disappeared. The dictionary’s
guidelines require that it refl ect “the
current frequency of words in daily
language of children”. However, the
philosopher A J Ayer introduced a
generation to the notion that unless
we have a word for something, we
are unable to conceive of it, and that
there is a direct relationship between
our imagination, our ability to have
ideas about things, and our vocabulary.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a groundswell
of opposition to the word cull began to
grow and, in 2015, the debate reached
a tipping point when an open letter to
the OJD , coordinated by the naturalist
Laurence Rose , was signed by artists
and writers including Margaret
Atwood , Sara Maitland , Michael
Morpurgo and Andrew Motion along
with the brilliant illustrator Jackie
Morris and the hugely acclaimed
wordsmith, word collector, and
defender of the natural world, Robert
Macfarlane. “There is a shocking,
proven connection between the
decline in natural play and the decline
in children’s wellbeing,” the letter said.
A heated debate in the national pressensued, both for and against the lost
words, and the collaboration between
Morris and Macfarlane was born.
The Lost Words makes no mention
of the dictionary and Macfarlane
deftly insults the OJD with a taste
of its own medicine by ignoring it.
Instead, in a book of spells rather
th an poems, exquisitely illustrated
by Morris, Macfarlane gently, fi rmly
and meticulously restores the missing
words. Acorn, blackberry, bluebell,
conker and “perhaps the one that cut
the deepest ” for Morris, “kingfi sher ”,
are lovingly returned to future
generations of children. It is a big,
sumptuous, heavy book. A proportion
of the profi ts will go to Action for
Conservation , a charity that workswith “disadvantaged and socially
excluded children” and is “dedicated
to inspiring young people to take
action for the natural world”. Hamish
Hamilton ha s no current plans for a
paperback, and I think this is a shame,
because a lighter, cheaper edition that
could be tucked under a little one’s arm
and aff orded by the school library will
cross the social divide just by being
there.
The acrostic spell-poems are
designed to be read out loud. It is a
book for adults and children, for adults
to read with children. The spells carry
the spirit of their subject in their
structure. Take the brilliant “Magpie
Manifesto: / Argue Every Toss! /
Gossip, Bicker, Yak and Snicker All DayLong!” Not only are the word and the
bird restored and celebrated, but the
spirit and nature and the clatter of the
magpie are conserved within its lines.
The Lost Words is a beautiful book
and, in terms of ideas, an important
one. I once asked a magician what
he considered to be the defi ning
characteristic of his art. “Directing
the gaze”, he said. Re-enchantment,
re-engagement and conservation of the
natural world is ultimately only going
to be possible if we retain the language
with which to make it happen.
Katharine NorburyTo order The Lost Words for £17 go
to guardianbookshop.com or call
0330 333 6846Clockwise from
left: otters,
dandelions and
adder from the
‘beautiful’ Th e
Lost Words.
Jackie Morris