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From: royer@savax.UUCP (royer)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Re: Heinlein's panegyric for the Bomb
Message-ID: <385@savax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 16-Sep-86 10:53:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: savax.385
Posted: Tue Sep 16 10:53:20 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Sep-86 22:43:35 EDT
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Organization: Sanders Associates Inc. Nashua ,NH
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Xref: mnetor net.sf-lovers:8497 talk.politics.misc:135

[  Miscellaneous comments leading up to this ...]
> 
> I read Farnham's Freehold and it certainly seemed to me to be more of
> a paean to "survivalism" than to actions to stop a nuclear war in
> the first place.  The protoganist is praiseworthy for stocking up
> with everything from food to encyclopedias to prepare for the aftermath
> of World War Last.   His major concern is protecting his survivalist
> fiefdom from looting by others who are starving and so forth.
> But that's OK, because we know that it should be "every *MAN* for himself"
> after any disaster, right?
>  
> "Farnham's Freehold" is hardly a realistic view of the effects of
> nuclear war whatsoever.  For example, because an all-out nuclear war
> would destroy the ozone layer, animals and humans without their
> eyes shielded would soon be blinded.  Then of course there is the 
> likelihood of the Nuclear Winter effect.  Heinlein could be excused
> for not mentioning these since both were just discovered in the past decade.
> But then another effect should have been well-known to Heinlein which
> he never bothered to deal with in his paean to "survivalism".
> Namely the certainty than any all-out nuclear war would lead to
> massive firestorms, leaving those in shelters like "Farnham's Freehold"
> to be either cooked alive like those in Dresden, or else suffocated by
> the lack of oxygen consumed by such torrential flames.
> It has been a long time since I read "Farnham's Freehold" but I also
> don't recall much discussion of the pernicious effects of radioactivity-
> in the region around Chernobyl, a minscule incident compared to the
> effects of an all-out nuclear war, they have to strip off the top
> inches of thousands of acres of topsoil because it is excessively 
> radioactive.  If you strip off the top inches of fertile topsoil to
> avoid radioactivity, the soil left will be practically useless for
> growing crops.  Nor do I recall Heinlein talking much at all about
> radiation sickness, leukemia, cancer, etc.
> The whole impression I recall from "Farnham's Freehold" was that
> nuclear war involved big terrific explosions but if you prepared
> your own survivalist holdout for yourself and you alone, that
> you could make it.  Of course a required part of your survivalist
> gear is at least one gun, if not several, so you can shoot the few
> surviving humans left and assure your own survival.
> I.e. maintain the same idiotic mentality which has placed us in the
> current position of facing the imminent extinction of the human race
> at any time!

Let's try and separate our *CURRENT*
understanding of the effects of nuclear war
from those accepted at the time this book was written.  When Heinlein
wrote "Farnham's Freehold", the prevailing wisdom really was that
all we had to do was hole up and wait it out and we'd be OK.  The
book actually advances the idea that that wasn't so, that there
were things about civilization that really were necessary to support
life as we knew it.

"Farnham's Freehold" is a very depressing book, especially when compared
with other Heinlein work.  If he wrote it now and included things
like nuclear winter, etc, I'm not sure what would come out.
	
> I would say that as I recall Heinlein's story in "Farnham's Freehold"
> that it more closely resembles Reagan's Undersecretary of Defense,
> T.K. Jones statement that 
> "we can survive nuclear war with enough shovels.  Just dig a hole
> a few feet thick and jump in it."
> than any statement by pacifists or even people like Eisenhower
> or Khruschev ('the living will envy the dead')
> 

If you feel that way, it would be better to sum it up saying that
T. K. Jones holds an attitude which is thirty or so years out
of date (about as old as "Farnham's Freehold") and not to
extrapolate that feeling to Mr. Heinlein.


>                      tim sevener  whuxn!orb

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Tom Royer
Sanders Associates
MER24-1283, CS2034          (603)-885-9171
Nashua, NH  03061-2034