The future consequences of war had been correctly predicted in the 1980s: 3 billion dead; radical changes in climate; the destruction of a considerable part of material culture and of sociopolitical structures; vast numbers of plant, animal, and human mutations. It seems that the prewar state was considered valuable because, surprisingly, the consequences of war were deemed negative (“collective suicide”). Surprising because a great many voices considered the prewar state ruinous and unsustainable (“This cannot go on!”). The details:

• Three billion dead: At the time, it was determined in unison that there were too many people. The elderly could no longer be fed in the developed areas, the underdeveloped areas were teeming with children who could not be nourished. All peaceful methods to control the demographic explosion (the pill, abortion, traffic accidents, drugs, AIDS, and so forth) had been ineffective. The overcrowding of schools led to a deterioration in the level of intellect. Illiterates populated the universities. All public spaces such as streets, beaches, and ski slopes were saturated with masses of people. The world was seething with people who were alien to each other but forced to come into physical contact. The individual lived embattled, in fear, and lonely within the crowds. Demographic projections forecast a veritably infernal massification. Death by mutual smothering. Nonetheless, nuclear explosion was rated negatively compared with a demographic solution to the problem—as if mass death, that is, death together with all one’s loved ones, would be worse than what was deemed necessary to experience the death of a loved one from cancer, a circulatory disorder, or asphyxiation. In short, from all the causes that we understand to be a “natural death.”
• Climate change: Before the war, a large portion of the available water mass was stored in the form of ice around the poles. Back then, they were concerned that an ice melt could increase the sea level, resulting in potential flooding of port cities. Remarkably, they did not foresee the irrigation of the desert, the climatic equilibrium of the earth, the radiant morning following a nuclear night, the eternal spring following a nuclear winter. This blindness may be attributed, not least, to the fear mentioned earlier.
• Material destruction: Back then, increasing automation and rationalization led to an oversaturation of the environment with useless stuff. People could no longer find a way toward each other or toward nature. All methods to stem this environmental pollution—such as by planning, economic crises, or increased consumption—had failed. Despite that, out of a lack of the imagination or creative foresight, no one seems to have advocated for the nuclear destruction of this stuff. The beauty of the ruins—if we think of the World Trade Center or the Detroit automobile plants, now covered with lush vegetation—was unimaginable back then.
• Collapse of structures: Even though structures such as family, class, the people, and the state were deemed obsolete and harmful at the time—and they were indeed in a state of slow decay—and even though precursors of the current monastic order of society (kibbutzim, ashrams, oases in the American desert, alternative groups) already existed, they apparently did not realize that the old, mummified (and thus air-polluting) structures could only be completely abolished in favor of the new structure with the help of thermonuclear intervention.
• Mutations: At the time, they believed in ecologically impossible monsters such as giant insects, meat-eating plants, and disfigured idiots, because mutations triggered by radioactivity had been labeled pathological cases, even though, first of all, the mechanism of natural selection was quite well known and, second, they should have been aware that the radioactivity released during the war accelerates the process of creating superior species. For that reason, they could not predict the rich branching of ecosystems today, their variety and abundance, and certainly not the refinement of the human being.

The contradiction between the correctly calculated prediction of the future and inadequately intuited foresight can be traced back to an insufficiently developed theory of catastrophes. Catastrophe meant a point on a projected curve from where it was impossible to calculate the curve’s future trajectory—this much was clear even then. However, they considered this point to be dangerous, not the emergence of something new. Because everything unknown is terrible, they feared catastrophes—instead of inducing them intentionally, as we do.

The reasons for visualizing the now no-longer-comprehensible primitive fear of catastrophes that was common in prewar times are pedagogical. Because we are currently observing symptoms that signal a relapse into prewar mentalities. Our almost paradisiacal situation seems to elicit mental inertia. Numerous monastic communities seem to value keeping what has been created rather than repeatedly questioning all that has been accomplished. Death-defying courage and an openness to adventure, both of which we owe to war, are beginning to slacken. Hence a warning: if we don’t resist the looming inertia, an inertia that was generally called progress in prewar times, we will relapse into a prewar state. And that is calculable in advance because inertia is calculable.