By George Chesterton
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It all feels a bit "end of the worldy" at the moment, doesn’t it? At least people of a certain age—such as myself—know how this goes. We’ve seen it all before: talk of the "gathering storm"; the claims this year feels like 1939; the footage of Russian bombers being escorted away from Polish airspace.
But for your children, the thought of war can be a wrench. It’s not so much like discovering Santa doesn’t really deliver your presents down the chimney, but that Santa is coming down the chimney and he’s got a gun. It’s simultaneously inconceivable and horrifying, like Mumford & Sons.
When I’m trying to reassure my daughters that everything will be OK, it doesn’t help when Vladimir Putin keeps mobilizing troops on the Baltic, or when Iran attacks its neighbors because they helped Donald Trump. Then there is China leaning menacingly over Taiwan. And now we have the sense of certainty that AI will put us out of our misery at some point regardless. Maybe even before we get the chance to deliberately blow ourselves up.
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"Is there going to be a war?" my youngest daughter asked me at the dinner table. Meaning are "we" going to be at war. In the literal sense the answer is "no." That’s because as a Brit I recently found out my country barely has any armed forces. Our once great Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and army are now so denuded we may be reduced to garden forks and Amazon Fire sticks to defend ourselves. At least our inner-cities are well stocked with knife-wielding maniacs, who might come in handy if Russian special forces were stupid enough to parachute into east London.
But my daughters are not interested in the details of the U.K.’s reduced fighting capacity, but rather in the prospect of being directly involved in a way that has become increasingly inconceivable for us in the West. You know, of actually being bombed. Or worse still, being bombed with one of those things that makes a big mushroom cloud.
There was a genuine look of fear in my daughter’s eyes. But not just fear, it was something approaching shock. Surely this couldn’t happen? Even though my girls are well versed in the horrors of the past and the catastrophes happening around the world right now, we are all compromised by the immense privilege of the past 80 years of domestic peace. I wish I’d never seen that look on her face. It was an uncomfortable moment.
What should I do? I could just say "it will never happen," which given my preference for searing honesty isn’t really sustainable. Another option is to say, quite rightly, that there are children all over the world who are living through conflict, so compared to them you are unbelievably lucky, as was my generation. This being true doesn’t mean their fears are not real and no amount of contextual know-how is going to make my children’s insecurities go away. Or I could just say it’s likely, given what we know of humanity, that another world war is inevitable. It’s usually at this point I bribe them with ice cream or takeout to sweeten this bitter pill.
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I would give my children the nod intellectually over Ilhan Omar, though, when it comes to analyzing the pending apocalypse. The Minnesota congresswoman thought World War II was pronounced World War Eleven, so presumably she would call World War III "World War One Hundred And Eleven." My daughters would never be so hopeless.
I strongly advocate a rounded view of history for my children (much to their annoyance I talk of little else), but I should not forget my generation and the boomers before mine had similar experiences. The early- to mid-1980s, when I was small, was a time of heightened tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. I had regular nightmares of nuclear explosions. These fears were reflected in the culture of the time. In the U.S. there were the TV series The Day After and World War III and films such as War Games, while, in Britain, we watched the relentlessly grim postnuclear war TV drama Threads.
I showed my daughters the video to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s "Two Tribes" as a way of illustrating how far fear of nuclear war had permeated the culture, but it only showed how far my irrelevance had permeated our family. You should have seen the side-eye I got.
And my father used to bore me similarly with tales of how he and his classmates practiced hiding under their school desks during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
That’s the problem with this fear of impending doom. In the mind of a child—even a smart one—it is both real and unreal, immediate and distant.
The difference between now and the Cold War fear and trembling of 1960s or 1980s is that we have more options. Yes, we could still be annihilated in a nuclear war. But we could also be wiped off the earth by rebellious AI. Or even, Terminator-style, a combination of the two in which AI launches a nuclear war on its own. With that in mind, the next time one of my daughters asks me if there is going to be another war, I’m just going to say a flat no. If I’m right, it means they won’t have worried unnecessarily. If I’m wrong, it won’t matter.
George Chesterton is Newsweek’s Director, Publishing & Subscriber Strategy.
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