Things that Can and Cannot Be Said by John; Arundhati; Cusack Roy Page A

Russians had one hundred and ninety-two. ”
    Our best first strike, then and now, has never, for a moment—since the mid- ’ 50s—never been able to keep the Soviets from annihilating every last person in West Europe.
    By the way, you know we were going to kill—depending on how the wind blew—which depends on the season . . . our private, top-secret estimates were that we would kill every European, a hundred million Europeans, without a single US or Soviet warhead landing on West Europe. Just from the fallout of the attacks we were planning on Russia and East Europe. One hundred million depending on . . .
    ES: How the wind blows west across Europe?
    DE: Yes.
    JC: So the blast radius . . . Dan, tell them about the calculation of fire and smoke . . . the state secret.
    DE: Yes, their damage calculations . . . okay, hold on to your socks . . . they don’t calculate the fire and the smoke . . . only blast and radiation. And fallout . . . because you could calculate those quite accurately. That was their excuse. Their excuse was we can’t calculate fire. . . . It’s fire that kills most people—but they left that out of their calculations.
    JC: So it just doesn’t exist.
    DE: So ignore it, ignore it, the reality. Fire is the main effect of thermonuclear weapons . . . to this day they do not calculate the fire. So they didn’t have to ask the question “What about the smoke?” Finally in ’83 somebody calculated the effect of just one of these things . . . what 150,000 tons of smoke and soot would cause, lofted into the stratosphere, reducing sunlight for a decade . . . basically it’s nuclear famine . . . crops die, livestock dies . . . everybody dies. With a small war between India and Pakistan, fifty Hiroshima-size bombs each, smoke would reduce sunlight enough to starve two billion people to death . . . In a US-Russian war—it’s nuclear winter. I never understand why we worry so much about climate change and not about nuclear war. Both have the potential of annihilating life on earth.
    AR: Nuclear bombs are the logical corollary to the idea of the nation-state . . . no?

About the Authors
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    John Cusack is a writer, actor, filmmaker, and board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
    Arundhati Roy studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She is the author of the novel The God of Small Things , for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. The novel has been translated into forty languages worldwide. She has written several nonfiction books, including Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers and Capitalism: A Ghost Story , both published by Haymarket Books.

Also by Arundhati Roy

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    Capitalism: A Ghost Story examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India, and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism have subjugated billions of people to the highest and most intense forms of racism and exploitation.
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    Field Notes on Democracy tracks the fault lines that threaten to destroy India’s precarious democracy and send shockwaves through the region and beyond.
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    The End of Imagination brings together five of Arundhati Roy’s acclaimed books of essays into one comprehensive volume for the first time and features a new introduction by the author.

About Haymarket Books
    Haymarket Books is a nonprofit, progressive book distributor and publisher, a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. We believe that activists need to take ideas, history, and politics into the many struggles for social justice today. Learning the lessons of past victories, as well as defeats, can arm a new generation of fighters for a better world. As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it.”
    We take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket Martyrs, who gave their lives fighting