Not long ago I had occasion to reread Level 7, a novel by the Polish-born American academic and writer, Mordecai Roshwald that was published in 1959.
Roshwald, who died in 2015 at the great old age of 93, was a man of the Left and his grim little parable of nuclear war harps on the strings of the quaint old Ban-the-Bomb movement. But I doubt that when I first read Level 7 in the late Sixties, Roshwald’s leftism came through to me. At that time the apocalyptic vision of a world laid waste by atomic war was a popular nightmare and Level 7, for all its implausibility, moral posturing and stilted writing, was a book that brought that very bad dream to life.
Human nature being what it is, the world and I went about our day-to-day affairs with little thought for the looming nuclear apocalypse to which people like Roshwald were pointing with such alarm. I was a teenager then, with a teenager’s confidence in his personal immortality. A nuclear war might kill other people, but I would survive. Besides that, though everybody realized that nuclear war was a possibility, some built-in psychological defense mechanism prevented us from believing that it could actually happen. Books like Level 7 made a powerful impression precisely because they challenged that refusal to believe. It could happen, they insisted. It could.
Yet as thing turned out the collective unconscious was right and the books were wrong: Despite all the apocalyptic predictions, no nuclear war occurred. In retrospect this was the chief irony of the Cold War. The “atomic madness” that supposedly dominated the superpowers turned out to be a figment of the antiwar Left’s overheated imagination. At no point during the period when the United States and the Soviet Union both possessed nuclear weapons did the theoretical advantages of deliberately starting a war appear to outweigh the glaringly obvious disadvantages. The phrase “balance of terror” seems trite now precisely because it turned out to be such an accurate thumbnail description of the international situation in the atomic age. It was not atomic madness but recipricol atomic fear that dominated the strategic calculations of the superpowers.
That the balance of terror constrained America and Russia became obvious at a relatively early stage of the Cold War, whereupon Roshwald and his antiwar compatriots shifted their ground. Perhaps a single madman with access to the nuclear trigger could start a war that neither superpower really wanted. That was the thesis of Red Alert, the 1958 novel by Peter Bryant that was adapted by Stanley Kubrick for his darkly comedic film masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove. Or perhaps some mechanical failure could result in the accidental release of nuclear weapons, followed by all-out war. That was the thesis of Fail-Safe, the best-selling 1962 novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, which was also made into a film.
Level 7, though less realistic in its background than Red Alert and Fail-Safe, is in some ways more interesting. It depicts a military mechanism so highly automated as to make human combatants all but redundant. When the final war begins, the officers of PBX (Push-Button X) Command launch thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles against the enemy merely by touching a few buttons. And except for the play of their fingers on the PBX console, the entire process is managed by machines. Why human participation is required at all remains something of a puzzle to both the novel’s protagonist, Officer X-127, and to the reader.
Roshwald actually believed that the ever-increasing automation of the machinery of nuclear war would eventually reach a culminating point similar to that depicted in Level 7. Atomic madness, he thought, would not simply be institutionalized—it would be hard-wired into the military establishment itself. Thus in his novel he depicts a world that has handed its fate over to an autonomous, even godlike, machinery of death. But this mechanical god, having been created by human beings, proves capable of human-like error.
When the inevitable happens—when X-127 and his fellow officers are ordered to push their buttons—it turns out the war was started by accident. Twelve of the enemy’s missiles escape their controls, destroying a couple of cities. The machinery reads this as the first move of an all-out attack and orders massive retaliation. Two and a half hours later the world lies in ruins and most of humanity had perished. Only a handful of people in deep subterranean shelters like Level 7 still survive.
Implausible? Of course. But somehow, despite all the baloney and stilted prose, Roshwald’s thermonuclear fable has stood the test of time.
But perhaps it’s not quite fair to criticize Roshwald’s writing style. A Polish Jew born in 1921, he learned English as a second language and, in fact, enlisted the help of an American friend to smooth out his original draft of Level 7. The result is perfectly grammatical English prose that could never be taken for the work of an American author. Occasionally it gave me the feeling that I was reading Kafka in translation. But this slightly alien diction actually works to the novel's advantage, lending Level 7 the air of a parable.
So does the anonymity of the characters, whose names were left on the surface when they descended to the military facility housing PBX Command, located 4,000 feet underground, called Level 7. We know them only by their functional numerical designations: X-127 (the protagonist), E-647, N-527, etc. Indeed, Roshwald provides no clues as to the nationality of the denizens of Level 7. They could be Americans or Russians. In his preface to the novel the author explains that he deliberately chose to omit national or cultural markers, since Level 7 was intended as a warning to all humanity.
For these reasons, the implausibility of the novel’s premise doesn’t matter as much as it would in a novel whose details are more realistic. For to be sure, it is implausible. That any nation would automate its military machine to the point depicted in Roshwald’s novel strains credulity. As is well known, the procedures governing the use of nuclear weapons in both the United States and the Soviet Union were hedged round with multiple safeguards designed, not so much to prevent accidents or deter madmen, but to keep the power of decision in the hands of the political leadership.
But unlike Red Alert, Fail-Safe and other novels purporting to give a realistic picture of nuclear war, Level 7 is, as I suggested above, a parable. Whether Roshwald intended it as such is doubtful: It seems that he really believed in his nightmare vision of push-button nuclear warfare. Even so, he touches a nerve. Politically, technologically, and now historically, Level 7 may miss the mark, but psychologically it’s on target. As a grim parable of the bloody and tragic twentieth century Level 7 deserves, I believe, a modest place in the literary canon. For the process of dehumanization it depicts, with ordinary men trained, conditioned and finally commanded to commit mass murder, has had its real-life counterparts in Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia, Rwanda and elsewhere.
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