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Profile: Stanley Kubrick 59
longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the
better the job that people do in psychologically denying its
existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all
going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of
denying. For this reason, most people have very little interest
in nuclear war. It has become even less interesting as a problem
than, say, city government, and the longer a nuclear event is
postponed, the greater becomes the illusion that we are constantly
building up security, like interest at the bank. As time
goes on, the danger increases, I believe, because the thing becomes
more and more remote in people's minds. No one can
predict the panic that suddenly arises when all the lights go out
— that indefinable something that can make a leader abandon
his carefully laid plans. A lot of effort has gone into trying to
imagine possible nuclear accidents and to protect against them.
But whether the human imagination is really capable of encompassing
all the subtle permutations and psychological variants
of these possibilities, I doubt. The nuclear strategists who
make up all those war scenarios are never as inventive as reality,
and political and military leaders are never as sophisticated as
they think they are."
Such limited optimism as Kubrick has about the long-range
prospects of the human race is based in large measure on his
hope that the rapid development of space exploration will
change our views of ourselves and our world. Most people who
have thought much about space travel have arrived at the somewhat
ironic conclusion that there is a very close correlation
between the ability of a civilization to make significant space
voyages and its ability to learn to live with nuclear energy. Unless
there are sources of energy that are totally beyond the ken
of modern physics, it is quite clear that the only source at hand
for really elaborate space travel is the nucleus. The chemical
methods of combustion used in our present rockets are absurdly
inefficient compared to nuclear power. A detailed study has been
made of the possibilities of using nuclear explosions to propel
large spaceships, and, from a technical point of view, there is
no reason that this cannot be done; indeed, if we are to transport
really large loads to, say, the planets, it is essential that it
be done. Thus, any civilization that operates on the same laws
of nature as our own will inevitably reach the point where it
learns to explore space and to use nuclear energy about simultaneously.
The question is whether there can exist any society
with enough maturity to peacefully use the latter to perform the
former. In fact, some of the more melancholy thinkers on this
subject have come to the conclusion that the earth has never
been visited by beings from outer space because no civilization