Cat's Cradle and the History of the Apocalypse

Before August 6, 1945, fewer than thirty novels had ever been written "...which specifically depict nuclear war and its aftermath" (Brians, 101). In the ten years that followed, over two hundred novels were written on the subject. In the ten years after that, over three hundred more were written (Brians, 351–358). Most of these novels were science fiction, including Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. In fact, science fiction became the genre of choice for writers looking to work out their fears and anxieties about the very real threat of the apocalypse that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. For the first time, humanity possessed a power with which it could easily wipe itself out. But why did the task of dealing with and predicting the effects of nuclear war fall mainly into the laps of a genre that generally was not thought of as particularly literary? In Containment Culture, Alan Nadel argues in part that the science fiction boom is the result of a failure on the part of scientists to give a coherent and reliable account of either the form nuclear war may take or the ultimate consequences of such a war. As a result, the responsibility of dealing with such a vast task fell into the domains of science fiction writers like Vonnegut to go where science could not by illuminating the failures of science to construct a coherent emerging cultural narrative of nuclear warfare.

In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut's characters illuminate a general regard toward the chronicling of the history of nuclear war as a pointless endeavor. For instance, the novel opens with the narrator, Jonah, collecting material for his book about "...what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan" (Vonnegut, 11). Jonah intended to call the book The Day the World Ended. However, Jonah's project does not get off the ground and the book he originally intended is never written. If the title of Jonah's book is taken literally, then perhaps Nadel can help to illuminate exactly why Jonah found the "factual" book impossible to finish.

In Containment Culture, Nadel describes science as a sort of history that is written before it happens. History, he argues, is a reporting of the "facts" of events that happened in the past. Science, on the other hand, is the reporting of the "facts" of events that should happen given a hypothesis and a set of natural laws as parameters. He quotes Michael de Certeau in describing the difference between modern science and history as "...the rift between a subject that is supposedly literate [history], and an object that is supposedly written in an unknown language [science]. The latter always remains to be decoded" (de Certeau, Writing, 3). In other words, science is like history in that it is a narrative that has already been written, even though the results of the experiment have yet to be experienced. The difference is that we can read a history readily while with science, "written in an unknown language," we have yet to understand all its secrets and narratives, though they were already written when time began. In order to "decode" the language of science, scientists must perform experiments. In this context, a new scientific hypothesis is much like a work of science fiction in that it is a previously unknown result of the creativity of a human mind and, as of yet, has as much basis in fact as a work of fiction until experience proves otherwise. As de Certeau puts it, "In order to come into being, science must resign itself to a loss of both totality and reality" (de Certeau, Heterologies, 214). Until proven, a scientific theory is a sort of fiction. Nadel clarifies by stating, "If science did no more than describe what had happened, it would be called history" (Nadel 43).

Of course, there is such a field of study as the History of Science that chronicles the attempts of scientists to prove their hypotheses and thereby turn an educated guess into a known fact of knowledge and science into history. This supposes that the ultimate goal of science is to predict the future and write the "History of the Future" (Nadel, 40) before it is history in truth. Rather, Nadel describes science as the modern equivalent of prophecy or fate ("a sense of unalterable history" [Nadel, 47]) that has yet to be made manifest. In essence, what Vonnegut is doing by having Jonah attempt to write a book about "the day the world ended," as an event that has yet to literally come to pass, is to write a history of the future. The book Jonah wanted to write is, ultimately, the book he has written—a book about the end of the world. The reason he was able to finish it at the end of the novel, not at the opening of the book, is that he was attempting to write an account of an event that has not happened in a "factual," or scientific, way. As we will see, this is not possible with the subject matter he has chosen. Instead, he is only able to finish his "history" after the world has ended in fact—a time when his history no longer has any meaning; there is no one to read it.

That the end result differs from his intention, in that his original title is written as hyperbole while the resulting book is "factual," isn't relevant. His original conception is to write "The Day the World Ended" as a book about the atom bomb—a topic that he and others of the era saw as "a fearsome destroyer and apocalyptic omen" (Boyer, 25). Though the atom bomb did not result in nuclear winter in Cat's Cradle, a post-apocalyptic winter is exactly what Vonnegut gives us in the end regardless. It is simply caused by "ice-nine" instead of atomic warfare. As in science, the hypothesis of Jonah (and the world at large of the time) is but an educated guess. Often, the result of a scientific enquiry does not fit the hypothesis as expected, though the question upon which the scientist hypothesizes remains the same. Simply, Vonnegut suggests that "history" about any apocalyptic scenario is no better than the vaguest scientific hypothesis until it is history in fact.

With the nature of science and its "...unavoidable connection [with] fiction" (Nadel, 41) laid out, one can begin to understand the explosion in the genre of science fiction after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This understanding is best illuminated by examining the ways science deals with the shadow of possible atomic warfare that continues to loom over the world, even decades after the last use of atomic weaponry. If it is the duty of science to utilize natural laws and combine them with hypotheses to write a history of the future, then how does one write a future of a nuclear Armageddon? If the goal of successful science is to ultimately become historical, then how can a nuclear apocalypse fall under the umbrella of science? As Nadel notes, "The ascent to nuclear power thus empowers an absurd discourse...for it necessitates the understanding of an event that cannot exist retrospectively" (Nadel, 46). The effects hypothesized by science of a nuclear apocalypse cannot be verified by experience because there would be no one left to do the verifying. Since a nuclear apocalypse of this nature can never be written as a history, it falls outside the domain of science to predict, as is reflected in the failure of the "scientists' movement" that Boyer relates (Boyer, 47–106). The furor surrounded scientists' ultimately inaccurate "prescient" proclamations of "one world or none" for only a few years. The public can only take being exposed to doom-and-gloom predictions for so long before their narrow repetition of ideas and the resultant popular fear was "overwhelmed by larger forces...manipulated by other people pursuing other goals" (Boyer, 106). However, the history of the nuclear apocalypse does not fall outside the domain of science fiction, the type of science no one expects to be proven true or false.

Thus, when Jonah confronts Bokonon at the end of the novel, Bokonon tells him, "If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow." After all, such a history would be good for little else. It would certainly be a cold, hard form of comfort to know that there was a "history of human stupidity," something people could use to learn from the mistakes of humanity, but that there is no longer anyone alive to read and benefit from it. It is only useful as a pillow for a dead man "...thumbing [his] nose at You Know Who" (Vonnegut, 191). This failure of history and science in such a case is why the responsibility for the exploration of the form and effects of such an apocalypse falls to the realm of fiction.

Indeed, if one purpose of history is to learn from the mistakes of the past, then the purpose of Vonnegut/Jonah writing a novel about The Day the World Ended, ultimately titled Cat's Cradle, is to produce a mock history. The title "Cat's Cradle" itself suggests this when, like the useless quality of a fake history such as Vonnegut's, Newt aptly signifies that the game "Cat's Cradle" as entertaining but insubstantial ("No damn cat, and no damn cradle" [Vonnegut, 114]). Like many other writers of science fiction, Vonnegut intends Cat's Cradle to be a learning experience—a history of the end of the world that the public still can read. Nadel describes the purpose of literary postmodern science fiction as "...generic mutations, hybrids, deformations become interesting not because they represent a falling away and/or progress toward some essential ideal of representation/expression, but rather because they help identify the cultural narratives that permit the appearance of generic stability" (Nadel, 52). In other words, science fiction as a literary genre is not meant to be escapist ("falling away") or prescriptive ("progress toward some essential ideal"), but rather they attempt to strip away the false facades of "generic stability." Science fiction attempts to critique, or at the very least lay bare, the "cultural narratives" that allow such facades to go unquestioned. In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut questions a variety of such cultural narratives, but none more so than exposing facades constructed around the popular perception of science and scientists.

The most obvious targets of Vonnegut's ire are the very people whose position he is usurping: the scientists who created the atomic bomb, aka "ice-nine." Like the atomic bomb, there is an inherent "dual nature" to ice-nine. Nadel describes the dual nature of the atomic bomb as "...totalizing and minuscule, secreted and omnipresent, capable of binding or of rendering asunder" (Nadel, 14). Atomic power is the power of life in the universe, "binding" all bodies together, yet at the same time it is the one and only power that is capable of the complete "rendering asunder" of life as well. Similarly, ice-nine is but crystals of water, the most essential nutrient to life on earth, and it is also the one thing that can render all other water on earth undrinkable. However, one point Vonnegut makes with his substitution of ice-nine for atomic weaponry is to point out that such an essential nutrient as water (thus atomic energy) only came by its destructive nature at the hands of irresponsible scientists. Nadel agrees with Vonnegut saying, "for the energy in the atom to become fuel, 'unnatural' acts must be performed; nature must be violated...the duality comes not from the fuel, but from those who tap and spend its energies" (Nadel, 23). Thus, ice-nine is a way for Vonnegut to show that scientists did not stumble onto a hidden use of water, they perverted its nature beyond recognition.

As for the scientists themselves, Vonnegut gives us Dr. Asa Breed and Dr. Felix Hoenikker to highlight the self-delusion under which he sees them as operating. Scientists too recognize a dual nature to the invention of atomic weaponry, but scientists see the problem as necessary: "the processes for the production of atomic weapons and for development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes are, through most of their courses, identical and inseparable" (U.S.Dept. of State, v). In other words, the existence of the most destructive weapons on the planet is an unfortunate side effect of the use of nuclear power as a source of energy. Thus, the negative aspects of atomic dual nature are simply problems we have to live with in order to use its advantages. Vonnegut hints that such a justification of atomic power is no excuse for science to deny responsibility for the totality of its creations. Case in point, Hoenikker's justification for the invention of the ice-nine that destroyed the world was that "...one of the aspects of progress should be that marines no longer had to fight in mud" (Vonnegut, 37). So, Hoenikker invented ice-nine to rid the world of mud. By giving such a trivial genesis to ice-nine, any justification there can be for a power that might destroy the world is inherently foolish. Simply because there is a dual nature doesn't make the exploitation of the negative aspect a great idea. Regardless, Asa Breed and Angela Conners see this noble purpose as reason enough to insist that "[i]f you ever do do the book, you better make Father a saint, because that is what he was" (Vonnegut, 81). Never mind "Father" ends up being responsible for the most dangerous substance the earth has ever known. When Jonah attempts to suggest such might be the case to Dr. Breed, Breed responds with anger and the end of the interview (Vonnegut, 41).

Scientists such as Breed and Hoenikker make the error of assuming that the advance of knowledge is an unqualifiedly good thing. Miss Faust describes Dr. Hoenikker by simply saying, "...the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth" after pointing out that "intimate things, family things, love things...weren't the main things with him" (Vonnegut, 43). The portrait Vonnegut paints here of the Doctor is one where morality does not enter into the thought process. Things that ought to be paramount in his life from a moral standpoint took a back seat. Dr. Breed seems to agree that "[n]ew knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become" (Vonnegut, 36). Again, Vonnegut hints that science and scientists are detached from the values that dominate the lives of the average person. To these scientists, truth and knowledge are more important than the well-being or safety of the general population. Micheal de Certeau supports this view of scientists by arguing that "[e]thical tasks are replaced by what is supposed to be an expression of reality [within] the scientific establishment" (de Certeau, Writing, 200). In other words, scientists see the most important goals in life as the increase of knowledge, or the discovery of the "reality" that was written at the beginning of time but only now becoming legible. In this light, science is not an "ethical task," but is rather replacing ethical tasks in a way that does not leave room for both ethics and scientific knowledge to coexist.

Vonnegut implies that scientists such as Hoenikker are pardoned from not noticing the dual nature of their inventions because their childlike nature shields them from the realities of the real-world uses of their toys. This may not necessarily be true. Hoenikker does label his ice-nine as "Danger!" and advises others to "keep away from moisture," and as a substance which "he had no doubt meant to melt up" (Vonnegut 165–166), but that didn't stop Hoenikker from creating ice-nine to begin with. The fact that he knew the danger shows him as even more irresponsibly childish. As such, Vonnegut also portrays Hoenikker and those like him as not as innocent as they wish they were and are thus accountable for the uses to which their inventions are put. George Kennan once described atomic scientists as "[p]olitically...as innocent as six-year-old maidens" (Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950, 301), and the picture Vonnegut paints on the surface seems to echo that sentiment. Hoenikker is portrayed as a man who once apparently sincerely asked, "What is sin?" (Vonnegut, 21) and performed "...some of his most famous experiments...with equipment that cost less than a dollar," which turns out to be "...cheap, gay toys" (Vonnegut, 45). How can one hold a man like that accountable when he doesn't hold himself accountable for the things he creates? While Hoenikker may be a metaphorical father of the bomb, Vonnegut's answer is to this question is to look to Felix's real children.

Vonnegut portrays the Hoenikker children as key figures in the struggles between the United States and the USSR in regards to which super power is to occupy the superior position in their power struggle through superior proliferation and control of ice-nine. Nadel characterizes this struggle in its real-world atomic aspect as a sort of courtship/seduction game being played between the two nations. Commenting on Kennan's theories of containing the spread of Soviet thought into free nations, Nadel states, "Kennan thus outlines a scenario wherein the United States seduces the Soviet Union through a slow process of courtship that situates the United States in the superior role..." (Nadel, 31). Of course, this theory does not take in to account that the Soviet Union will also be attempting to occupy that same superior role. Vonnegut does not buy in to the rhetoric that one or the other nation must necessarily be submissive. Once each nation learns of the existence and the significance of ice-nine, the race to possess this new ultimate weapon is on. In order to obtain this ice-nine, both nations employ the exact same tactic: the seduction of Hoenikker children. The U.S. seduces Angela and the U.S.S.R. seduces Newt. In this way, Vonnegut plays no nationalist favorites, equating the two countries in tactics and intent. Rather, he makes the dynamic interesting where the children themselves are concerned.

If the Hoenikker children represent the legacy of Dr. Hoenikker the scientist, then perhaps Dr. Hoenikker's legacy is not as pure as Angela and Dr. Breed think it is. They think of Hoenniker's legacy as that of his bomb child. But Vonnegut takes a more direct and literal approach of parentage and legacy by focusing on Hoenikker's biological children. Vonnegut uses the Hoenikker children to suggest that maybe the two super powers are not the seducers they see themselves as being. Rather than taking advantage of innocent children, Frank Hoenikker lets slip that "I bought myself a job, just the way you (Angela) bought yourself a husband, just the way Newt bought himself a week on Cape Cod with a Russian midget" (Vonnegut, 163). This leads to the possibility that the legacy of Dr. Hoenikker through is various "children" is far from being pure and rather one of prostitution. Each Hoenikker offers his or her goods in order to gain a desire. He or she then denies any role by trying to displace the responsibility for his or her action on others—the nations of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. For example, Frank dumps all the responsibility of his decision and its consequences onto Jonah and takes a trip "...down a spiritual obliette" (151). This shows that the legacy of science is really not the innocent child it appears to be. Science and thus scientists aren't purely innocent simply because of their morally ambiguous neutrality, instead purely focusing on the desire to knowledge. Rather, this dangerous, atomic science is portrayed as a Lolita-type character who is a willing partner in illicit activities for which the seductive partner (government) is forced to accept the blame while the legacy in question hides behind a façade of innocence. After all, scientists only "handed the bomb over to the generals" (Boyer, 95), they did not use them, but that doesn't change the fact that, to a large extent, the offspring of the scientist, Hoenikker's legacies, are to blame for the end of the world in more ways than one.

Though Boyer does go into some detail about the "scientist's movement" of the mid- to late-1940's, his narration too seems to support the notion of moral ambiguity on the part of scientists. Despite all the rhetoric of "one world or none" of the scientist's movement, Boyer points out much of the criticism surrounding "...the atomic scientists' motives and their moral right to offer themselves as political guides...A reflective silence, Niebuhr implied, might be a more appropriate stance for the makers of the bomb than eager volubility" (Boyer, 95). Further, Boyer gives us an example of Edward Teller, who,

...when the UNAEC negotiations collapsed, Teller lost all further interest in political efforts to control atomic weapons. The one great moment had passed; further effort was pointless...Succumbing increasingly to an all-encompassing suspicion of the Soviet Union, Teller championed development of the hydrogen bomb, challenged nearly all arms-control efforts as naïve and dangerous, and advocated a nuclear arms build-up almost without control or limit (Boyer, 101).

In other words, as the moral rhetoric behind the scientists' movement gave way, Teller and many scientists like him simply switched positions and went back to work making more, bigger, better bombs. After all, that is what, as nuclear scientists, they do while justifying it to themselves as an intellectual exercise—manipulating primarily what is, Nadel reminds us, the negative half of the atom's dual nature.

At the very least, Cat's Cradle can be read as an indictment of the irresponsibility of science and the façade of innocence that covers scientists in general. But more than that, we can also see in Jonah's two books, one failure and one success, that perhaps the true fault of science in the era of containment is their lack of foresight which caused them to overstep their own rational boundaries. Without due consideration of the consequences, scientists—looking for the next boundary to cross, the next frontier to explore—created, in their search for truth and knowledge, a legacy that escaped their control. And, being scientists, they were unable to write the cultural narrative for how the "history of the future" would play out in regards to atomic weaponry, as science does not provide a means with which to test a hypothesis about "the day the world ended." Such a history can only be written through experience, as Jonah finds, and the only experience can be through fiction. Ultimately, unable to write their own legacy of the bomb—which, as the scientists' movement would have had it, was that of world government—their creativity exhausted, these scientists mainly went back to that which they knew best, making bombs. Much like Dr. Hoenikker and his legacies, both weapon and human, the government is what seizes control of the atomic legacy for its own ends. Perhaps, what Vonnegut suggests is that next time, science should leave the contemplation of the apocalyptically horrible in the hands of science fiction and leave the real world out of it.

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