1984 and the nuclear threat - 1 January 1984

The end of any year is a time when journalists envy the rest of the population for a simple reason that may not occur to most of you, namely you are not called on either to write a survey of everything important that has happened since 1 January and, better, you are not required to pontificate and say what is likely to happen in the New Year.

Journalists obviously are by their calling more likely than most people to be able to recite a roll call of events, but they're not better equipped than anybody else to predict anything, no better than old Moore's Almanac in this country, the Farmers Almanac or – in every country – the weird and bafflingly popular breed of astrologists.

Well, all that has changed. I suppose for the first time in human history we really are able to say, without shame or fakery, how most Americans feel about life, what they consider to be the most promising and the most threatening trends at home and abroad. I don't think it's possible to make too much of the startling novelty of the scientific public opinion poll.

I spent some days of the holidays leafing through history books of eminent reputation. What I was ferreting out, in a leisurely fashion, was how the people at large – as distinct from statesmen and kings – felt about events, about the conditions of their work, about military threats from abroad and so on.

I regret to tell you that historians until, say, the Second World War could do no more than make large vague guesses; they didn't admit, or even know, that that's what they were doing, they told us by hindsight what was bound to happen, they quoted the newspapers – that is the opinions of one editorial writer with easy access to a grocer or a coach driver – they expanded the prejudices of foreign secretaries and kings and bankers to cover the population. Wars happened because two or three men in one country thought that the neighbouring country or the one across the Channel was getting too powerful or was making threatening noises. The vast majority of the people never knew how factory workers felt about life until they started to throw bricks.

As late as 1942, Winston Churchill – criticised for refusing to pay much attention to the Gallup poll – retorted by saying, "I read in the papers that leaders should keep their ear to the ground, I don't think the British nation would look up to a leader who was detected in that somewhat ungainly posture". Well, as I say, we can today tell quite a lot about what is on the minds of a nation, what they hope for, what they fear, how their opinions break down into percentages on such vital matters as the role of government, the freedom or licence of the press, the prospects of nuclear war and what our leaders in America what President Reagan, most of all, ought to do about it.

I don't remember a time when we've been subjected to or privileged to receive such a blizzard of surveys on popular opinion. By the way, quite a lot of people say several million Americans will be fretting just now about very little except their own survival.

You've all heard about the worst December since 1933 – thousands of miles, the main body of the American land groaning under appalling blasts of snow and ice storms and grotesque temperatures in which people fumbling for their keys or just nipping next door were frozen to death.

But before this happened, just before this happened, the pollsters swarmed across the nation by telephone, by house calls, producing statistical samples that speak for the whole and I hope there's nobody still complaining that a poll of 1200 citizens cannot possibly be representative of the variety of types and people's and opinions of the whole country.

The late Dr Alfred Kinsey used to say – a little prematurely, I must say – about 30 years ago, that it would soon be possible to discover the balance of American attitudes on anything from simply talking to a sailor in Time Square, a shopkeeper in Seattle, a housewife in Dallas, a fisherman in Maine. We're not quite there yet, but 1200 matched types across the country are amply sufficient for an X-ray of public opinion.

On the matters nearest the heart and home – getting and spending and working and eating – this is the breakdown by Lou Harris, who has the most remarkably accurate record: more than half of all Americans expect inflation to stay low, about as many expect unemployment to go on dropping, exactly 50% expect the economy to expand.

Now since all these things were promised by Mr Reagan the day he took office, it's not surprising that 47% believe the Reagan economic programme to have been a success. It is surprising that this view reflects a whacking 20% increase over a year ago. The polls don't yet go on to say that a majority of American's expect Mr Reagan to be reelected, but since it's practically unheard of for most of a politician's promises to come true within two years, the day cannot be far off when, saving some colossal blunder in foreign policy, the polls will show Mr Reagan pulling easily away from the Democratic hopefuls.

However, along with these gung-ho notes, the Harris poll sounds some bleak, even contradictory, notes. Half the people say their no better off than when Reagan came in, 69% see no relief from high interest rates, more than half expect more people to have their home mortgages foreclosed and to see more people go hungry and 72% expect big business and the rich to be better off still. This is, incidentally, a theme that the Democrats bang away at as party gospel (it always has been) but again, if the homeless and the poor visibly increased and this charge could be made to stick, Mr Reagan might find himself derided and rejected as President Herbert Hoover was on the same grounds.

There are two matters of immediate and continuing interest to everybody who lives in a democracy which have dominated the surveys. One is the aching Topic A, the arms race, the likelihood of nuclear war, what to do about it.

The other is the very serious question of the people's belief in, or disillusion with, the power of government to destroy freedom. I imagine that every country with democratic pretensions has printed realms of comment this Christmas about the approach of George Orwell's doomsday year, 1984. We too have had our deep ruminations from double-domed intellectuals telling us peasants what to think about Orwell's book and his hint of awful trends to come like newsspeak and double think and Big Brother watching and policing our lives.

But I doubt that elsewhere, not in England I think, has this nightmare and the prospect of it been put up to the mass of ordinary people. One survey put it bluntly, "Do you worry that the totalitarian state in Orwell's 1994 is a possibility?". You might think I should have guessed that a majority of any nation had not only never read the book but had never heard the name.

The range of answers was extraordinary and, I dare to say, extraordinarily intelligent or aware. A great majority see the invasion of privacy as scary, about 30% believe that government control of thought and opinion is a real and frightening possibility in the near future. Most people questioned saw computers as a present danger, they note that already corporations and local and national governments can find out everything they need to know about anybody they want to collect money from. The majority opinion was best put by a black shop girl, "I don't think our minds will ever be controlled by a government but I can see our lives becoming terribly constricted by technology". A majority, too, believed that in this country anyway, the human spirit would resist and checkmate the computers.

On the larger, the universally nagging subject of the nuclear threat and Russian-American relations, they together constitute the number one problem confronting the United States and it is the problem on which the people give the president his lowest score.

Only one American in four believes Mr Reagan is doing a good job in avoiding the chance of war, more than three-quarters believe that this country must take some of the blame for the present grim state of American-Russian relations. A remarkable 88 Americans in 100 agree with the suggestion that the Russian people could be our friends if their leaders had a different attitude. This does not lead people to a different view of the Soviet Union, but they don't like the president's emphasis on its evils.Sixty-four per cent think the Russians are just as afraid of nuclear war as we are.

The numbers of people who are worried about nuclear war have risen by 10% in the past year and the increase in anxiety is matched by a more dramatic rise in the number of Americans who do not believe that the United States can contain Russian influence everywhere in the world. Ninety-three per cent conclude that picking a fight is too dangerous in a nuclear world; more than three Americans in four want Mr Reagan and Mr Adropoff to meet, not sometime or in the near future, but now.

Whatever else these swings and pressures of public opinion may do in the New Year, I for one hope that they will at least refute a notion which is very widespread in Europe that Americans are a united, belligerent pack of 220 millions insensitive to negotiation lined up in a body behind the president and the keepers of the Pentagon. They are a divided and anxious and thoughtful nation, just like you.

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