Another Thought On The Bomb

[WKLJAZZ at aol.com]

  Spinning these thoughts out a bit more, I would suggest that the singular
horror of the atomic bombs (as opposed old-fashioned acts of war terror)
derives from the way in which they represent humanity's use of its most
brilliant minds and, therefore, most HUMAN elements (reason, consciousness,
intuition) for an act singularly inhumane.

  A dog can figure out that, to kill a squirrel, you just bite the thing more
and harder, making it bleed (or whatever) more or faster.  And the old
technology of war and terror was like that:  drop more exploding gunpowder,
make a hotter fire, carpet a greater portion of a city.  With the German V
rockets (and death camps) and the American A-bomb, however, nations turned
entire systems of established intelligence and scientific advance to a dark
purpose and were successful in generating death in ways that were not only
more efficient but also seductive.  (I know I'm into GR territory here, and I
don't mean to pass off these analyses as original, by the way.)  The ICBM,
embodied for the first time by the V rockets, is a thing of beauty, in a sick
sort of way.  It's arc, it's flight is poetry.  It's the Wright Brothers and
Dorothy & Toto and The Odyssey and a million other perfect myths perverted
and blackened and rotted from the inside out.  The Bomb is the same --
irresistable (to us, even now as we discuss it) and picturesque and
attractive, curvy or cock-like, take your pick.

   Though they may have killed "only" as many or fewer people than older
methods, and though the deaths themselves may have been no less horrible, the
Bomb and the Rocket are unique and -- Cold War or no Cold War -- marked an
irreversible turning point for us because they made systematic death so,
well, sexy.  They generated the weapons of that death from the very
intelligence and aesthetic that we like to believe makes us uniquely human
and elevates us above the rest of our, now, delicate world.

-- Will L.