Norbert and the Nukes

[Steelhead]

Thumbing through the vast archives of The Nation last night, I came across
a shocking essay on nuclear power by one of Pynchon's intellectual mentors,
the mathematician Norbert Wiener, author of Cybernetics: Or Control and
Communication in the Animal and Machine and the enormously influential The
Human Use of Human Beings.

No Luddite (or rocket scientist, apparently), Wiener embraces nuclear power
as not only a necessary evil, but a force capable of transforming society
along more utopian and orderly structures. The big question for Wiener was
whether or not the development of nuclear power would be controlled by
corporate energy cartels (which, in his view, could lead to fascism) or the
government (ie., the military scientists who ran the show at Los Alamos,
which would lead to a more orderly and efficient society).

Here's a taste of what the good doctor had to say in "Too Big for Private
Enterprise" (The Nation, 1950):

        "The importance of atomic energy depends, then, on the time scale
of which we are speaking. If we are speaking of decades, it is highly
questionable whether we should gain anything from the exploitation of
sources of atomic energy on a large scale. If we are talking of centuries,
we must begin to think very seriously of the use of atomic energy; and if
we are talking of milennia, there seems to be no hope for the continued
existence of the human race on a civilized level without the efficient
employment of atomic energy. If we can employ atomic energy without any
residual unused part, the now very questionable future of our human
occupation of this world may well be a matter of many millions of years,
and it becomes highly probable that the race's ultimate extinction will be
the result of intrinsic biological factors rather than of scarcity."

How wrong can you be? For me, this puts Pynchon's references to Wiener's
work in a whole new light. It's all a big joke. Wiener's little more than a
Nazi scientist with progressive credentials.

It gets worse.

        "We cannot escape the fact that atomic energy, if it is to pay off
at all, is 'big business.' It is much too big business to be allowed to
continue in the loose controll of private hands. It is business of the
order of magnitude of the state itself; and either the state must swallow
it or it must swallow the state."

What Herr Doktor misses, of course, is the fact that private companies
could never had constructed nuclear plants without the backing of the
State--to the tune of over a trillion dollars. Wiener also sidesteps the
fact that only the State would be likely to use the plutonium generated by
the nukes to fire up hydrogen warheads inside ICBMs.

Now things start to get really interesting.

        "The energy which is produced will not be in suitable form for the
propulsion of moderately sized vehicles or boats or implements. [Wiener
blew it on this one, again. There are tiny nuclear-powered subs menacing
nearly every shoreline on the planet.] In order to convert it to these
uses, we shall probably have to revise our entire concept of storage of
energy, and either greatly perfect our existing storage batteries or
manufacture synthetic fuels whose function it will be to act merely as safe
and controllable carriers of energy. We shall then use the large new wells
of power at our free disposition in order to revise our chemical and
metallurgical industries from the ground up...Again, we may hope for
synthetic plastics which will make the maximum use of a number of cheap and
plentiful materials, such as sand and limestone, together with some sort of
carbon."

Norbert was no environmentalist. In fact, it doesn't sound like the
professor got out much at all.

        "With large sources of atomic power available, the separation of
sea water from its salt will be much more practicable than at present, and
our rivers will replaced by pipe channels in which the freshened sea water
and such freshwater sources as are otherwise available will be pumped up
hill; so that our agriculture will depend on universal irrigation. This
will eliminate the large lacunae of practically unused country (!) which
still fill our maps and the eyes of travelers. This new country of the
future which we will be forced to create by the logic of our new atomic and
other inventions will be a man-made country, like Holland, and not a
nature-made country, like the greater part of the United States and
Russia."

Norbert goes for the kill.

        "Let it be noted that in the matter of tenure of land by fee
simple, Los Alamos is on the same basis as the Dutch polders. No person is
tolerated there if he has not function to fulfill, and there is no way in
which one can buy one's way into the community permanently. On the other
hand, the problem of personal freedom is probably more difficult, and less
adequately adjusted, in these military camps than in the new lands of the
Zuyder Zee. The new centralized atmosphere of the age to come is likely to
lead us in the direction of "big brotherism." This tendency must be
countered by a continual awareness of its dangerous possibilities [Ah, even
more paranoia for the masses!] In the future we can no more conserve our
liberties as squatters in areas of moral anarchy than we can be squatters
on the highly developed land on which all of us will live. We shall enjoy
our rights of freedom as explicit rights rather than merely as potential
servitudes which no one has yet taken the trouble to impose upon us."

And the nukes shall set you free.

Steelhead