Pointsman's obvious point ain't so obvious

[Monte Davis]

>  One of the more
> > > > obvious points in GR is that the V2 attacks,
> > > > unlike tomahawks, are random.

> I disagree. It's not  an obvious point in GR that the
> V2 attacks are random.

> but one of the most obvious and important ambiguities in 
> the novel, is the one about the randomness / percision of the V2 
> attacks, the rockets, THE ROCKET, etc.

> in chapter 33 of "minima moralia", written in los angeles in late 1944,
adorno 
> has an aphorism about the V-weapons, machines which he sees as
paradigmatic for 
> the fascist spirit of the time because in their subjectless accuracy of
aim... 

I don't know that it carries any weight in the domain of high metaphor, but
no one could have done the amount of research Pynchon did on the V-2/A-4
without knowing that as a matter of prosaic fact the missile was far from
accurate or "precise." According to http://www.cdiss.org/v2.htm its CEP (the
circle within which *half* the missiles would land) was 17 km/11 mi. in
diameter... i.e., an area of almost 80 square miles. So the targets were at
best "the Antwerp dock region" or "the East End of London." Twice as many
*missed* London as fell within its boundaries. On average, each V-2 that
*did* hit London killed 5 people and injured 30: psychologically powerful
because the missile was unstoppable, but trivial compared to the Blitz of
1940-41. 

This is more than a numbers game. On the Allied side, it was in part the
failure of the RAF's and USAAF's "precision" aerial bombing to destroy
specific hard targets (factories, command centers, rail junctions) that led
to the moral idiocy of city-burning, thousand-bomber raids. The inaccuracy
of ballistic missiles from the late 1950s through the early 1980s *required*
nuclear warheads -- and a "counter-population" strategy aimed at cities --
to make even tenuous military sense.

That's what the "window of vulnerability" and "first strike" arguments of
the 1980s were about: only then did missile accuracy become good enough that
a nuclear warhead might be able to destroy a missile in a  buried silo. And
that's the reason for the prominence of precision-guided munitions these
days: 60 or 70 years after the flyboys began claiming that "the bomber will
always get through," they can actually destroy what they're aiming at with
something less than an H-bomb.

So let's keep in mind that when Pynchon is talking about Poisson
distributions, he's talking about the real historical _Vergeltungswaffen_:
"vengeance" in effect because they could kill somebody somewhere in enemy
territory, but were too inaccurate and weak to affect the military
situation. When he's talking about a point-for-point correspondence with
Slothrop's conquests, about Something or Someone in Control, he's talking
about a *direction* or *tendency* of the technology that has become real
only many years later.

-Monte Davis