von Braun in the Rainbow

[Monte Davis]

> I'd like to encapsulate Dyson's statement
> of WvB's bombardment of London not interfering with
> business as usual... .
> it's callous to dismiss anybody's suffering as unimportant.

In the bomber raids of 1940-41, the experience of those in the target areas
was:

- several times a week (nightly at the height of the Blitz)

- minutes to hours of warning time to get to shelters (and worry)

- hours to overnight hearing multiple explosions from a cramped, anxious
shelter

- emerging to find whole neighborhoods of rubble and fire damage from tens
to hundreds of tons of high explosive

- and knowing you'd be doing it all over again soon

- all in a context of feeling the UK alone with German successes everywhere

With V-weapons in late 1944 to spring 1945, the experience was

- very little (V1) or no (V2) warning, and a single BLAMM somewhere

- from an isolated half-ton or ton of explosive almost randomly directed

- in a context of knowledge that German armies were retreating and German
cities were getting hundreds of times more punishment every night      

I don't think it's at all dismissive of any victim's experience, or requires
some special scientific/numerical detachment, to conclude that the latter
experience produced a lot less cumulative stress, especially for people
who'd already been through the former.

Pynchon invests the V2 with tremendous symbolic power: the eerie seeming
reversal of effect (BLAMM) and cause (screaming)... the thematic bridges
back to the arcs of Noah's rainbow and Newton/Leibniz's parabola... Tyrone's
stars, Poisson, paranoid meditations on randomness (or maybe not)... and our
knowledge as post-1973 readers that (1) military rocketry would go on to
enable the Space Dream as well, and (2) now we're *all* sitting at the end
of the rainbow, all the time, waiting for annihilating light. 

But of course, the Belgians and English in 1944-45 didn't know those last
two. Neuifeld and Dyson are writing not about GR's rich metaphors, but about
history. And in prosaic, as-it-was-experienced history, the V-weapon
campaign really was minor compared to the Blitz, and trivial compared to the
apocalypse visited on German cities. To fault Dyson or Neufeld for not
matching Pynchon's impact seems to me like faulting King Leopold's Ghost for
not being Heart of Darkness.