TRP, Science, re Zone ing the post-modern heavens, credentials

[Monte Davis]

JT > I find  that  Pynchon's framing of the issues seems increasingly less
literary/imaginative  and more like multilayered description.

My sons loved Dr. Strangelove right off the bat. They loved it even more
after I explained that yes, the Doomsday Device really had been imagined in
1950  by Leo Szilard as the mad, logical endpoint of shrinking warning and
response times: eventually we'll just have to take people out of the
decision process. 

What Szilard had advanced as a warning, parodic _reductio ad adsurdum_ was
then taken up seriously by very smart game-theory types advising the DoD
strategic planners. Nobody actually built a Doomsday Device -- but we got
Mutual Assured Destruction, which is close enough for government work.