MB DRO ROSHI

[Monte Davis]

Alan Moore gets it wrong in one respect: the A-bomb didn't make the rocket
obsolete, but would soon make it supreme.

In the last eight months of the European war, the A4/V-2 was terrifying
because it was new and unstoppable. It was also not much of a weapon. All
the V-2s ever launched delivered less high explosive than a few nights of
Allied bombing raids on Berlin (or Tokyo), and with even less accuracy.

The A-bombs of 1945 were much too heavy and bulky to be warheads for a V-2.
But over the next ten years, they -- and then the H-bomb, 100 to 100 times
more powerful -- grew more compact as Peenemunde veterans helped the US and
USSR create larger rockets with longer range. Accuracy improved less
rapidly, but that was OK: with warhead yields in megatons, it hardly
mattered if they detonated a few miles off the aim point.

The BOMARC long-range anti-aircraft missile Pynchon wrote about at Boeing
in 1960-62 had its own smaller nuclear warhead, and could have done a lot
of damage to squadrons of Soviet bombers towards the end of a 12-hour
flight over the Arctic. (Sorry about that, Canada.) But as Pynchon and
Boeing and the generals knew -- had known since before it was deployed --
it didn't have a chance of intercepting ICBMs on a 25-minute arc from
launch to target. That's where we were when GR was written, and where we've
been for fifty years.

So GR foreshadows the prospective "marriage" (to adopt Pynchon's disturbing
_liebestod_ imagery) of A4 and Hiroshima technologies, not the supersession
of the Rocket by the Bomb.



On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 4:26 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> http://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Cover-up-Soldiers-Hiroshima-Nagasaki/dp/1468127403/
>
> On Tuesday, August 6, 2013, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > "Do you suppose something has exploded somewhere?  Really--somewhere
> > in the East?  Another Krakatoa?  Another name at least that exotic
> > ..." (GR, Pt. IV, p. 642)
> >
> >    "At the instant it happened, the pale Virgin was rising in the
> > east, head, shoulders, breasts, 17° 36' down to her maidenhead at
> > the.horizon.  A few doomed Japanese knew of her as some Western deity.
> > She loomed in the eastern sky gazing down at the city about to be
> > sacrificed.  The sun was in Leo.  The fireburst came roaring and
> > sovereign ..." (GR, Pt. IV, p. 684)
> >
> > ".. a scrap of newspaper headline, with a wire photo of a giant white
> > cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic bush.
> > The letters
> >
> > MB DRO
> > ROSHI
> >
> > appear above with the logo of some occupation newspaper ..." (GR, Pt.
> > IV, p. 693)
> >
> > The Enola Gay
> >
> > 588; The Enola Gay, a B-29 built by Pynchon's previous employer Boeing
> > Aircraft, dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
> >
> > http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/e.html
> > http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=E
> >
> > Hiroshima
> >
> > 480; "a city on Honshu, the Inland Sea" in Japan, where Ensign
> > Morituri & family live; "Do you suppose something has exploded
> > somewhere? Really--somewhere in the East" 642; "MB DRO ROSHI" 693
> >
> > http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/h.html
> > http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=H
> >
> > MB DRO ROSHI
> >
> > When discussing GR, the writer Alan Moore recalled this sequence as
> > "the whole point of the novel... It’s just this bit of burnt paper
> > that, if you put it together, talks about America dropping the atom
> > bomb on Hiroshima. Which is of course, the end of the V bomb, which
> > has been made obsolete. Gravity’s got a new rainbow."
> >
> >
> http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_674-700#Page_693
> > http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/12/alan-moore-dodgem-logic/3/
> >
> > "Part 3: In the Zone" comprises 32 episodes, a number some speculate
> > is related to the gravitational acceleration of 32 feet per second per
> > second and also bearing significance to the Kabbalistic tradition. The
> > action of Part 3 is set during the summer of 1945 with some analepses
> > to the time period of Part 2 with most events taking place between
> > May18 and August 6; the day of the first atomic bomb attack and also
> > the Feast of the Transfiguration.
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity's_Rainbow
> >
> > August 6 is the Feast of the Transfiguration, the celebration of the
> > day when Jesus revealed his divinity to Peter, John, and James on the
> > top of Mount Tabor. (Matthew 17:2 and Mark 9:2.) It has been called
> > "the culminating point of His public life, as His baptism is its
> > starting point and His ascension its end." As an actual holiday, the
> > Feast of the Transfiguration had its origins in the forth century. It
> > is believed that it was substituted for an early pagan feast called
> > Vatavarh, or Roseflame, held in honor of Aphrodite. In an ironic
> > pairing typical of Gravity's Rainbow, this feast coincides with
> > another event on August 6, 1945: the dropping of the atomic bomb on
> > Hiroshima.
> >
> > http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_granalysis.html
> >
> > Through the clever placement of ironic transformations and satirical
> > inversions, there are several focal points throughout the work where
> > two opposing images exist simultaneously, setting up an ironic
> > dissonance -- the fact that Hiroshima occurs on the Feast of the
> > Transfiguration, for example, or that Easter Sunday corresponds to
> > April Fool's Day. Is there a message in such a dissonance? Which image
> > contains the greater truth, or is the truth to be found in the
> > juxtaposition itself? Or do we truly dwell in an observer-created
> > reality, where the only meaning we are allowed is what we create from
> > the primal chaos, where all connections we see are fictions, imposed
> > by us upon the universe in order to maintain an illusion of
> > understanding, a ghost of control....
> >
> > http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_grintro.html
> >
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