The Rocket and The Bomb

Tue May 2 15:43:10 CDT 2017

 Gravity’s Rainbow begins with air-raid sirens. It ends by linking a mad,
perverted, transcendence-seeking rocket launch in 1945 to the dT instant
before detonation of a warhead -- right here, right now. Its title
signifies both a ballistic parabola and a remix of Noah’s rainbow: God’s
promise of no more floods (but the fire next time).

That has special resonance for Baby Boomers like me, who were born and grew
up between Gottfried's flight and Richard M. Zhlubb's resignation. You
post-Boomers know the big picture if not the details: the US that we grew
up in was enjoying (if "we" were white well-educated Anglo males, of
course) its most prosperous, world-dominating years. It was also, in the
Cold War and nuclear arms race, vulnerable and frightened in ways it had
never been before. Disneyland meets “duck-and-cover” drills, Conelrad tests
between Elvis songs on the AM radio, yada yada.

Since joining the P-list almost 25 years ago, I’ve periodically nattered on
about how the linkage of the Rocket (throughout) and the Bomb (peeking from
that scrap of newspaper Tyrone finds), connecting GR’s first and last
pages, is among the most central of P’s patented “offstage but central”
historical elements – like the Holocaust (and most of the war itself) in
GR, the foreshadowings of the US’ western expansion and the Civil War in
M&D,  the Chums’ glimpses of WWI from above the clouds in AtD, etc.

Current events involving various rockets, bombs, and Scarsdale Vibe’s
wayward grandson Donald -- along with some other exchanges here and on FB
W.A.S.T.E. -- got me thinking about this again. Instead of big-picture
blather, here are one Boomer’s personal snapshots that may explain why I
just can’t quit the topic:

1960, a precocious 10-year-old read John Hersey's _Hiroshima_.  Both my
parents had been Marines in the Pacific, and I’d never questioned the need
to defeat those Very Bad Japanese. But as I read I thought: “This is just
wrong. Pearl Harbor, Bataan death march, atrocities in China – I don’t
care, nothing makes this right." Not because the A-bomb was uniquely
horrible, but because annihilating cities and civilians just didn’t *fit*
with the proud narrative I wanted, of soldiers and sailors and pilots
fighting their counterparts. Over the next 15 years, on my way towards
writing brief pop histories of WWI and WWII in the 1970s, I’d learn about
how little the "strategic" bombing of Japan and Germany actually
contributed to victory. Before WWII began we’d committed ourselves to heavy
bombing as a doctrine – and when it turned out to be incapable of
paralyzing war production and logistics as planned, we turned to attacking
cities on a much greater scale than the earlier Axis "terror bombings" of
Guernica, Warsaw, London, Chungking etc. And when at last it *did* seem to
work in August 1945, we decided that would be a pillar of our national
security. No more Blitzes, no more Holocausts, because we’d be equipped to
do both much bigger and faster – purely as a deterrent, mind you.

1962, the Cuban missile crisis. A space & rocketry nerd, I knew nerdy stuff
about missile technology -- including the fact that very soon, inevitably,
the USSR would have hundreds of ICBMs (intercontinental) at home, far more
threatening than a handful of IRBMs (intermediate-range) in Cuba. I was
scared. I was angry at Khrushchev for gambling to fill the interval ("OK,
you have rockets and bombers close to us in Europe and Turkey and Japan and
Korea, we'll put some close to you"). I was also angry at Kennedy for going
to the brink when the best possible outcome would make us a bit safer for
two years or so. Afterward, I was angry at all the Free World pundits for
treating a dick-waving contest as a triumph of resolute courage.

1964, ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb.’ In its black-humor slapstick approach to Very Serious Matters, this
was Gravity's Rainbow _avant la lettre_ for me. All the deserved praise for
its bold satire seemed to fall short, because satire implies exaggeration –
and with its B-52 bombers approaching the USSR for hours while statesmen
frantically conferred, the movie wasn’t half as extravagantly insane as the
truth. Outside the theater, our dawdling aircraft had already been
reassigned to “follow up” our missiles, which would arrive 25 minutes after
launch from Missouri and the Dakotas, or in half that time from a Polaris
submarine. Talk fast, President Muffley!

1967, a summer job walking the streets of Harlem and Spanish Harlem for the
Army Corps of Engineers, surveying building basements as potential fallout
shelter sites to be stocked with food and water and filtered ventilation
kits. This was late in a decade-long, nationwide program that was supposed
to save millions of lives if "the balloon goes up." But civil-defense
drills had tailed off years before -- and there was *no fucking trace* of
the extensive planning and frequent practice that would be essential to
actually get people into these shelters on panicky short notice. Like the
man sez in GR, "The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre."

1982, I admired Orville Schell's 'The Fate of the Earth,' which described
 the possibility that all-out nuclear war might cause a mini-ice age that
could kill most if not all of humanity. I was happy that it revived
pressure for disarmament. But I also wondered: “Jeez, *this* is what it
takes to get our attention now? The familiar prospect of just killing a
billion people quickly and kicking civilization back to 1900 or so wasn’t
enough?”

1983, Reagan promotes SDI ("Star Wars"). Overwhelmingly, those who
understood the technologies quickly concluded that (1) with enough money
and time we might be able to intercept 100 or even 1000 warheads, but that
(2) it would take the USSR less money and time to add another 2000 or 5000
warheads and decoys. The response from SDI advocates was, and still is,
essentially high-tech Mr. Micawber: "Something will turn up."

(A few years later, it emerged that only when visiting the Strategic Air
Command after his first election had Reagan realized that we didn’t *have*
a defense against ICBM attack – only deterrence and retaliation. For
roughly twenty years, a rising GOP star on his way to the Oval Office,
speaking often about the Red menace and the need for more defense spending,
had simply not known the most central fact of the matter. And you worry
about Trump?

Lately, less worried about nukes in the former Red menaces (or the UK and
France and Israel and India and Pakistan), we’ve indulged in vapors over
Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. “Sure,” say the Very Serious People, “we told
you in 1949 about how dangerous it was for a brutal dictator in Moscow to
have The Bomb, in 1964 about how dangerous it was for a brutal dictator in
Beijing to have it, in 2002 about the brutal dictator in Baghdad who --
oopsie! But trust us, those guys in Tehran and Pyongyang are different.
They're *crazy.* Maybe we can cut deals with Moscow and Beijing to help
restrain them..?"

Meanwhile, President Obama – the one who made us feel there was adult
supervision – signed off last year on a 30-year, trillion-dollar commitment
to  “redesigned nuclear warheads, as well as new nuclear bombers,
submarines, land-based missiles, weapons labs and production plants.” Not
more nukes (and there *are* a lot fewer than in the 1960s), just a
technological upgrade of the 2016 status quo. To maintain deterrence,
because without it the world would be a more dangerous place. Does Obama
regret it? Very likely. Was he more able to just say “no” than his
predecessors since Harry Truman? No.

Thomas Pynchon didn’t make all this up -- but it really sounds like him,
doesn’t it? .

+++

Based on no evidence at all, I like to imagine that Berlin 1948 and Suez
1956 and Berlin 1961 and Cuba 1962 affected young Pynchon the way these
affected me… that maybe working at Boeing was for him what the
fallout-shelter survey was for me. Spend a little time in some corner of
the belly of the beast, and it stays with you.

Based on more evidence, I believe that throughout his books, he's trying --
among many other things -- to get at *what kind of crazy we are* to keep
acting this way… digging back past the 20th century, to the Industrial
Revolution and calculus and Calvinism and the Age of Exploration and
mythology, to Adam’s goddamned Fall, to trace all the roots.

To suggest, maybe, with savage and compassionate artistry, that after all
these years of dealing with our fear of death and submission by building
ever grander systems of death and domination, we might want to try
something else.

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