The Rocket and The Bomb

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Thank you very much for your recollections and thoughts, 
Monte!

As for the present situation, this may be of interest:

http://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/medialibrary/2017/04/21/94c24315/Beyond%20the%20Nuclear%20Threshold.pdf

Including a reference to an incident in 1995 that I was 
not aware of:

'A frightening example of things going terribly wrong was 
provided by the 1995 accident
involving the launch of a Norwegian geodesic rocket, which 
was taken for a Trident 2
missile, triggering the Russian early warning system. The 
event was urgently reported to
the president, the “Cheget” system was activated, and 
Boris Yeltsin, as he said later, for
several minutes held his finger “on the nuclear button” – 
until the incident was settled.'

The tensions are, of course, fueled by a constant barrage 
of atrocity propaganda in the service of the empire:

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/04/lets-call-western-media-coverage-of-syria-for-what.html

Howard's brilliant article makes abundantly clear why many 
people on the left, including myself, nowadays do not 
trust the NYT (or the Washington Post or the Guardian or 
the Zeit or the Spiegel) at all when it comes to 
geopolitics: "They keep pumping out the propaganda, day 
in, day out, never stopping to reflect on the potential 
consequences."

The potential consequences, of course, include 
thermonuclear war.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l