The Rocket and The Bomb

Thu May 4 09:26:37 CDT 2017

Yes, and for that honor to him, Markey, Merkley, Franken, Rep. Blumenauer
and a handful of others... and shame to almost everyone else, for how
little discussion or even attention it received.

Garry Wills' fine _Bomb Power_ is mostly about how nuclear weapons changed
the nature of presidential power,  but along the way he does a lot to
explain how Congress  -- and citizens -- accepted a much narrower range of
what can be debated, what is considered realistic vs. utopian, in that
domain. The secrecy and atom-spy mania of the early Cold War was a crucial
seedbed for the much broader "national security -- don't ask" mindset we're
still wrestling with.

https://www.amazon.com/Bomb-Power-Presidency-National-Security/dp/1594202400

On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 7:15 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> In the recent election for POTUS only Sanders enthusiastically supported
> the SANE Act.
>
> https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/s831
>
> On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 4:43 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>  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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> [image: https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif]
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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