Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions Read Online Free Page A

books on the question, I had come to Washington to read a yard more, to talk and to listen, to peer into the nuclear campus. People came up with all these nuclear weapons, and then nuclear weapons came up with all these people — thinkers, minders — to wonder what to do with them, what to do about them, how to do without them.
    'Some of these guys', one expert told me, 'are nukies for life. Only one subject. Nukes this. Nukes that.' Their office walls are sandbagged with nuclear literature, their floors are heaped with nuclear dossiers and printouts. They like maps, graphs, blackboards. They tend to talk with almost inhuman rapidity: you sit there listening to cascades of acronyms, blizzards of abbreviations. In some of their faces you can make out the orbits of strain, of moral care; but many of the boys in the school have the superanimation, the robust esprit of the gratified hobbyist. Two things immediately strike you - or they struck me. There are no women here. And there are no smokers.
    This last point exercised me above and beyond the familiar torment of nicotine denial. Halfway through an afternoon of intense discussion, with my lungs starting to sob and plead for their customary half-hourly snack, I would sometimes master the usual feelings of shame and criminality, and say, 'Would you mind if I had a cigarette?' 'Yes, I would, actually' was the standard reply. With shared embarrassment we would then lurch back into our X-ray lasers and hard-kill capabilities. Even if you get them out of the office and into a bar, they cough and gag and fan themselves the instant you get burning. It seems discrepant that these connoisseurs of thermal pulse and superstellar temperatures, these fireball merchants and inferno artists should all go green at the sight of a Marlboro. But you are going to get discrepancies — comic, tragic, pathetic - when your subject is nuclear weapons.
     
    Nuclear weapons are everything and nothing. This is their genius. On the one hand, they are bargaining chips, pawns in a propaganda contest, peace-keepers — mutually cancelling, a double bluff we all go along with. They are nothing. How can anyone get hurt by an 'umbrella' ? On the other hand, nuclear weapons are what they are and do what they do: they multiply matter by the speed of light squared; they deal in tons of blood and rubble; they are instruments of mass destruction. They are everything, because they can destroy everything. It's just as well, for their sake, that they sometimes look like nothing.
    Marcus Raskin, who is now at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, tells the following story about his time with the 'strategic community' under Kennedy. This was 1961. Word came through that the Soviet Union was about to test a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb. Everybody reached for their circular slide rules. 'Fifty thousand tons,' people were calmly muttering. 'Four times Hiroshima.' It took several minutes before they realised what they were dealing with: not the equivalent of fifty thousand tons of TNT, but the equivalent of fifty million tons of TNT. And these were experts who thought about little else. As Raskin says, if you stare at nuclear weapons long enough, you start to lose your grip on what they are, what they do.
    Actually, it was more like sixty million tons of TNT: fifty-eight megatons, the biggest bang ever. A train carrying the Hiroshima yield in TNT form would take up four miles of track. A train carrying the equivalent of the Soviet H-bomb would put a girdle round the earth at the latitude of London with a three-thousand-mile overlap. Military strategists, of course, have a special contempt for such Believe-It-or-Not formulations. And that contempt is understandable. For at moments like these, nuclear weapons edge out of their shadowland; they edge out of nothing and start heading for everything. We see them, but do we really believe them? Believe it or not. Believe it or else. Luckily for them (but not for us),