Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions Read Online Free Page B
Author: Martin Amis
nuclear weapons are unbelievable: they defy belief, they are beyond belief. Do we really see the train — do we really see the preposterous savagery of fifty-eight million tons of TNT?
The atom bomb, said J. Robert Oppenheimer, who put the first one together, 'is shit'. It's just 'a big bang'. He had felt rather differently after the Alamogordo test: 'I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture ... "Now I am become death, shatterer of worlds." ' Both intuitions are quite accurate. Everything and nothing. If they become everything, we become nothing. If they become nothing, we become everything, all over again. So which is it going to be?
One flight down from Marcus Raskin at the Institute for Policy Studies you will find William Arkin, who describes himself as America's 'most troublesome nuclear weapons expert'. His office resembles that of an ecstatically disciplined academic — the room is information-crammed, yet orderly, alphabetical, fingertip. Behind the cover of his beard and glasses, Arkin seems at first to exude the brusqueness and glaze of the far-gone nukie: you feel you are keeping him from higher things. And so you are.
There is a kind of nuke chat that sounds like masochism - amused, collusive, cheerfully scandalised. You talk about government policies as if you were talking about your children, their pointless delinquencies, their cute inanities. (You know what they did? Have you heard what they're doing now?) For a while Arkin and I did this kind of nuke chat. He told me about the $6,000 nuclear-hardened coffee pot, the 'readiness to test' facility at Johnston Island, south of Hawaii. Then his manner changed, and I sensed what I was to sense many times in Washington: a desire to escape complexity, to escape detail and the proliferation of detail, a desire to change the language, to edge back toward first principles.
'What you have to understand, what you have to make clear, is that the nuclear arsenal is a living organism, constantly adjusted, refined, alerted, programmed, mobilised. Under Reagan we have shifted from prevention to preparation. They're not interested in World War III. They're interested in World War IV. The nuclear war plan spans 180 days. It's a confession of inevitability — "it can't not happen" — though it's so fucking complicated that they can't even see it ... Nuclear war is not just an idea. The whole planet is wired up for it.'
Nuclear geography - or cosmology — is a pressing theme in Arkin's work. You read him and listen to him with scepticism, with trepidation, because he is telling you that the nuclear arsenal is not nowhere — it is everywhere. Every minute, in thousands of locations, in the oceans, in the heavens, there are reports, readings, dispatches, exercises, posturings, provocations. The Defense Mapping Agency has 'digitised' one third of the earth's 39 million square miles; scientists monitor the weather, the upper atmosphere, sun spots, meteor trails; they study 'gravity intensity profiles' and cloud-particle characteristics (for 'nose-cone erosion testing applications'). The highest detection spacecraft is a third of the way to the moon; even the innocent quasars, among the most distant objects in the universe, are pressed into service (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) for superaccurate readings of the earth's rotation and polar motion. Meanwhile, planners of postwar 'reconstitution' call hotels 'strategic locations' and wonder whether the cable-TV network meets 'national security specifications'. Meanwhile, the National Weather Service feeds wind data into civil-defence computers twice daily to update fallout forecasts. Everything and nothing (but mostly everything), a pullulating reality dependent upon thousands of assumptions, all of them untested, all of them untestable.
Military science is deeply interested in the planet, in nature. But what kind of interest is it? It is national interest. Let us look further. (Leave no stone unturned: it might
The atom bomb, said J. Robert Oppenheimer, who put the first one together, 'is shit'. It's just 'a big bang'. He had felt rather differently after the Alamogordo test: 'I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture ... "Now I am become death, shatterer of worlds." ' Both intuitions are quite accurate. Everything and nothing. If they become everything, we become nothing. If they become nothing, we become everything, all over again. So which is it going to be?
One flight down from Marcus Raskin at the Institute for Policy Studies you will find William Arkin, who describes himself as America's 'most troublesome nuclear weapons expert'. His office resembles that of an ecstatically disciplined academic — the room is information-crammed, yet orderly, alphabetical, fingertip. Behind the cover of his beard and glasses, Arkin seems at first to exude the brusqueness and glaze of the far-gone nukie: you feel you are keeping him from higher things. And so you are.
There is a kind of nuke chat that sounds like masochism - amused, collusive, cheerfully scandalised. You talk about government policies as if you were talking about your children, their pointless delinquencies, their cute inanities. (You know what they did? Have you heard what they're doing now?) For a while Arkin and I did this kind of nuke chat. He told me about the $6,000 nuclear-hardened coffee pot, the 'readiness to test' facility at Johnston Island, south of Hawaii. Then his manner changed, and I sensed what I was to sense many times in Washington: a desire to escape complexity, to escape detail and the proliferation of detail, a desire to change the language, to edge back toward first principles.
'What you have to understand, what you have to make clear, is that the nuclear arsenal is a living organism, constantly adjusted, refined, alerted, programmed, mobilised. Under Reagan we have shifted from prevention to preparation. They're not interested in World War III. They're interested in World War IV. The nuclear war plan spans 180 days. It's a confession of inevitability — "it can't not happen" — though it's so fucking complicated that they can't even see it ... Nuclear war is not just an idea. The whole planet is wired up for it.'
Nuclear geography - or cosmology — is a pressing theme in Arkin's work. You read him and listen to him with scepticism, with trepidation, because he is telling you that the nuclear arsenal is not nowhere — it is everywhere. Every minute, in thousands of locations, in the oceans, in the heavens, there are reports, readings, dispatches, exercises, posturings, provocations. The Defense Mapping Agency has 'digitised' one third of the earth's 39 million square miles; scientists monitor the weather, the upper atmosphere, sun spots, meteor trails; they study 'gravity intensity profiles' and cloud-particle characteristics (for 'nose-cone erosion testing applications'). The highest detection spacecraft is a third of the way to the moon; even the innocent quasars, among the most distant objects in the universe, are pressed into service (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) for superaccurate readings of the earth's rotation and polar motion. Meanwhile, planners of postwar 'reconstitution' call hotels 'strategic locations' and wonder whether the cable-TV network meets 'national security specifications'. Meanwhile, the National Weather Service feeds wind data into civil-defence computers twice daily to update fallout forecasts. Everything and nothing (but mostly everything), a pullulating reality dependent upon thousands of assumptions, all of them untested, all of them untestable.
Military science is deeply interested in the planet, in nature. But what kind of interest is it? It is national interest. Let us look further. (Leave no stone unturned: it might
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