reliable. In Star Wars, as elsewhere, Professor Thompson shows himself to be the fit exponent of the nuclear High Style. He is witty and grand, writing with the best kind of regulated hatred. How devastating he is, for example, on the SDI public-relations effort. From the confidential literature:
Innumberable opportunities for highly visible 'cause' activism could be opened up… interest to Catholics also… Such a ratification effort would permit the White House to look good in confronting powerful anti-BMD domestic critics… addresses 'Eurostrategic' issues, which are big today… play freely on high-road ethical themes (by far the best mobilizational approach)…
Thompson is devastating about SDI; his case is well-nigh complete. But he will devastate nobody-indeed, he may even subvert the converted-because he has no respect for tone.
His tone is lax, impatient, often desperately uncertain; it is excitedly alarmist; it takes pleasure in stupidity. His anti-Americanism ('the US of A is inherently moral,' 'President of Planet Earth,' 'I want you Commies to come out with your hands up') is as dated and grueling, and as much a matter of stock response, as the counterprejudices of Lord Chalfont. Thompson also makes jokes. He likes this joke so well that he cracks it twice:
Already, the soon-to-be President warned, the window [of vulnerability] might be so wide open that 'the Russians could just take us with a phone call.' 'Hallo! Mr. Reagan, is zat you? Tovarich Brezhnev here. Come on out with your hands up, or I put zis Bomb through the window!'
Everything in you recoils from this. You sit back and rub your eyes, wondering how much damage it has done. For in the nuclear debate, as in no other, the penalty for such lapses is incalculable. Human beings are unanimous about nuclear weapons; human institutions are not. Our hopes lie in a gradual symbiosis. We must find the language of unanimity.
I argue with my father about nuclear weapons. In this debate, we are all arguing with our fathers. They emplaced or maintained the status quo. They got it hugely wrong. They failed to see the nature of what they were dealing with- the nature of the weapons-and now they are trapped in the new reality, trapped in the great mistake. Perhaps there will be no hope until they are gone. Out on the fringes there are people who believe that we ought to start killing certain of our fathers, before they kill us. This reminds me of the noble syllogism (adduced by Schell) of Failed Deterrence: 'He, thinking I was about to kill him in self-defense, was about to kill me in self- defense. So I killed him in self-defense.' Yes, and then he killed me in retaliation, from the grave. Our inherited reality is infinitely humiliating. We must try to do a little better.
My father regards nuclear weapons as an unbudgeable given. They will always be necessary because the Soviets will always have them and the Soviets will always want to enslave the West. Arms agreements are no good because the Soviets will always cheat. Unilateral disarmament equals surrender. And anyway, it isn't a case of 'red or dead.' The communist world is itself nuclear-armed and deeply divided: so it's a case of 'red and dead.'
Well, dead, at any rate, is what this prescription seems to me to promise. Nuclear weapons, my father reminds me, have deterred war for forty years. I remind him that no global abattoir presided over the century-long peace that followed Napoleon's discomfiture in 1815. And the trouble with deterrence is that it can't last out the necessary time-span, which is roughly between now and the death of the sun. Already it is falling apart from within. When I say that America is as much of a threat as the Soviet Union my father categorizes me as someone who takes democracy lightly, who takes freedom lightly. But of course it is the weapons themselves that are the threat. Ironically, an autocracy is much the better equipped to deal with this question, because the question is superpolitical. There is no one for the Soviets to deal with-leaders of sharply deteriorating caliber, beset by democracy, by politics, and doing six-month stints between midterm elections, lame-duck periods, and the informal referenda of American public life. And there is money, the money. It would seem, at the time of writing, that the Soviet Union can't afford to go on and that the United States can't afford to stop. Saul Bellow has written that there are certain evils-war and money are the examples he gives-that have the power to survive identification as evils. They cheerfully continue, as evils, as known evils. Could it be a further accomplishment of nuclear weapons that they have united these continuations, in a process of terminal decay? So the world ends in the same way The Pardoner's Tale ends, with the human actors gone, leaving behind (though no one will find them) the spent weapons and the unspent money, the weapons and the money.
Anyone who has read my father's work will have some idea of what he is like to argue with. When I told him that I was writing about nuclear weapons, he said, with a lilt, 'Ah. I suppose you're… 'against them,' are you?' Epater les bien-pensants is his rule. (Once, having been informed by a friend of mine that an endangered breed of whales was being systematically turned into soap, he replied, 'It sounds like quite a good way of using up whales.' Actually he likes whales, I think, but that's not the point.) I am reliably ruder to my father on the subject of nuclear weapons than on any other, ruder than I have been to him since my teenage years. I usually end by saying something like, 'Well, we'll just have to wait until you old bastards die off one by one.' He usually ends by saying something like, 'Think of it. Just by closing down the Arts Council we could significantly augment our arsenal. The grants to poets could service a nuclear submarine for a year. The money spent on a single performance of Rosenkavalier might buy us an extra neutron warhead. If we closed down all the hospitals in London we could…' The satire is accurate in a way, for I am merely going on about nuclear weapons; I don't know what to do about them.
We abandon the subject. Our sessions end amicably. We fall to admiring my one-year-old son. Perhaps he will know what to do about nuclear weapons. I, too, will have to die off. Perhaps he will know what to do about them. It will have to be very radical, because there is nothing more radical than a nuclear weapon and what it can do.
Another satirical voice in the debate is that of Civil Defense. Unlike Professor Thompson's, these jokes are funny. Civil Defense Against Nuclear Attack-the concept is a joke in itself. There are only two words to be said, and they are forget it. Nevertheless, books on this subject continue to appear. I suppose someone has to write them, but the whole genre is scuppered by subhuman bathos. It is like trying to acquaint the Royal Family with the consolations of life in a blood-soaked lean-to, or a medieval field hospital. (And, against this particular backdrop, every family is a royal family.) In the nuclear hospital, by another feral irony, there will be a reversed triage: only the comparatively healthy are considered treatable. The process of nuclear inversion is complete when one realizes that the correct attitude to nuclear war is one of suicidal defeatism. Let no one think that it is thinkable. Dispel any interest in surviving, in lasting. Have no part of it. Be ready to turn in your hand. For myself and my loved ones, I want the heat, which comes at the speed of light. I don't want to have to hang about for the blast, which idles along at the speed of sound. There is only one defense against nuclear attack, and that is a cyanide pill. Recently I came across an American offering, Civil Defense in Nuclear Attack: A Family Protection Guide by Capt. T. Kalogroulis. It is a peach. It is also full of illiteracies and misprints ('A schematic illustration of the blast wave is shown in the neat page?'). But I imagine we can live with that. After a nuclear attack, I imagine we can live with a few misprints. The book begins with the Justification-the justification for all this ghoulish prattle. 'The Communist aim is world domination… they will use nuclear blackmail based on their boasted capabilities. And they are prepared to use force if they need to and can afford the risk.' That if is not a big one, because the Soviets 'might accept a risk in human and property losses that we would not consider risking. They are hardened to losses.' The enemy is not made of flesh and blood but of hide and ice; to them, nuclear holocausts are meat and drink. Over the page, Captain Kalogroulis lists the 'strategic advantages of population protection.' There are seven of them. Number four states that 'protection of the people gives meaning to all military defense; the latter has no meaning if the populations perishes.' What meaning does the former have, if the population perishes? Here is number five:
Our leading military authorities agree that ability to limit our casualties in event of an attack has definite military advantages. It would mean that an enemy must commit greater military and economic strength to the venture. It would thus take him longer to attain capability.
