Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (4 page)

Some people, you might reasonably conclude, are never satisfied. 'You've heard about
smart
weapons? Well, now they have
brilliant
weapons.' Around the corner from the Institute for Policy Studies is the Committee for National Security - situated, appropriately enough, above a pizza parlour called Vesuvio's. My interlocutor was Robert English, mustachioed, bright-eyed, casually dapper: another young expert in another smokeless zone. 'There's this "deep-interdiction" or assault-breaker weapon called Skeet. You fire a missile deep into enemy lines, and it dispenses submunitions about the size of hockey pucks that will seek out enemy tanks.' If there are no tanks around, the brilliant weapon will brilliantly hang around until some enemy tanks show up. Robert English smiles and shrugs and shakes his head.

'It's the saddest story. With Gorbachev things are
really
different. Look at the moratorium on testing. Instead of an American response, you just get a series of excuses. They say that the Soviets had just finished "an orgy of tests". They say that because we don't have a "command economy" our scientists will go off and make toys unless they get a regular blast. It's always
toys,
for some reason . . . Recently there was some bilateral agreement on a new emphasis on "imprecisely located weapons": small, mobile, land-based missiles. Crisis-stable. A good idea for both sides. It's now becoming clear from the Department of Energy figures that money is being spent on an enhanced electromagnetic pulse weapon that would release electrons over a wide area. What would this weapon be directed against? "Imprecisely located targets." It happens again and again. It really is the saddest story.'

If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, then the Reagan era can be seen as an eight-year blackout. Numb, pale, unhealthily dreamless: eight years of DO
NOT DISTURB.
This was the Reagan Sleep, when America crashed. Now, perhaps, we have started to come to, at last.

Now we notice the state of the linen and feel the airlessness of the room. We look in the mirror and see the patchy beard, the spiked hair, the crimson eyes.

During the early years of the decade, the fresh faces in Reagan's apparat began talking about nuclear weapons in a new tone, a tone of subhuman frivolity.

'Soviet leaders would have to choose between peacefully changing their Communist system ... or going to war.'

'Nuclear war is a destructive thing, but still in large part a physics problem.'

'It would be a terrible mess, but it wouldn't be unmanageable.'

'Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors, and then throw three feet of dirt on top ... If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it.'

'I do not think the real danger of the situation is nuclear war and mass destruction; I think the danger is political coercion.'

'I've always worried less about what would happen in an actual nuclear war exchange than about the effect that the nuclear balance has on our willingness to take risks in local situations.'

One would have thought that there was nothing more 'worrying' than an 'actual nuclear war exchange'. But Richard Perle evidently managed to come up with something even more worrying: American prudence. When a powerful man bandies such discrepancies, he is sure to get himself mythologised: 'Dr No', 'The Prince of Darkness'. We fictionalise him, we send him off to nothingland with his nuke pets, his nuke familiars. Perle is gone now, and to hell with him; but he was real, and the policies were real. They brought people out into the streets in their hundreds of thousands.

In 1983 came the President's 'vision', the Strategic Defense Initiative, soon to be nicknamed Star Wars; a different fiction, a kind of science fiction, was consolingly emplaced.

Most of us believe, incorrectly but with good reason, that we live under the auspices of Mutual Assured Destruction. In fact, the Soviet Union has never subscribed to MAD; and neither has the United States, except for a brief period in the Sixties (when McNamara briefly allowed the notion to hold sway as a means of heading off military procurements). The underlying strategy has always been something else: preemption, counterforce, escalation dominance, prevailing, denying victory to the Soviet Union. Or, if you prefer,
winning,
which in turn means
going first.
Why then does MAD continue to loom in the public consciousness? Because it is an accurate description of reality. Whatever the policy, whatever the plan, MAD will be the result. Mutual Assured Destruction is not an arrangement between the US and the USSR. It is an arrangement between human beings and nuclear weapons.

Strategic thinking always rotates and loops back on itself, as it must. The ballistic missile defence idea, for instance, has been around since 1946, long before there were any ballistic missiles to defend against, and has popped up every ten years or so. Predictably, the
winning
idea is a year older and has gamely survived the appearance of thirty thousand nuclear warheads on the other side. Nuclear-war fighting, 'prevailing', has normally been kept at the think-tank, worst-case level, wheeled out in times of crisis or belligerence — and wheeled back in again when the planners saw the 'collateral damage' or when the public saw the planners. But the Reagan emphasis, the Reagan candour, was a new phenomenon. After the incautious remarks of 1981-3, everyone was told to shut up while SDI seized 'the moral high ground'. Momentarily revealed as being everything, nuclear weapons quietly went back to being nothing.

And what about Ronald Reagan? What about the blinding, the terminal discrepancy that
he
represents? Here is a forgetful old actor with a head full of Armageddon theology and Manichaean adversarialism, interspliced with war movies and scraps of
Reader's Digest,
an old media man who has foreclosed one arms treaty (Comprehensive Test Ban), broken out of a second (SALT II), and is whittling away at a third (ABM); a babbling, bloopering illusionist who now bestrides the spoils of the biggest buildup, or spend-up, in the history of the planet. 'We may be the generation that sees Armageddon.' 'We have a different regard for human life than those monsters do.' 'Israel is the only stable democracy we can rely on as a spot where Armageddon could come.' Washingtonians talk about 'the Caligulan possibility' - with the President somehow going solo on nuclear war - but we may be more worried, these days, about the President's celebrated talent for delegation. Imagine a Soviet leader who laid aside his Marx and Lenin in favour of Revelation and Ezekiel. Ideology is something the
enemy
is meant to be contaminated by. But what about
theology,
and 'end-time' theology at that? How would the alarmists, the procurers, targeters, and contractors of the Pentagon feel about General Secretary Reagan?

To get some idea, I arranged to meet a diplomat from the Soviet embassy. It was a morning of such deracinating wind chill that I for one could have used a toasty little nukelet, groundburst on Dupont Circle. Some of the tramps shivering in the doorways are Vietnam vets, frantic, melancholy. For all the wrong reasons, the Reagan story is their story, too. A story of humiliating memories and willed resurgence. I had been told by a friend that my Russian contact would probably have a tail on him and there was a certain amount of eyeing and frowning before we identified each other among the fronds and fountains, the antebellum splendour of the Mayflower Hotel. Absolute weapons require absolute enemies (inhuman, superpowerful - mass destructors), but Sergei and I got along fine. He didn't want to kill me. I didn't want to kill him. We drank a lot of coffee and smoked up a storm.

US—Soviet strategic relations, said Sergei, work as a kind of 'body language'. The disposition of forces sends messages to the other side, which responds with various bristlings and squirmings of its own. At the moment, Reagan's body language seems to consist of a reversible V-sign: V for victory, together with an obscene gesture. Briefly we mention 'ethnic targeting', a tactic that is now falling out of favour, even in the Pentagon. The aim would be to concentrate on the Russians and spare all the Uzbeks and Kazaks. 'That is also not very nice,' said Sergei. His dusty face is sardonic, put-upon, long-suffering. No doubt there are Soviet 'options', somewhere or other, for an America consisting entirely of blacks and Hispanics. How dwarfed we are, how belittled we all are by nuclear weapons.

'My father was chief of staff of the strategic bomber division in Siberia during the Fifties,' says Sergei. 'This was when the Americans were talking about the "bomber gap". We knew that our planes couldn't reach
Japan.'
After the bomber gap came the missile gap. There was no bomber gap. There was no missile gap. Now up springs the SDI gap, the Star Wars gap. 'In the Fifties, America suffered a loss of innocence [the end of nuclear solitude]. SDI is a way of restoring the lost virginity.' So perhaps we should not imagine SDI as a shield over America. We should imagine it as a nice new hymen. 'About war, America
is
innocent. Send the boys overseas. They'll be back by Christmas. In the USSR, war is a disaster, a cosmic tragedy, a holocaust. Families, children. Something that can't be rationalised.'

Reagan is said to hate the cognomen 'Star Wars'; he thinks it trivialises his proud dream. But it was the Great Trivialiser himself who, in his historic address of March 1983, invoked the George Lucas money-spinner: 'If you will pardon my stealing a film line, the Force is with us.' In conclusion, Sergei and I pondered three further curiosities in the President's speech. If the US merely
added
the defensive systems to the offensive systems, Reagan conceded, the Soviets would consider them aggressive, and 'no one wants that'. Want it or not,
that
is what we are getting. One also wonders why, if Star Wars is just a logical response to a clear Soviet advantage, the 'initiative' caused such consternation in the President's strategic apparat? And why, if the Soviets already had the technology, did Reagan offer to share it with them?

Currently Reagan's lawyers are inspecting the ABM Treaty, which prohibits ballistic missile defence, in search of a 'broad' reading, a reading so broad that it will, remarkably, permit ballistic missile defence.

'What next?' I asked Sergei.

'They need Soviet violations. They
must have
Soviet violations.'

Washington is a society: a debating society. The debaters have been called Hawks and Doves, Warriors and Disarmers, Generals and Paediatricians. I will call them Recruiters and Pressed Men, for this straightforward reason: nowadays, we are all in the military; we are all in uniform. The old and the young are in uniform. Our babies are born, not in their birthday suits, but in uniform (in little sailor suits, perhaps). Although the full militarisation of space is still only a 'vision', the planet has already been militarised, digitised. We are all on the front line.

Someone new to this subject, someone innocent of it -an extraterrestrial, a pre-nuclear Rip Van Winkle — would have no trouble choosing between the arguments of the Recruiters and the Pressed Men. There is, emphatically yet ironically, no contest. In their styles of discourse the Pressed Men are as varied and distinctive as all human discourse is. The only unquestionable achievement of nuclear weapons is the goaded eloquence of their opponents: the moral inerrancy of Jonathan Schell, the elegant historicism of Solly Zuckerman, the sensitive hardheadedness of Freeman Dyson, the witty tenacity of Robert Scheer and Daniel Ford. Passion, humour, memorability, appositeness - against all this, against this everything, the Recruiters offer precisely nothing. What else can they offer? What else have they got to give? They can field the desk-job manliness of George Will and Norman Podhoretz, the prideful frigidity of Colin Gray and Keith Payne; the rest is a desert of business language, euphemism, and cliche, with an occasional chant or whoop from the school yard or the rumpus room. It is the voice of the technophiliac, the tough guy, and the toady. With the Recruiters you are not in the presence of active thought; you just sit there and watch the laborious bolstering of stock response, the steady fattening of prejudice. Besides being called 'war criminals' and 'mass murderers' (phrases used with surprising freedom here in Washington), the Recruiters are referred to as 'the megadeath intellectuals'. But the term is a contradiction. There is no intellectual content in megadeath. There never has been and there never will be. The mind can do nothing with it.

Addiction is a resilient theme in the story of nuclear weapons, and many a Pressed Man has got hooked on the hardware, the beautiful physics, the undoable Rubik's cube of nuclear strategy. 'There's nothing worse', the writer Andrew Cockburn said to me, 'than listening to some Freezer going on about — I don't know — the Circular Error Probable of Trident II.' But there is something worse. There is something worse than listening to a Pressed Man going on about hard kill and blast over-pressure, PACFLT and AFSATCOM, choke points and back-fit cancellations, FROLIC and SIZZLE and PINCHER and BROILER. And that is listening to a Recruiter going on about them.

This little guy in the three-piece suit is just coming out of his twenties. ('You look a bit older than that.' 'It must be the beard.') On the other hand, he
sounds
a lot younger; at moments of emphasis his vocal cords twang with an adolescent yodel. His name is David Trachtenberg. On his desk are scale models of intercontinental ballistic missiles (look at the size of those Soviet SS-18s!). On the wall behind his chair is a customised poster, jokingly accusing David of being a wanted man, 'convicted of supporting the SDI program'. Next to the poster is a cartoonish watercolour of an unreservedly grinning David, straddling the globe while missiles squirt this way and that; to his right is Uncle Sam, to his left the Russian Bear. David's pals or loved ones evidently felt relaxed enough to present David with this picture, and David evidently felt relaxed enough to hang it on his office wall.