"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of a King." Hamlet knew. So does The Kremlin. The KGB can "prove" a nuclear scenario is winnable. According to the most painstaking calculations, a conventional war of any duration "swings" into a pre-nuclear stage. That's when the nuclear option becomes "viable". That's when Gorbachev and the boys calculate "target readiness" and plummet the depths of the human spirit.
The East is Red and ready. The Chinese have been told by Mao 300 million or their number cremated is a small price for global supremacy. A human dung hill is being set in motion for another generation of poppies. Marx lends credibility to this, but with a different opiate for the masses. The lumpenproletariat can hack it. Such clever playing with facts, now I understand genius.
For a young physicist, a 100 megaton blast is the culmination of the creative spirit. Certainly irrefutable evidence, this quintessential "spirit".
I read Toronto would be "messy" in the event of a nuclear strike. Half-baked and eviscerated thinking Or just inescaspable?
Chin up. We'll survive or at least part of us will. We really are "malleable". It will be a "transitional stage",
Page17 a step upwards on the evolutionary ladder. Radioactivity and genetics are at work with one another.
When the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic device, the pilot was later to go mad.
Maybe this has already happened to the world and there's no one to discern the difference.
Maybe a forest of "maybes" has already sprouted and left a forest of dust clouding the collective vision.
Maybe it's all too terrifying to be taken seriously and disbelief is the escape hatch. Like the pilot's lapse into comforting drugs for reassurance or the dervishes with their Magic Mushroom.
Maybe it's closer to what Harry Truman announced after "deploying" the first "device" or exercising the nuclear option in the jargon of the strategists.
They started it. We prepared to end it. No regrets. Turned over on his deathbed and went to sleep
ENERGYENERGyENERGYENE n Being alive n e wastes e r energy r g g y wastes B wastes y e i n g
Fate is a mahout astride a large elephant, impersonal as dark sun with winds raging across a desert. Fate is the old bones of dead Indians being resurrected as ground mist on the edge of a salt marsh.