Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (3 page)

Around me was being enacted the formless drama that perhaps invariably succeeds every incident of mass crisis or jeopardy. I can only describe it as a scene of peculiar ragged-ness, with sights and sounds somehow failing to coordinate. A man keeled over in the grass, clutching his heart and moaning loudly. A girl with a sprained ankle was being helped away three-legged to safety. Busily the stewardesses gave comfort where they could. I myself — with, no doubt, egregious nonchalance — attempted to console a weeping woman. There was a good deal of crying in the air, brittle, exultant. Soon the French security guards were shepherding us tenderly across the field to the terminal.

After a shock (I later learned), the body needs a lot of sweet tea. But the drinks were on BA, and most people drank a lot of brandy, which (I later learned) is the very thing the body needs least. I compromised by drinking a lot of whisky, and remained in capital fettle throughout the five-hour wait. The evening soon became an exercise in maximum
esprit de corps,
with the passengers informally dividing into two camps: those who were saying, 'I've never been so scared in my life,' and those who were saying, 'You think this was bad? This was nothing. Let me tell you about the time I . ..' My position was, I suppose, unusual. I had not felt fear; but I knew that fear would have been an appropriate feeling.

Now, all writers secretly maintain a vampiric attitude to disaster; and, having survived it, I was unreservedly grateful for the experience. Here I sat, not in Gatwick but in Dinard, enjoying a good free dinner and pleasant camaraderie. And when I flopped into bed at five the next morning — replacement aircraft (the original was later searched, fruitlessly), baggage identification on the dark tarmac, the incident-free completion of the journey — I felt like a returning lord, a man who had come through a testing time, without a scratch, without a wince.

And I was wrong. For the next few days, although outwardly cheerful enough, I was pretty sure I was dying -and of natural causes, too. My body was subject to strange tinglings. Throughout my tragic siestas I lay there trembling and boiling, as if a tram station or a foundry had established itself beneath the bed. I watched the world through veils of helplessness. This was no hangover. This was old age. One morning I found a brief report on the Dinard ordeal in the
Herald Tribune.
Incredibly, there was no mention whatever of the quiet and simple heroism with which I had borne it... My wife suggested that I was suffering from delayed shock - which, I admit, gave me quite a turn, Although I had privately diagnosed a brain tumour, I was still reluctant to identify the malaise as an after-effect of something that had bothered me so little. My body, however, continued to insist on the truth. Hoaxers and other operatives in the terror business will be relieved to learn that, when it comes to fear, there's no such thing as a free lunch, or a free dinner.

So much, then, for my valour on the fields of France. I emerge from the incident with another new experience, and no credit whatever. I was as brave as a lord, as brave as a newt. Chemically numbed at the time, my fear — of which there had clearly been plenty — had just burrowed deep and waited. I had sneaked out of the restaurant without settling the bill. The body's accountants had redressed the ledger, with interest. And for nearly a week I was wearily picking up that tab.

Observer, 1985

NUCLEAR CITY: THE MEGADEATH INTELLECTUALS

Washington is nuclear city. In any imaginable exchange, however 'surgical', 'splendid', 'cathartic' or 'therapeutic', Washington would go (and so would San Diego, Seattle and San Francisco). Washington would be 'taken out'. Its well-forested malls would go, the silver masonry of its imperial buildings would go, its museums and monuments would go; a good deal of such history as America has would go, along with all the random life that any great city contains: the jazz bars of Georgetown, the residential follies of Capitol Hill, the beggars (lobbyists of the street), the graffito saying
NO NUKES,
the bumper sticker saying
NO
FAT
CHICKS,
the National Gallery's Matisse: The Early Years in Nice (and that particular interest in human form and posture), the Rose Garden, the day schools — all would go. Washington stands there, like a king on a tumbrel, awaiting decapitation.

When nuclear weapons become real to you, when they stop buzzing around your ears and actually move into your head, hardly an hour passes without some throb or flash, some heavy pulse of imagined supercatastrophe. Staring at the many-eyed helmet of the Capitol, you see the clouds above on fire, the winter sky ignited, taken out. Now is the time to see this, and your head is the place to see it in. The reality won't be seen by anyone. Certain Virginians, I suppose, might get to view the lit brain, the scorching shower, the moronic fist of the mushroom cloud. But no one will 'see' the bursting city. To this crime there will be no witnesses; there will just be innocent bystanders, in their millions. Many times the cinema has tried to imagine a nuclear attack upon a city. What the cinema cannot get, what
we
cannot get, is the simultaneity: everything becoming nothing, all at once.

Washington is nuclear city, is Thermopolis, in another sense, too. With famous prodigality and greed, nuclear weapons squander resources, gobble money, hog know-how. But what of the intellectual resources, what of the thought, the acuity, and concentration they hourly consume? In institutes, foundations, committees, endowments, and in a thousand offices along the corridors of power, people are sitting around all day thinking about these man-made objects, nuclear weapons - the strangest subject, with its squalor, profanity and nausea, its addictive fascination and terrible glamour, its unique inclusiveness and complexity. Having read a yard of 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), 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 have a weapon under it.) Volcano activation, hurricane manipulation, tidal-wave initiation, quicksand generation, ice-cap liquefaction, ozone depletion, asteroid diversion: all have been looked into as possible means for getting the most out of nuclear weapons. Other weird shapes hover and beckon in the realm of speculation. The antimatter weapon, which would yield forty-three megatons for every kilogram expended. The heat bomb, a gigaton (or thousand-megaton) device exploded outside the atmosphere: there would be no fallout, no blast - and no oxygen either, so that survivors of the continental firestorm would soon succumb to asphyxiation. Finally, for now, there is the black-hole weapon. A small black hole could be electrically restrained and thus deprived of fresh material; it would explode, and at last we would be up there in the million-megaton range.