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mythopoeic importance to the Jewish idea is clear enough. (Hence “the Masada complex,” in fact a hawkish formulation used to shore up Israeli maxi-malism.) Suppression, revolt, beleaguerment, mass suicide—sacrifice. A holocaust is a sacrifice, “a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire … a whole burnt offering … a complete sacrifice.”
    The northern view from the monstrous boulder of Masada is one of elemental beauty. It makes you feel what it is to live on a planet; it makes you feel what it is to live on a larger, emptier, cleaner, and more innocent planet than earth. Everything—the firm mountains to the left, the spurs and undulations of the plain, the Dead Sea, the misty heights of Jordan—is hugely dominated by the sky; even the burnished acres of the water can reflect only a fraction of the circumambient blue. In fact the biosphere is shallow: space, outer space, is only an hour’s drive away (space is nearer than Jerusalem); but the Judean sky looks like infinity. Below, the terrain is a terrain for war, conventional war: conventional death, conventional wreckage, under these same heavens. But another kind of war, a nuclear one (I thought, with double vertigo), could wreck the sky. Later that day a journalist from the Jerusalem Post told me about “the Warehouse,” a building in the desert surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, the supposed locus of Israel’s nuclear effort. It is not altogether clear—it never is—whether Israel has the bomb or merely the ability to make one. I want to know what use this weapon would be. What use are they, ever? Beirut and Damascus are both forty miles from Israel’s border, an hour’s drive away, like space. For Israel, a nuclear weapon would be a Masada weapon. That’s what nuclear weapons are: Masada weapons.
    Meanwhile they squat on our spiritual lives. There may be a nuclear “priesthood,” but we are the supplicants, and we have no faith. The warheads are our godheads. Nuclear weapons could bring about the Book of Revelation in a matter of hours; they could do it today. Of course, no dead will rise; nothing will be revealed ( nothing meaning two things, the absence of everything and a thing called nothing). Events that we call “acts of God”—floods, earthquakes, eruptions—are flesh wounds compared to the human act of nuclear war: a million Hiroshimas. Like God, nuclear weapons are free creations of the human mind. Unlike God, nuclear weapons are real. And they are here.
    Revulsion at MAD is understandable and necessary. I suggest, however, that MAD is not just a political creation but a creation of the weapons themselves. Always we keep coming back to the weapons as if they were actors rather than pieces of equipment; and they earn this status, by virtue of their cosmic power. They are actors and, considered on the human scale, insane actors. The weapons are insane, they are MAD: they can assume no other form. In one of those philosopher’s throat clearings, Anthony Kenny says that “weapons considered merely as inert pieces of hardware are not, of course, objects of moral evaluation. It is the uses to which they are put …” This isn’t so. Recent evidence strongly suggests that nuclear weapons, in their inert state, are responsible for a variety of cancers and leukemias. What toxicity, what power, what range. They cause death even before they go off.
    The A-bomb is a Z-bomb, and the arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves. It is them or us. What do nukes do? What are they for? Since when did we all want to kill each other? Nuclear weapons deter a nuclear holocaust by threatening a nuclear holocaust, and if things go wrong then that is what you get: a nuclear holocaust. If things don’t go wrong, and continue not going wrong for the next millennium of millennia (the boasted forty years being no more than forty winks in cosmic time), you get … What do you get? What are we getting?
    At the multiracial children’s