Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    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