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

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