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

nukelet, groundburst on Dupont Circle. Some of the tramps shivering in the doorways are Vietnam vets, frantic, melancholy. For all the wrong reasons, the Reagan story is their story, too. A story of humiliating memories and willed resurgence. I had been told by a friend that my Russian contact would probably have a tail on him and there was a certain amount of eyeing and frowning before we identified each other among the fronds and fountains, the antebellum splendour of the Mayflower Hotel. Absolute weapons require absolute enemies (inhuman, superpowerful - mass destructors), but Sergei and I got along fine. He didn't want to kill me. I didn't want to kill him. We drank a lot of coffee and smoked up a storm.
    US—Soviet strategic relations, said Sergei, work as a kind of 'body language'. The disposition of forces sends messages to the other side, which responds with various bristlings and squirmings of its own. At the moment, Reagan's body language seems to consist of a reversible V-sign: V for victory, together with an obscene gesture. Briefly we mention 'ethnic targeting', a tactic that is now falling out of favour, even in the Pentagon. The aim would be to concentrate on the Russians and spare all the Uzbeks and Kazaks. 'That is also not very nice,' said Sergei. His dusty face is sardonic, put-upon, long-suffering. No doubt there are Soviet 'options', somewhere or other, for an America consisting entirely of blacks and Hispanics. How dwarfed we are, how belittled we all are by nuclear weapons.
    'My father was chief of staff of the strategic bomber division in Siberia during the Fifties,' says Sergei. 'This was when the Americans were talking about the "bomber gap". We knew that our planes couldn't reach Japan.' After the bomber gap came the missile gap. There was no bomber gap. There was no missile gap. Now up springs the SDI gap, the Star Wars gap. 'In the Fifties, America suffered a loss of innocence [the end of nuclear solitude]. SDI is a way of restoring the lost virginity.' So perhaps we should not imagine SDI as a shield over America. We should imagine it as a nice new hymen. 'About war, America is innocent. Send the boys overseas. They'll be back by Christmas. In the USSR, war is a disaster, a cosmic tragedy, a holocaust. Families, children. Something that can't be rationalised.'
    Reagan is said to hate the cognomen 'Star Wars'; he thinks it trivialises his proud dream. But it was the Great Trivialiser himself who, in his historic address of March 1983, invoked the George Lucas money-spinner: 'If you will pardon my stealing a film line, the Force is with us.' In conclusion, Sergei and I pondered three further curiosities in the President's speech. If the US merely added the defensive systems to the offensive systems, Reagan conceded, the Soviets would consider them aggressive, and 'no one wants that'. Want it or not, that is what we are getting. One also wonders why, if Star Wars is just a logical response to a clear Soviet advantage, the 'initiative' caused such consternation in the President's strategic apparat? And why, if the Soviets already had the technology, did Reagan offer to share it with them?
    Currently Reagan's lawyers are inspecting the ABM Treaty, which prohibits ballistic missile defence, in search of a 'broad' reading, a reading so broad that it will, remarkably, permit ballistic missile defence.
    'What next?' I asked Sergei.
    'They need Soviet violations. They must have Soviet violations.'
     
    Washington is a society: a debating society. The debaters have been called Hawks and Doves, Warriors and Disarmers, Generals and Paediatricians. I will call them Recruiters and Pressed Men, for this straightforward reason: nowadays, we are all in the military; we are all in uniform. The old and the young are in uniform. Our babies are born, not in their birthday suits, but in uniform (in little sailor suits, perhaps). Although the full militarisation of space is still only a 'vision', the planet has already