Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (5 page)

David works for the Committee on the Present Danger ('Present Danger?' sings the lady on the phone), the Recruiter think tank that has supervised Reagan's nuclear policies. Reagan is a member of the board, and close to sixty fellow directors have found work in his administration. Though fairly eerie in its own right, talking to David is not as bad as reading the Present Danger literature, namely a buxom volume called
Alerting America
('What Is the Soviet Union Up To?' 'Has America Become Number 2?'); with David, at least, there is a human dimension, however subdued. On the other hand, you can smoke while you're reading the literature, and you can't do that while you're talking to David.

The public has been misled by arms treaties ... It was good to call attention to Soviet cheating, bad not to follow it up ... Menacing violations . . . Krasnoyarsk . . . The Soviet moratorium on testing is a completely empty gesture ... Height of folly ... Combat environment. .. Some kind of limited scenario ... But yet ... If we so choose to do so ...' The language is notable for its sobriety and caution, with few descents into the colloquial: 'making the rubble bounce', for example, Recruiterspeak for overkill or 'un-deconflicted targeting'. Otherwise, talking to David is like talking to your accountant. But I will certainly never forget the expression on David's face, one of saintly forbearance, as he told me that the US had decreased its overall mega-tonnage in recent years.

I kept wondering what his friends were like, what his human dealings were. I kept wondering how it went, humanly. Perhaps David was wondering about the same sort of thing, beneath his flat smile of fastidious scrutiny. How flaky was he finding me? Had I shaved properly that morning? What about the width of my tie? David is no keener on a nuclear holocaust than I am. But he is less fearful — that's the difference. Like Perle, a fellow Dangerman, he is 'more worried' about other things. Hang around too long at this end of the nuclear weapons business, and you lose the knack of imagining what nuclear weapons are, what they can do. I asked David if he ever dreamed about his work, if he ever dreamed about nuclear weapons. But David wasn't going to discuss his dreams with a
journalist.
He assured me that he had 'no problems' on that score. He slept the sleep of the good.

'The Soviet Union', David had said at one point, 'is only a superpower militarily. Not economically, not politically, not ideologically. Only militarily.'

At the time I wondered what
ideologically
was doing in David's sentence. After a while I realised that I had simply been listening to mainstream Reaganism. If the Soviet Union isn't 'really' a superpower, then how many superpowers does that leave?

Meanwhile, or later the same day, Dr Allan Mense is pacing hungrily around his office in the Pentagon. To get in here you need to go through a door marked
SURVEILLANCE,
ACQUISITION,   TRACKING AND  KILL ASSESSMENT.   People   Stride in from time to time with documents stamped
TOP SECRET
(which, in these leak-prone days, means little more than mildly confidential: the top-secret stuff is designated
BLACK).
On the large wall chart there is a magic-marker diagram showing the earth, the atmosphere, and an incoming missile being briskly zapped by some smart rock, laser beam, or death ray. Dr Mense is tall, florid, early-middle-aged; he sports brogues and braces and a ballpoint-crammed shirt pocket, but the face is wild. He looks like a cop in a Boston precinct station. His barnstorming energy is likable (you feel he would make a fun uncle) and very necessary, too, for Dr Mense is chief scientist on SDI.

'Okay,' he said. 'You tell me. What is the purpose of SDI?'

I hesitated and searched my mind for whatever buzz phrase was currently serving as national policy. 'To, er . . . enhance deterrence.'

Dr Mense was astonished. That's the right answer! Hardly anybody gets it right. Most people seem to think it's some kind of peace shield.'

I could have said that 'most people' would include the President of the United States, who in June 1986 was still talking coaxingly of 'a shield that could protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from rain'. But I didn't. Any argument I would have with Dr Mense about SDI would be over in ten seconds. He is about Can Do. I am about Don't Do. One's objections to Star Wars need never get as far as the usual haggling points of expense, technical achievability, and so on. One objects to Star Wars because it is just another firebreak. It is just
more.
And more will mean
more.
The President's idea sounded appealingly simple, but it has brought no simplification with it. It has brought only more of the same — more bitter complexities. On every level it will merely add to the epic fairy tale of cry-wolf, brier-patch second-guessing on which, for some strange reason, our existence now depends.

A well-grooved simplifier, Dr Mense gave me his pitch: up-front, down-home, frenziedly, cravenly demonic. Once a fusion-energy expert at McDonnell Douglas, he is now mainly a coordinator. He translates technical data 'into eighth-grade English for the guys on Capitol Hill' and goes out 'to debate the critics with my anti-tomato shield'. Linguistically, this is the jock end of the market. Robust simplicities are delivered like slaps on the back.

'Protection? No. Hey, folks, you're playing the wrong game! If deterrence fails, we're all out to lunch. We'd all be gone. No more Americans! And we don't think, "Gee, by having this system we can just ride out a nuclear war." All we're really doing is planting doubt in the mind of the Soviet offensive mission planner. All we're doing is denying him a free ride.'

'Then why are so many Americans against it?'

'I don't think I'm talking out of school here, but. . .' (And this was before the Tower Report and the palpable sapping of the Reagan momentum.) 'It's not that they're against SDL They're against the President. You know, here's this bad guy. Food stamps, abortion. All we're saying is, Come on! Jee
sus
: we don't have the data yet!'

'Then why are the Russians against it?'

David, at Present Danger, had given me the Gap answer to this question: 'Because they've done the research. They know it works.' Dr Mense didn't have an answer. He didn't seem to think there
was
an answer. He shrugged hugely, spread his arms, and bulged his eyes, as if to say, 'Go understand people.'

I made my way out of the Pentagon, or I tried. When I stopped every few yards and asked directions, I was proudly told how easy it was to get lost in here. They were right. Getting lost is not a problem. The Pentagon is one of the largest edifices on earth. Its corridors are as wide as boulevards, but they point nowhere, they double back, they leave you where you were before. Signposts and billboards told me everything except how to get away from them.
PENTAGON PRAYER BREAKFAST (CONTINENTAL
$2).

PRAY   FOR   AMERICA.     SPECIAL   MUSIC:     ARMY   CHORUS.     My requests for help became more querulous and self-pitying. Bobbing uniforms, dog-tired secretaries, bales of paper, split cardboard boxes, proliferating doorways: the minute administration of an inconceivably vast concern. At last I walked weepily through the shopping malls to the Metro, telling myself that there was no chance whatever, no hope at all, of ever starting to unpick the dreamlike complexity of
this.

Since 1979 US arms policy has been avowedly 'dual track'. New deployments have been combined with new negotiations; America has rearmed so that she may disarm. Under Reagan, dual track has become a cruder matter of saying one thing while doing another. Dual track is often clearly visible, it seems to me, in the President's face, in the President's eyes. One part of him likes the idea of dramatic reductions (or likes the idea of making speeches about them); what the other part of him wants can best be called nuclear free enterprise, with the American system naturally 'prevailing', naturally 'winning'. Star Wars is the technological fix to his dilemma, his confusion, his imposture.

It is also, incidentally, the missing link in first strike. Useless as a peace shield (and useless against bombers, cruise and low-trajectory missiles, suitcase devices, et cetera), it might yet mop up a 'degraded' retaliation. This among other things is what the Kremlin worst-casers fear; and in a worst-case world, intentions and capabilities are indistinguishable. What do you do with a first-strike capability? You don't go ahead and strike first, unless the Russians look like they're doing it (and, in a crisis, they will look like they're doing it). No, you coerce, you play hardball. Thus you gamble the future to serve local and temporary ends. You show American willingness, American 'resolve' to bet the planet. The weapons improve until they are capable of anything. And, in a crisis, people deteriorate until they are capable of anything. Perched on a twanging ladder of instability, the President will have 'options' unlimited. Humanly, morally, politically, militarily, they will all be zero options. That's what nuclear options are: zero options.

On the nuclear issue, as on so many others, Ronald Reagan has deceived the American people. 'Ronald Reagan has deceived the American people,' I was told, more than once, not just by Pressed Men but by analysts and onlookers in federal buildings, sitting there with their computers and their cherry Coke. 'Don't name me - I'll lose my job.' The hidden aim was broad superiority (only one superpower); the intention was to outbuild and outspend the Russians, while throwing lopsided offers their way to keep public opinion quiet. To the administration's fuddled alarm, Gorbachev called the bluff.

Now, owing to a world-historical fluke, we may get the first arms-reduction deal ever (but watch out for those Soviet violations). The prime mover in this reduction is not Ronald Reagan. The prime mover is Oliver North, with the help of some pillow talk from Nancy, as she attempts to spruce up a tousled presidency for the history books. Reagan's avowed policy was to negotiate from nuclear strength. In 1987, he must negotiate belly-up, from domestic impotence. 'You hear that, Ivan?' Colonel North used to shout during his lectures on geopolitical strategy. Well, you hear that, Ollie? Such are the cosmic jokes, the astronomical cheap shots, that fashion our destiny in the nuclear age.

After forty years of concerted thought, no one has got anywhere with nuclear weapons. No one has discovered what to do with them; no one has discovered how to do without them. The story of their management is a story of repetition, false summits, the retracing of steps. Nuclear technology changes, the procurements change, but the situation does not change. By a radiant paradox, public opinion has changed only that aspect of policy that directly concerns the public: it has killed off civil defence. (Remember the films and drills, the blast-shelter singsongs, the pathetic docility of the human actors?) Public opinion is there, however, and it is waiting. Imagine nuclear weapons as sentient beings: there they are, preposterously savage, stupidly inert, yet not quite fearless. For they fear what they most threaten, ordinary people, people who have felt their mortal insult, people who have grasped a simple truth: that there is something wrong with the planet.

Fred Kaplan is among the more recent nuclear chroniclers. He completed his classic study,
The Wizards of Armageddon,
at the age of twenty-eight. Four years later, his young face bears the orbits of care and strain; but these I partly attributed to his two-year-old twin daughters, who swayed and staggered around the lunch table as we ate. 'You go into this subject with certain feelings and instincts. Then you're confronted by endless complexity. The complexity has no limit, and you can take on as much of it as you want. But when you come out the other side, you're left with the same feelings and instincts. They're completely unchanged.' Although Fred will talk about nuclear weapons, and talk well, his eyes are resigned and long-suffering. 'He wants to give them up,' says his wife, 'and just write about hi-fi or something.' Fred nods and sighs. We all want to give them up. We are all long-suffering. We all want to give them up and get on to something else.

Seeing the Kaplans' children made me anxious to see my own. If you spend too much time with this subject, if you spend too much time in nothingland, you begin to feel marginal, spectral, insubstantial. You want to get away from the death-ubiquity; you want to get back to life. And when I took my seat in the smoking section of the 747 at Dulles, I realised I was flying back just as I had flown in: with extra sadness, bitter complexity, with extra nuke fatigue — but unchanged. However far you go into nuclear weapons, there is no understanding to be had, only more knowledge. This is as it should be, because nuclear weapons are nothing.

And everything, also, at the same time. In
The Fate of the Earth,
Jonathan Schell stressed the need for sobriety in the nuclear debate; the Pressed Man must be civil to the Recruiter, despite the enticements of exasperation and anger, I have always assented to the justice of this tenet, while often wondering why I find it so hard to abide by. I genuinely don't
want
to be civil to, or civil about, the Pentagon handyman, the peanut at Present Danger, the charm-school colonel on the phone with his
You betcha
and
That's what we're here for
(but what
else
are they here for?), the princes of darkness, the foolish and complaisant President. How strictly do civilised rules apply to civilisation's enemies? This is a human story, and human pressures, human mobilisations, can be brought to bear upon it.

The answer to a predicament must be of the same size as that predicament. It must have congruence. The nuclear debate is a debate conducted with our fathers — but it is
about
our children. If the Recruiters are to be isolated and eventually pathologised - if the planet is to grow up - then our children will have to act in self-defence. We must fix our kids so that they will have nothing to do with anyone who has anything to do with anyone who has anything to do with nuclear weapons, with instruments of blood and rubble. The process will begin at that moment of mortal shame when we acquaint them with the status quo, with the facts of life, the facts of death. So come on. In an inversion of filial confession, we will have to take deep breaths, wipe our eyes and stare into theirs, and tell them what we've done.