Three books on SDI—three quickies on the end of time —have recently landed on my desk, two pro and one anti. How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete is by Robert Jastrow, the man who jumped into newsprint the day after the space-shuttle disaster with the comment, “It’s almost fishy.” First, Jastrow makes it clear how much he hopes that World War III can, if possible, be avoided, how much he would regret and deplore such an eventuality (the tone is the familiar one of hurried moral gentrification, as if this were all a wearisome matter of etiquette and appearances); he then addresses himself to the main business of the book, a stirred account of “The Battle.” Here in the midst of the techno-philiac space-opera we glimpse the president coolly “ordering” this and “deciding” that, coolly erecting his untried “peace shield” as hemispherical butchery looms in the skies above. In fact the president, if he has not been vaporized by a suitcase bomb in the Russian embassy, will be understandably immersed in his own nervous breakdown, along with every other actor in this psychotic fantasy. For Jastrow, the unthinkable is thinkable. He is wrong, and in this respect he is also, I contend, subhuman,, like all the nuclear-war fighters, like all the “prevailers.” The unthinkable is unthinkable; the unthinkable is not thinkable, not by human beings, because the eventuality it posits is one in which all human contexts would have already vanished. SDI can never be tested, and neither can the actors. How they would respond at such a time is anyone’s guess. But they would no longer be human beings. In a sense, nobody would be. That status does not exist on the other side of the firebreak.
Solly Zuckerman has suggested that the Allies’ complaisance on SDI, lukewarm and hangdog though it was, could not have survived a reading of Jastrow. Probably the same could not be said for Alun Chalfont, whose Star Wars: Suicide or Survival? welcomes SDI in the baritone of gruff realism. True, the Initiative will entail “high risk”; true, the Initiative “calls for an entirely new approach to the doctrines underlying arms control policies”; true, the Initiative will cost a trillion dollars. But it’s worth it. Highly risky, entirely revolutionary, and incredibly expensive, it’s worth it —because of the Gap. The Soviets will soon be doing it, or have started doing it, or (he sometimes seems to suggest) have already done it. So we’d better do it too. . . . Interestingly, what exercises Lord Chalfont is not the existence of nuclear weapons, an existence which, he says, cannot be “repealed.”[1] What exercises Lord Chalfont is the existence of their opponents. Now here is something we can get rid of. Civility, in any case, absents itself from his prose whenever the subject of peace—or “peace”—is wearily introduced. “Immediately the peace industry begins its predictable uproar … a coalition of misguided idealists, with a sprinkling of useful idiots and Soviet agents (conscious and unconscious).” Annoyed by references to the war “industry,” he nonetheless accords industrial status to the peace movement. Why? Where are the factory townships of peace? Where are its trillion-dollar budgets? At one point Chalfont discusses American plans
for the deployment of enhanced radiation warheads in Europe . . . there is, at once, an uproar against the “neutron bomb”—described by the mentally enfeebled as a capitalist weapon, designed to kill people but preserve property.
Chalfont isn’t happy with the phrase “capitalist weapon,” and one concurs. But how happy is he with “enhanced radiation warheads”? How happy is he with “enhanced”?
E. P. Thompson is unfortunately not much nearer to finding the voice of appropriate and reliable suasion. He has made great sacrifices for the cause he leads; he is brilliant, he is charismatic, he is inspiring; but he is not reliable. In Star Wars, as elsewhere, Professor Thompson shows himself to be the fit exponent of the nuclear High Style. He is witty and grand, writing with the best kind of regulated hatred. How devastating he is, for example, on the SDI public-relations effort. From the confidential literature:
Innumberable opportunities for highly visible “cause” activism could be opened up … interest to Catholics also. . . . Such a ratification effort would permit the White House to look good in confronting powerful anti-BMD domestic critics . . . addresses “Eurostrategic” issues, which are big today . . . play freely on high-road ethical themes (by far the best mobilizational approach) . . .