Authors: Don DeLillo
I got up and closed the door. Then I returned to the chair by the window. I turned it around and sat with my arms over the back of the chair. I faced the closed door. Bloomberg raised his right arm, maintaining that position — body supine, one arm bent across his chest, second arm in the air — for the length of the ensuing narration. He appeared mad, an imprisoned prophet or a figure in a
very old painting, a man about to die, his last word spoken to a finger tip of light.
“As the world’s ranking authority on environmental biomedicine, I have been asked to lend the weight of my opinion to yet another tense seminar on the future of the earth. My friends, there is nothing to fear. Soon we’ll harvest the seas, colonize the planets, control every aspect of the weather. We’ll develop nuclear reactors to provide the English-speaking world with unlimited energy, safely and cheaply. Our radio astronomers will communicate with beings at the very ends of the universe. We’ll build hydraulic robots to make automation obsolete. We’ll manufacture plastic lungs and brains. We’ll reprogram human cells with new genetic information to wipe out inherited disease. Obsolescence itself will become obsolete. We’ll recycle everything. Shoes to food. Candles to paper. Rocks to light bulbs. The philosophical question has been asked: what will become of death? Gentlemen, I have the answer right here. The sealed envelope please.”
Andy Chudko looked at me. He got up, took the guitar from the chair by the door and then opened the door and left, closing it behind him. Bloomberg began to speak again. I was sorry Chudko hadn’t left the guitar. In some obscure way, its presence would have been a comfort.
T
HE MOTEL
was about two miles from campus. I walked out there along the edge of the road. Fragments of glass flared in the sun. I passed a number of dead animals, just scraps of fur now, small pieces of flesh completely macadamized, part of the highway. Finally I reached the motel. It was a gray building, barely distinguishable from the land around it. Major Staley had been staying there since the school year began. I didn’t know what kind of car the major drove so I went into the office and got his room number from an old woman half-asleep over a bowl of Shredded Wheat. The major had a towel in his hands when he came to the door. He was wearing his uniform trousers and shirt, the shirt unbuttoned and outside the pants, sleeves rolled up around the forearms. Some blue ROTC manuals were stacked on a table. Above the bed was a three-dimensional picture of mountains.
*
“Wife and kids are still up in Colorado. I sure as hell miss them. I hope to have them down here real soon now.
Our house should be ready in ten days. I’ve lived in more places than a stray cat.”
*
“There’s a kind of theology at work here. The bombs are a kind of god. As his power grows, our fear naturally increases. I get as apprehensive as anyone else, maybe more so. We have too many bombs. They have too many bombs. There’s a kind of theology of fear that comes out of this. We begin to capitulate to the overwhelming presence. It’s so powerful. It dwarfs us so much. We say let the god have his way. He’s so much more powerful than we are. Let it happen, whatever he ordains. It used to be that the gods punished men by using the forces of nature against them or by arousing them to take up their weapons and destroy each other. Now god is the force of nature itself, the fusion of tritium and deuterium. Now he’s the weapon. So maybe this time we went too far in creating a being of omnipotent power. All this hardware. Fantastic stockpiles of hardware. The big danger is that we’ll surrender to a sense of inevitability and start flinging mud all over the planet.”
*
“We’re talking about a one-megaton device. All right, you’re standing nine miles from ground zero. If it’s a clear day, you get second-degree burns. Guaranteed. One hundred megs, you may as well forget it. If you were seventy-five miles out, you’d still get second-degree. Depending on the variables, your house might even ignite. That’s just the first flash. After that comes the firestorm, like Tokyo, like Hamburg, like Dresden, like Hiroshima. Structurally the older cities in the U.S. are very susceptible to firestorms. Building density is high and combustible material per building is high. Tucson might escape a firestorm.
New York, Baltimore, Boston — forget it. Nagasaki didn’t get too much burn. They had a low density and the wind was blowing right. Hamburg was something else. Hamburg was a hot place to be. Over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit if you can imagine what that’s like. They found bodies naked except for shoes. That was heat that did that, not fire. Heat disintegrated the clothes. They found bodies shrunken, dry as paper. That was the intense heat. The other thing in a firestorm is carbon monoxide.”
*
“I’ve had a checkered career at best.”
*
“I think what’ll happen in the not-too-distant future is that we’ll have humane wars. Each side agrees to use clean bombs. And each side agrees to limit the amount of megatons he uses. In other words we’ll get together with them beforehand and there’ll be an agreement that if the issue can’t be settled, whatever the issue might be, then let’s make certain we keep our war as relatively humane as possible. So we agree to use clean stuff. And we actually specify the number of megatons; let’s just say hypothetically one thousand megs for each side. So then what we’ve got is a two-thousand-megaton war. We might go further and say we’ll leave your cities alone if you leave ours alone. We make it strictly counterforce. So right off the bat you avoid the fallout hazard and millions of bonus kills, or deaths from fallout. And at the same time you eliminate city-trading and punishing strikes against the general population. Of course the humanistic mind crumbles at the whole idea. It’s the most hideous thing in the world to these people that such ideas even have to be mentioned. But the thing won’t go away. The
thing is here and you have to face it. The prospect of a humane war may be hideous and all the other names you can think of, but it’s still a prospect. And as an alternative to all the other things that could happen in the event of war, it’s relatively acceptable. My fellow coliberals are always the first to jump all over me when I talk about something like humane warfare. But the thing has to be considered. People close their minds. They think nuclear war has to be insensate, both sides pushing all the buttons and the whole thing is over in two hours. In reality it’s likely to be very deliberate, very cautious, a kind of thing that’s almost fought in slow motion. And the limited humane variant is the most acceptable. Negotiations could easily take that turn. A war may have to be fought; it may be unavoidable in terms of national pride or to avoid blackmail or for a number of other reasons. And negotiations, whatever remains of negotiations, whatever talking is still going on, this could easily lead both countries to the humane war idea as the least damaging kind of thing in the face of all the variants. So they hit our military and industrial targets with any number of bombs and missiles totaling one thousand megatons and we do the same to them. There’d be all sorts of controls. You’d practically have a referee and a timekeeper. Then it would be over and you’d make your damage assessment. The sensing devices go to work. The magnetic memory drums are tapped. The computers figure out damage and number of casualties. Recovery time is estimated. We wouldn’t be the same strong industrial society after one thousand megs but our cities would still be standing and the mortality rate would be in the fairly low percentiles, about eight to twelve percent. With no fallout in the atmosphere, or a relatively minimum
amount, we’d have no problems with environmental stress, with things like temperature changes, erosion, droughts, insect devastation, and we’d avoid the radiation diseases by and large, the infections, the genetic damage. So we’d get going again relatively soon. It wouldn’t be nearly as bad as most people might expect. On the other hand this entire concept is full of flaws.”
*
“Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war.”
*
“The nuclear nations have a stockpile of fissionable material I would estimate in the neighborhood of sixty thousand megatons in terms of explosive power. That’s a personal estimate, based on whatever tech-data I’ve been able to accumulate in the journals and bulletins, accurate within a factor of maybe three or four. But just for the heck of it, figure that out in terms of pounds of TNT. That’s pounds now, not tons. I bet you can’t do it without paper and pencil. The trick is to keep count of the zeros.”
*
“War is the ultimate realization of modern technology. For centuries men have tested themselves in war. War was the final test, the great experience, the privilege, the honor, the self-sacrifice or what have you, the absolutely ultimate determination of what kind of man you were. War was the great challenge and the great evaluator. It told you how much you were worth. But it’s different today. Few men want to go off and fight. We prove ourselves, our manhood, in other ways, in making money, in skydiving, in hunting mountain lions with bow and arrow, in acquiring power of one kind or another. And I think we can forget ideology. People invent
that problem, at least as far as the U.S. is concerned. It has no real bearing as far as we’re concerned. Obviously we can live with Communism; we’ve been doing it long enough. So people invent that. That’s the grotesque sense of patriotism at work in this country. Today we can say that war is a test of opposing technologies. We can say this more than ever because it’s more true than it ever was. Look, what would our cartoonists do if they wanted to satirize the Chinese, if we were in a period of extreme tension with the Chinese and the editorial cartoonists wanted to stir up a little patriotism? Would they draw slanted eyes and pigtails the way they drew buck teeth for the Japanese in the forties? No, no, they wouldn’t make fun of the people at all. They’d satirize the machines, the nuclear capability, the weapons and such of the Chinese. They’d draw firecrackers and kites. War has always told men what they were capable of under stress. Now it informs the machines. It’s the best test of a country’s technological skills. Are all your gaseous diffusion plants going at top efficiency? Are your ICBM guidance and control mechanisms ready to work perfectly? You get the answers when war breaks out. Your technology doesn’t know how good it is until it goes to war, until it’s been tested in the ultimate way. I don’t think we care too much about individual bravery anymore. It’s better to be efficient than brave. So that’s it then. It’s regrettable but there it is. And your technology isn’t any good if it can’t beat the enemy’s. Your weapons have to be more efficient than theirs, more reliable, more accurate, more deadly. Your technology has to reach peak efficiency. It has to stretch itself out, overreach itself; it has to improve itself almost instantaneously. It won’t do this
without the stress of war. War brings out the best in technology.”
*
“Major, there’s no way to express thirty million dead. No words. So certain men are recruited to reinvent the language.”
“I don’t make up the words, Gary.”
“They don’t explain, they don’t clarify, they don’t express. They’re painkillers. Everything becomes abstract. I admit it’s fascinating in a way. I also admit the problem goes deeper than just saying some crypto-Goebbels in the Pentagon is distorting the language.”
“Somebody has to get it before the public regardless of language. It has to be aired in public debate, clinically, the whole thing, no punches pulled, no matter how terrible the subject is and regardless of language. It has to be discussed.”
“I don’t necessarily disagree.”
“Look, Gary, if I go out and talk to different groups about this sort of thing, it doesn’t make me some kind of monster who likes to expound or whatever the word is on the consequences of nuclear exchange, who likes to stand up there before a group and talk about mass death and all the rest of it. If I try to inform people so they’ll do something about the situation, the gravity of it, then I’m performing a service, or at least it seems to me. I’m not some kind of monstrous creature who enjoys talking about the spectacle of megadeath, the unprecedented scale of this kind of thing. It has to be talked about and expounded on. It has to be described for people, clinically and graphically, so they’ll know just what it is they’re facing.”
“I don’t necessarily disagree, major.”
“The greatest thrill of my life was getting a ride in the XB-seventy. That was the greatest thrill of my life.”
*
“Weapons technology is so specialized that nobody has to feel any guilt. Responsibility is distributed too thinly for that. It’s the old warriors like myself who have to take the blame for what the so-called technocrats and multi-dimensional men are up to.”
*
“What did you want to see me about exactly?”
“Just nuclear war, sir. What it might be like.”
*
“First to sixth hour after detonation the ground-zero circle is drenched with fallout. By the end of the first day the dose-rate begins to slow down. After a few months it slows down considerably. It all depends on the megatons, the fission yield, air or surface burst, wind velocity, mean pressure altitude, descent time, median particle size.”
*
“Ten megatons of fission produce one million curies of strontium ninety. What does that do to milk calcium levels? There’s a factor-four discrimination against strontium in the human body. Newly forming bone attains a level eight times greater than the level that’s acceptable. Then there’s cerium one forty-four, plutonium two thirty-nine, barium one-forty. What else have we got? Zinc sixty-five in fish. Also radioiodine. That’s milk, children, thyroid cancer.”
*
“The average lethal mutation in an autosome persists for twenty-two generations.”
*
“The aging process, the natural aging process means there’s a slowdown in cell turnover, cellular turnover.
Now you get a cell population exposed to a particular radiation dose and what you have is an aggravation of the slowdown thing, the radiation on top of the natural degenerative body process. The average life span undergoes a decrease. If you’re exposed to three-hundred-R whole-body radiation, say within seven days of when the thing hits, and then say another hundred R over the entire first year, you lose about eleven years, you undergo a life-span reduction of eleven years. Sublethal doses also cause reproduction problems. There are problems with microcephalic offspring. There are abnormal terminations and stillbirths. There’s a problem with inferior skeletal maturation of male and female progeny. There is formation of abnormal lens tissue in offspring. There are chromosome breaks. There is sterility of course. There is general reduction of body size of male offspring six years of age and under. However, the Japanese data indicates that congenital malformation frequency would not necessarily vary from the norm as far as the first post-bomb generation is concerned.”