Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online

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,