PRESS: Armageddon, Anyone?

...I can't see how a President could trigger a spasm war with one button or one telephone call, out of the clear blue, just like that...

...Something is reported about the B-l bomber-a rise in cost, say, to $21 billion for a fleet of 244-and that is the last you hear about the B-l for awhile...

...After he finished we talked about his motorcycle, his car and his work...

...No one wants war now, either, but they're ready for it, and they are getting readier...

...After awhile the engines were backed down and the roar and the light disappeared, leaving a whisper and a fading red glow, no brighter than a cigarette across a football field, as the Phantoms shot off through the darkness toward their targets...

...It is hard to get everybody to agree on the same policy at the same time...

...India, Iran and Saudi Arabia are only three recent big spenders...

...I know, roughly, what a bomb would do to Manhattan, where I live, but it's hard to look out the window and think that one day it will be a smoking plain...

...Once in awhile, way up there, I see a white vapor trail...

...No one power can be shattered in one or two campaigns so completely as to confess itself beaten, and conclude peace on hard terms...

...In the summer I go to Vermont, where my family has a farm...

...Human life, yes, but not all other sorts...

...Would their editors grow irritated if they insisted on appending a paragraph or two on radiation burn to every story...

...Headline from the Washington Post of April 5, 1976: ISRAELI A-BOMBS PUT AT 13 The major newspapers, newsmagazines and broadcast networks all have Pentagon reporters and along with the stories about closing military bases they report from time to time on the ultimate question...

...I imagine they're still right there, in the same place on the same ship, if they haven't been replaced by better, bigger and newer models...

...I asked if they carried nuclear weapons on board...

...My roommate was a young B-52 navigator who owned a 750 cc...

...Sometimes I wish they would describe the officials a bit, tell me something of their faces and voices when they argue for doubling the size of warheads...

...I asked if he and his crew would have any hesitation about dropping their bomb, if it came to that...

...That made it real for 20 minutes, but of course Gelb and Middleton can't go on repeating such stories forever...

...They have been with us for thirty years and a cause of-how shall we put it9-continuing concern, but most of the time we are thinking of other things...

...Besides, that's what they pay us for...

...But if you were to clip the papers methodically for a year or two you would notice, I think, how vast, inexorable and immutable the world's arms programs are...

...His mouth opened and he looked unhappy as he groped for some way to say he was not allowed to say...

...There was no sign on the big door behind them and I asked why there were guards standing in front of it, thinking a-ha...

...Would we...

...In 1890 the German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke (the elder) wrote If the war which has hung over our heads, like the sword of Damocles, for more than ten years past, ever breaks out, its duration and end cannot be foreseen...

...Nixon and Kissinger tried to do something about this, but we all know what happened to them...

...Missiles are more accurate and better protected...

...My friend Tim Ferris, who knows a lot about these things, points out that even a really major nuclear war-what Herman Kahn used to call a "spasm war," in which everybody shot off everything-would not destroy all life...

...and Soviet Account for 60% of Expenditure Gain Sharpest in Mideast It is unusual for an arms story to make the front page...

...Not only has the total megatonnage increased, but the means of delivery have steadily progressed as well...

...Not to get caught on the ground...

...Take a minute right now and try to imagine all the people, all over the globe, who are ready-right now, at this very instant, whether you are reading this article at noon or midnight-to fire all the missiles...

...The difference here is that the great powers carry guns of unprecedented caliber, and that the world's well-being demands they never go off...

...THOMAS POWERS...

...One was the Phantom jets taking off at night...

...it may be Thirty Years' War-woe to him who first sets fire to Europe . . . Von Moltke did not have all the details right, but the gravity of his foreboding was hardly unjustified...

...Our guide said nothing...

...A dozen years ago, for example, I went up to Platts-burgh, N.Y., for an Air Force physical and spent the night in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters...

...Now I know, and I think: One day all the planes will go up at once, and no one will call them back...

...Never is a long time...

...In every corner of the globe governments squeeze every available penny of revenue or credit for arms...

...I take the children sometimes and after we are tired of picking-which for them comes very quickly-we lie on the grass and look up at the sky...

...On an average day, he said, he took off from Pittsburgh around ten in the morning, flew down the East Coast to Atlanta, turned west to St...

...The other thing I remember was a tour the following morning of one of the hangar decks...

...But that simply begs the point...

...Their capacity for destruction is very great, although not quite as great as is sometimes supposed...

...The great fleet of Darius, the Roman Legions, the Spanish Armada and the Wehrmacht were all intended for war, and that is what they were used for...

...Triumph motorcycle and a Corvette...

...No," he said...

...It took 24 years but war came in the end, and it was just as bad as he had feared...

...I suppose that Leslie Gelb and Drew Middleton of the Times have their moments of sudden fear when they hear sirens at night, like everybody else...

...here's the brig...

...When Kissinger was working on detente, Anthony Lewis of the Times was writing about Valery Panov, the dancer, who couldn't get a visa to leave Russia...

...All my life I have seen those vapor trails, like a scalpel cut across the blue, but until I went to Pittsburgh I never knew where the planes were coming from, or where they were going...

...When you stop to think of these things clearly and logically the situation looks bleak indeed...

...The art of the siren has made a lot of progress in recent years...

...There is no question that the President of the United States, or the Chairman of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, could, if he wished, and if he went about it with a clear head, trigger a political crisis which would precipitate a war...

...It might take a bit longer than 20 or 25 minutes, but the end result would be the same This would be so awful that it is hard-perhaps even impossible-to imagine anyone doing it, but you might have said the same thing of the First and Second World Wars, too, with a little foresight, and yet they happened all the same...

...I know it's difficult to think of so many people in so many places, all at the same time...

...The whole ship seemed to vibrate with the roar The flame pouring from engine exhausts lit up the ocean more brightly than the moon...

...I find it easier to imagine the men on the aircraft carriers...

...It may be Seven Years' War...

...From South Dakota to Novosibirsk, and in all the oceans between, there are men on duty-at this very instant!- ready to push the buttons...

...I, myself, have never written about this before, and I probably never will again...

...The threat had to be "clarified" (by Sen Alan Cranston, the source of the story) because it was not really a threat at all, but only a comment by the President intended to show how precarious the world was, and how important the pursuit of peace...

...The poor, for example, are always with us, but it's hard always to think of them...

...We have got Panov, finally, but I am not so sure we have got detente anymore...

...The greatest powers of Europe, armed as never before, will then stand face to face...

...We have had peace of a sort for thirty years, but there was peace of an even better sort for 42 years between the Franco-Prussian and First World Wars...

...Almost everyone will confess to the sudden half-fear-is this it?-when a siren catches them unprepared, but we would think it odd if Gelb and Middleton put that sort of thing into their grey columns of newsprint...

...That is what you would call faint comfort...

...Every Palestinian kid in Lebanon wants his own Kalashnikov assault rifle, just as every national leader wants his own air force, and both generally get what they want...

...Before he went to bed he did 50 push-ups and 100 sit-ups...

...I have no complaints about their seriousness or expertise, but sometimes I wish their language wasn't so flat, careful and judicious...

...In Deadwood, South Dakota, a hundred years ago it probably made a sort of sense to carry a gun, especially if you wanted to carry money too...

...That's the whole idea...

...We knew it was only practice, just in case, but I don't remember talking or laughing during the drills...

...All the same I wish there were some way to make the danger seem real...

...You see such things only in erratic flashes...

...There is an abandoned pasture on a mountain-top across the valley, where the view and the blackberries are both magnificent...

...I didn't doubt him for a minute...

...Two things remain in my mind...

...Louis, then north to Chicago and finally on back to Pittsburgh, arriving in plenty of time for dinner...

...The same goes for nuclear weapons...

...They are almost always one-day stories...

...They are far from being our first line of nuclear attack or defense, but they have their bombs too...

...We have so many things to do, so many check lists to work through, that we'd be over the target before we knew it...

...They can write knowledgeably about first and second strike capabilities, "city busting," "throw-weights," deterrence, hard and soft missile sites, the difference between MIRVs and MARVs, and the like...

...In the summer of 1966 or 1967-I forget which-I spent a day on the U.S...

...The noise was simply incredible, even with ear plugs...

...I suspect we would...

...They used to just wail, but now they warble, or let out foghorn blasts that make you all but start up out of your chair...

...But it would be out of place, and it would absorb too much of their limited space, nudging out facts, and the news paragraph itself, short and dense, is unsuited to vivid writing...

...They led us out into the central corridor and sat us down on the linoleum floor, backs to the wall, away from the windows...

...The human episode on earth would be ended, but not the planet itself...

...Aircraft Carrier Saratoga in the Mediterranean, watching military exercises...

...It seemed real enough to me when I was ten and used to have air-raid alerts at the Siwanoy School in Pelham, just outside New York...

...I don't have the figures but I would suspect that since 1950 every quarter has seen a rise in the number and size of nuclear weapons ready for war...

...Besides, it's hard to maintain a sense of alarm...

...Of course," he said...

...So I thought, of course The ship has a nuclear capability, and this is where they keep the bombs...

...This isn't entirely crazy...

...Why should the present situation end any differently...

...We passed machine shops and storage rooms and aircraft in the huge between-decks space like a factory floor while our guide pointed out this and that, never at a loss for some statistics or fact...

...They showed us how to bend over, heads between our knees, to protect our eyes from glare and shattering glass...

...The passion for arms is universal...

...The usual position for arms stories is somewhere around page 13...

...Of course we all hope it will end differently, but is hope enough...

...But then the children grow restless, and it's time to take them home, and I forget...

...We're not in the mood for war, perhaps, but we're certainly ready for it, and if we wait at the ready long enough, the mood may steal over us...

...Headline from the Washington Post of February 9, 1976: NIXON 'A-THREAT' CLARIFIED The "threat" was delivered in the summer of 1974 when Nixon told two members of the House, "At any moment I could go into the next room, push a button and 20 minutes later 60 million people would be dead...

...The last one I remember was the ABM story, which captured attention as much for its elements of political melodrama as for the inherent significance of the proposed ABM program itself...

...Headline from the New York Times of February 1, 1976: world's spending on arms reported at record levels Study Places Annual Outlay at $300 billion-Fastest Rise in Developing Lands U.S...

...It is so high up there is no sound...

...In any event both versions of Nixon's comment strike me as hyperbolic, although the second is perhaps faintly more plausible than the first...

...Then we approached an area where two Marines were carrying rifles on guard...

...It seems the more improbable when you stop to consider that up until now the world's great armies have always gone to war sooner or later...

...A second version of the quote has Nixon saying, "I can go into my office and pick up the telephone, and in 25 minutes 70 million people will be dead...