High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [90]
How could we? How even to pay our monthly bills, if we held in mind the fact that we are camped on top of a technological powder keg? Or to use Carl Sagan’s more eloquent analogy: we are all locked together in a room filled with gasoline vapors, insisting that because they have two hundred matches, we won’t be safe until we have three hundred.
The Cold War is widely supposed to have ended. But preparations for nuclear war have not ended. The Titan museum’s orientation film is still telling the story we have heard so many times that it sounds, like all ultra-familiar stories, true. The story is that they would gladly drop bombs on us, if they weren’t so scared by the sheer toughness of our big missiles. They are the aggressors. We are practicing “a commitment to deterrence.”
Imagine you have never heard that story before. Look it in the eye and see what it is. How do strategic-games trophies and Titan-missile golf shirts stack up against a charred eyelet petticoat and handfuls of hair? The United States is the only nation that has ever used an atomic bomb. Dropped it, on men and women and schoolchildren and gardens and pets and museums, two whole cities of quotidian life. We did it, the story goes, to hasten the end of the war and bring our soldiers home. Not such an obvious choice for Oshita-chan. “To protect the rights and freedoms we enjoy” is a grotesque euphemism. Every nuclear weapon ever constructed was built for the purpose of ending life, in a manner so horrific it is nearly impossible to contemplate. And U.S. nuclear science has moved steadily and firmly, from the moment of its birth, toward first-strike capacity.
If the Titan in Green Valley had ever been allowed to do the job for which it was designed, the fire storm wouldn’t have ended a world away. Surely all of us, even missile docent Dave, understand that. Why, then, were we all so polite about avoiding the obvious questions? How is it that a waving flag can create an electromagnetic no-back-talk zone? In 1994, half a century after the bombing of Hiroshima, we spent $150 billion on the business and technology of war—nearly a tenth of it specifically on nuclear-weapons systems. Any talk of closing down a military base raises defensive and reverent ire, no matter how wasteful an installment it might be. And yet, public debate dickers and rages over our obligation to fund the welfare system—a contribution of about $25 a year from each taxpayer on average, for keeping the poorest among us alive. How can we haggle over the size of this meager life preserver, while shiploads of money for death sail by unchallenged? What religion of humankind could bless the travesty that is the U.S. federal budget?
Why did I not scream at the top of my lungs down in that hole?
I didn’t, so I’ll have to do it now, to anyone with the power to legislate or listen: one match in a gasoline-filled room is too many. I don’t care a fig who is holding it.
I donned the hard hat and entered the belly of the beast, and I came away with the feeling of something poisonous on my skin. The specter of that beast could paralyze a person with despair. But only if you accept it as inevitable. And it’s only inevitable if you are too paralyzed with despair to talk back. If a missile museum can do no more than stop up our mouths, with either patriotic silence or desperation, it’s a monument the living can’t afford. I