October 21: Battle of the Laboratories, Climate Change, Rumfoords of the World

"You guys go on without me," said Billy Pilgrim deliriously, as pretty little Lily came in.  She had been an a-go-go girl when Rumfoord saw her and resolved to make her his own.  She was a high school dropout.  Her I. Q. was 103.  "He scares me," she whispered to her husband about Billy Pilgrim.

"He bores the hell out of me!" Rumfoord replied boomingly.  "All he does in his sleep is quit and surrender and apologize and ask to be left alone."  Rumfoord was a retired brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve, the official Air Force Historian, a full professor, the author of twenty-six books, a multimillionaire since birth, and one of the great competitive sailors of all time.  His most popular book was about sex and strenuous athletics for men over sixty-five.  Now he quoted Theodore Roosevelt, whom he resembled a lot:

"'I could carve a better man out of a banana.'"

One of the things Rumfoord told Lily to get in Boston was a copy of President Harry S. Truman's announcement to the world that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima.  She had a Xerox of it, and Rumfoord asked her if she had read it.

"No."  She didn't read well, which was one of the reasons she had dropped out of high school.

Rumfoord ordered her to sit down and read the Truman statement now.  He didn't know that she couldn't read much.  He knew very little about her, except that she was one more public demonstration that he was a superman.

So Lily sat down and pretended to read the Truman thing, which went like this:

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base.  That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T.  It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam," which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.

The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor.  They have been repaid many-fold.  And the end is not yet.  With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces.  In their present form, these bombs are now in production, and even more powerful forms are in development.

It is an atomic bomb.  It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.  The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy.  But nobody knew any practical method of doing it.  By 1942, however, we knew that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to all the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world.  But they failed.  We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got the V-1's and V-2's late and in limited quantities and even more grateful that they did not get the atomic bomb at all.

The battle of laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land, and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles.

We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city, said Harry Truman.  We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications.  Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.  It was to spare--

And so on.

I know that is an incredibly long passage, mostly because of Truman's announcement about the bombing of Hiroshima.  Rumfoord, a multimillionaire who has probably never seen the real wages of warfare and thinks he's smarter than everybody else (sound familiar?), obviously is trying to make a point to his young wife.  Something about the necessity for death and destruction in the world to keep it safe from enemies who threaten its peace and stability.

Don't get me wrong.  I believe that there are just causes for the use of military intervention.  Nazi Germany needed to be stopped.  As did Japan and Italy.  However, overlooking the human cost of war is a mistake.  Innocent people die.  It's inevitable.  I think that world leaders should always keep that in mind when making military decisions.

A pissing contest with nuclear weapons is not something that should monopolize international relationships.  There's too many real, human tragedies that need attention.  Millions of refugees who have been suffering for years and years.  A planet that is rapidly being killed by its inhabitants--pollution, global warming, climate change.  Gun violence.  The rise of a new generation of Nazis, despite the defeat of Adolf Hitler over 70 years ago.

I have no answers here.  I'm just tired of the Rumfoords of the world being in charge, making decisions that impact millions of people without really considering their repercussions.  In fact, that frightens me.  A lot.  It should frighten you, too.

Saint Marty is thankful this morning that nobody has launched a nuclear warhead today.