Bomb Mentality

Bomb Mentality

BOOKS

THE GREAT AMERICAN

BOMB MACHINE

Roger Rapoport

E.P. Dutton

What, in terms of the species, is the greatest threat technology poses to man? Oil spills? Atmospheric pollution? Overpopulation? Chemical wastes?

Chickenshit! All of those are reversable within a lifetime or two. But, there remains a peril that is, for all effects and purposes, a permanent damage. That is atomic bombs. So, you’d forgotten about those impolitic devices that used to keep people awake in the fifties. The tests of which kept everyone checking their milk for strontium 90 and cesium 137, whatever the hell they were. Well, it turns out they did not go the way of the tail fin; they have proliferated and have not ceased to be a danger to humans. Perhaps the threat of nuclear war has subsided as the major cause of fear, but slower, more insidious damage has continued to grow in spite of the Atmospheric Nuclear Test Ban.

“Why do ecology-minded college students spend more time fighting for biodegradable toilet paper than elimination of this nuclear juggernaut? Why do liberal-minded senators and congressmen lash out at the inhumanity of napalm, and then routinely approve billion dollar appropriations for these infinitely more dangerous hydrogen bombs and warheads?”

This question is asked and its ramifications dealt with in 77ze Great American Bomb Machine. It is a short, direct, extremely informative book on the activities of the only civilian agency capable of specicide — the A.E.C. Roger Rapoport spent two years hassling the A.E.C., questioning people, traveling, and observing. The book he put together puts the whole idea of nuclear weaponry into a perspective that makes the impossibly grotesque events and thinking comprehensible.

ROGER

RAPOPORT

IHE

GREAT

AMERICAN

BOMB

MACHINE

The most difficult problems faced by anyone — scientist, layman, or writer — in dealing with something like the atomic weapons complex, or, say, the Bengali refugee catastrophe, or the holocaust of the European Jewry, is personal rather than technical. The initial shock eventually becomes too difficult to face and the resultant depression and/or freakout has to be coped with. This is accomplished by either slowly erecting shields or by changing outrage to morbidity and becoming fascinated by the statistics and trivia. Roger Rapoport has managed to steer clear of these by some clear thinking and occasionally resorting to some healthy black humor. But, the reader’s psyche must be an area of concern. The problem, as I say, isn’t as much the accumulation of indicting data, but of making it possible for the reader to assimilate it and live with it.

Of course, the danger of nuclear devices is pretty well camouflaged by itself — it’s invisible and it doesn’t hurt until it’s too late. Jt’s kind of like the doctor’s problem of dealing with a patient with high blood pressure. If there were pain, their job would be immeasurably simpler, but there isn’t, so to get the patient to act in his own interest is exceedingly difficult.

But, if this book can’t start the ball rolling, nothing, short of an accidental elimination of one of our major cities will do it.

Not that that’s so far fetched. As Rapoport states at the beginning, that in spite of the billions spent by the A.E.C., “The truth is that the quality of the average nuclear bomb is controlled little better than the quality of the average mass-produced automobile.” Nor is any of the process, from the mining of the uranium to the manufacturing processes to the “safe” underground tests to the handling and storage of the bombs to the disposal of wastes, any better. The entire story makes the great nerve gas scare seem like Chicken Little’s worry.

What, actually, has been the tangible results of this supposed mismanagement, you may ask, and why should this worry take precedence over the hike in kilo prices? Well, to begin with:

“The nuclear weapons makers have spent over 17.1 billion dollars supposedly to make America safe for democracy. They have also sunk one South Pacific island and forced the evacuation of two others. They have raised the nations’ infant mortality rate, permanently contaminated 250 square miles in Nevada, taken uranium miners to an early grave, contaminated thyroids in Utah and the Marshall Islands, probably hiked the cancer rate in Denver, scattered radioactive debris in Greenland and Spain, triggered small earthquakes in Las Vegas, and polluted the prime Western watershed with radioactive waste.”

But, this is an overall view. Author Rapoport has spent a good deal of time gathering some hard data, some of which is frightening and most, is somewhere between absurd and grisly.

Possibly the most discouraging one to face is the ongoing case of Rocky Flats, the bomb assembly plant near Denver owned by Dow Chemical (you folks remember them?). Rocky Flats has had something over 200 fires due to the rather uncomfortable fact that plutonium (the fissionable material in bombs), besides having a radioactive half-life of 24,400 years, is also violently inflammable. The largest of these fires, the one in 1969, was, coincidentally, the most costly industrial fire in US history. 45 million dollars worth of damage. The A.E.C.’s reaction, after they had paid for the cost of the fire from government funds, was to give the Rocky Flats plant an award for all the time before that that they didn’t have a 45 million dollar fire. Of course, the citizens of Denver, who were downwind when 20 million dollars worth of plutonium went up in a very toxic smoke, may have another award in mind as they continue to pressure for the closing of Rocky Flats.

The discouragement comes from something other than the possible loss of Denver. And that’s the incredible blind persistence of the Bomb Mentality. For instance, Nixon has just announced plans to expand further our nuclear morass by building a half dozen breeder, reactors. We have only had two up until now, and one of them went haywire a few years ago and very nearly forced the evacuation of Detroit.

But, these are big things. Let’s look at a nearly everyday accident. In 1968, a truck full of oil that had been contaminated with plutonium was leaving Rocky Flats for the A.E.C. waste burial ground in Idaho. I’ll let Rapoport take it from here: “En route across the plant ground, however, the drum began to leak. Over a mile of highway was contaminated. The A.E.C.’s solution was to repave the road. Unfortunately, plutonium’s half-life of 24,400 years is a good deal longer than the full-life of asphalt, and years from now, when the roadbed wears away, the hot plutonium will be exposed, to contaminate unborn generations.” This is not unusual of the care taken. There are accounts of waste lost in transit, buried without authorization, uranium mine tailings used as foundation landfill, and if you can imagine it, they’re doing it.

It’s when Rapoport gets into the A.E.C.’s projections of post-nuclear society that we realize what we’re up against. For instance, Human Sciences Research, Inc., working for the A.E.C., has been contracted to figure out such things as the possible “therapeutic effects of disaster.” Stanford Research

DEALING OR THE

BE R KE LE Y-TO-BOSTON LOST-BAG BLUES Michael Douglas Bantam

Everybody out in Readerland is familiar with the Substitution Thesis: people smoke cigarettes as substitutes for teats, jocks drive Mustangs because they can’t get laid, bookworms read books because they can’t find friends, ad nauseum. There’s a new one to the effect that people who have rejected the notions of major world religions substitute for them a faith in the long con, and I humbly submit that I’m not only a believer, but a priest of the Church of the Long Con.

Some of the more heart-warming evidence for my having faith comes in the form of a successful novel of exploitation, particularly one whose author has convinced his publisher that the book is the “real thing”, payment for which will allow the author to sit back and laugh at Institute did post-attack research on food availability in five different cities. They stated that, for instance, 39% of Albuquerque’s soft drink industry would be put out of commission, but not to worry because 76.4% of the potato processing potential is expected to survive the attack. One of the benefits of a thermonuclear war, said the Institue of Defense Analysis, is that the survivors will have a great increase in per capita wealth, due to the unfortunate elimination of capitas.

Mama Mia!

Roger Rapoport lives in the next town over from me, so I called him up to see what’s happened since the book came out. He’s been traveling and lecturing. United Features Syndicate has serialized the book in a number of newspapers.

Two direct results have occurred, he said. One is that a particularly offensive set of radiation experiments bn terminal cancer patients is under investigation by Ted Kennedy.

The other is that the F.B.I. came by to visit Roger the day before I called. Looking for Weathermen, as usual.

Read this book. It isn’t very long. It will be out in paperback. I hope that isn’t too late.

Alec Dubro

the gullibility and naivete of the publisher and the buying public while solvency burns a hole in his pocket. William Burroughs’ (Lee) Junkie is a good example, though it probably didn’t change his income bracket. Ideally, for the author and appreciative believer, it’s a heads I win, tails you lose operation.

Dealing, as it turns out, is merely a summer soldier of con, a vinegar sacrement. The book was written, as the cover glibly informs you, by none other than Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain and Five Patients, and Douglas Crichton, his pencilpushing sibling. It is difficult to see how two people could possible have contributed to this, much less a genyouwine author and tyro aid as this is a meager offering doing no more, and that not well, than typifying what has come to be known, whispered on the tongues of those in the know, as the not-too-hiprip-off.

Very few books have been able to successfully usurp the hip background for use in popular novels. Exceptions have succeeded by virtue of their obvious sincerity (Be Not Content) or casual tongue-in-cheek attitude (A Free Country). Dealing is lacking both of these and instead glides on nippy-comelately-security charged with latent hipper-than-thouism. I concede.

The story itself is of little consequence, and, as the cover also announces, this will soon be more widely known as the book has mutated and is, “Now a really fine movie from Warner Bros.” And no doubt far-fuckin-outasite to boot. You see there’s this kid who goes to Harvard where he doesn’t work too hard and doesn’t do too much and he gets involved in a cross-country dope deal that leaves him safe and the front man (his best buddy) invulnerable, but puts in jeopardy (not to mention jail) his newly acquired California chickie. She is busted and the protagonist has to free her to show that he’s a man after all and not just a feather-weight undergraduate with a Kick Me sign pasted to the back of his denims.

In the process of getting involved and uninvolved the protagonist shows his John Stickney quit his job at Life magazine in order to travel around the country and find out what ever happened to peaceluvnflahrs. He thinks he found out, and he’s so good at reportorial legerdemain that you’ll probably get most of the way through the bbok before you begin to realize that his observations don’t really form a coherent whole, and he’s probably as, or more, confused as the people he writes about. Basically a series of vignettes, the book is best when some articulate ( or inarticulate) spokesman/woman is speaking about an issue that he/she is deeply involved in: for instance, the Jesus freaks who pick him up hitchhiking who expose themselves brilliantly with just a few well-programmed cliches, or the spokeswoman for a number of allied women’s groups in Seattle detailing with icy precision the collapse of the tenuous movement in that city through some rather heavy-handed male chauvinism. It is when he starts to draw conclusions from his observations that he begins to fuck up. And when he begins to act on his conclusions — like the disastrous confrontation he engineers in the book’s last section between a “spiritual” expertise as a camouflaged hip type. He does dope deals, coast-to-coast, consorts with criminals and cops, is briefly busted, knows the pathos and bathos of free love, but nevertheless he dresses strictly Harvard Square and he realizes his class hang-ups. As if this isn’t enough he also has flashbacks concerning relations with his parents.

STREETS, ACTIONS,

ALTERNATIVES, RAPS:

A Report On The Decline

Of The Counterculture

John Stickney

Putnam

The book has all the components of a thirteen year old’s fantasy. It has: 1) a girl (she’s “been around”), 2) a best friend (foil, wealthy kid who makes unneeded money by “playing with fire”), 3) a bad guy (Murphy the Cop, archetypal Lucifer who plays “both sides of the track”), 4) settings (Berkeley and Boston, de rigeur “scenes”), 5) goals (growing up, learning to live with the easy life), 6) walkins, cameos (black speed freak, an old flame, a Big Dealer, a “genius”, all courtesy Central Casting), and 7) a plot (Genus: Shoestring).

If you know a bed-ridden thirteen year old, give him the book. Me, I think I’ll just stroll over to church on my knees.

Stephen Nugent

commune and a “political” one — the result is a mess. One walks away from this book with virtually no insights and certainly without any questions as to the “counterculture’s” direction having been answered. Hmmm, come to think of it, that probably means it’s a pretty accurate portrait...

Ed Ward

THE MAFIA IS NOT

AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

EMPLOYER

Nicholas Gage

McGraw Hill

BOSS,

RICHARD J. DALEY

OF CHICAGO

Mike Royko

Signet

If insomnia or ignorance of American political style are your problems, then these two books are offered up as panaceae. Gage’s book has all the packaged features that characterize Madison Avenue’s heavy investment in the book biz: it’s presented with flair, a snappy title, concerned with something of considerable interest, and is said to be something of a departure from conventional journalistic style. It is also sleep-inducing. Royko’s book, by contrast, is solid, unpretentious, transcendent of conventional journalistic binds, and is surely the best book of its type to emerge in recent years.

The Mafia is a slightly updated version of a Sunday Supplement Special on organized crime, and it allegedly demonstrates the courage of the “new journalism” of those reporters who now go out and investigate their stories. It must be noted that this is in sharp contrast to the old-fashioned style of reporting which only involved sitting at a desk until the Angel of Good Copy descended with hot tips and inspiration. The dirt that Gage presents consists of some heretofore unpublished interviews with nameless persons who are on the ‘inside’. The quotes are at times interesting, as in the discussions of Mafia home life and Mafia Women, and big name stars’ relations with the Mafia, but the effort is minimal when compared to other recent books such as Gay Talese’ Honor Thy Father.

The starting point for Gage’s tale is the onerous question, Does the Mafia exist, and if so is it fair to employ the familiar syllogism by which Americans have typically related persons of Italian(i.e. The Mafia is composed of ItalianSicilians; the Mafia runs organized crime; therefore Italian-Sicilians are criminals). Gage hems and haws a bit, and comes to the startling conclusions that although members of all ethnic minorities have been involved in organized crime, Italian-Sicilians have captured the popular imagination, and in fact there is much evidence to support the claim that the Mafia exists and is a predominantly Italian-Sicilian concern.

With the problem settled, Gage proceeds to outline the rise of the Mafia as an underworld power, and in doing so he reveals how it is that the Mafia has been able to maintain its position of power. Briefly, it is because the Mafia is an organization that has viewed itself not simply in terms of its goals of power, but also in terms of relative positions of other power-wielding organizations; thus, the Mafia, imported from Europe as a kin organization, took advantage of its internal coherence to run illegal liquor distribution operations during the Prohibition Era. Operating in the underworld the organization established contacts with other groups and networks and with the abolition of Prohibition the Mafia was in a position to capitalize on its successful illegal and extralegal experiences, and it could pursue other projects. By the time machine gun show of force was becoming unfashionable (and unsafe) the Mafia was organized enough to approach crime with a more subtle approach. The threat of an overdose of bullets was replaced by the threat of the double-bind: you pay us to be part of you, or we take our business elsewhere. The Mafia had the necessary capital to establish itself in the guise of various business corporations and to invest in conventional ways, and with the assent of local political machines it proceeded to go ‘legit’. It is at this point that Gage’s narrative comes close to redeeming itself by suggesting the close parallels between the Mafia and any other high profit child of Robber Baron now turned God of Industry, but Gage does not see fit to venture far along these lines.

Royko steps in as the Prince of the Shiny Suit. All those things at which Gage’s book fails are eminently manifest in Boss. The difficulties of such a task are monumental; even assuming one has the data, how can they be presented so that the detailed interdependence of all tne Machine's components is demonstrated? Royko has overcome the problem by taking the angle that the system, is entropic, and that the significant features of the Machine are evident when it is confronted with the problem of overcoming entropy; thus, Royko has written a history with Chicago as an arena in which various groups of men have been vying for power. Daley has held his position on top of the ‘shit pile’ for almost twenty years. He rose to this position, and he maintains it by not viewing the maintenance of the Machine as a matter of quashing power-hungry groups, but by seeing it as a thing susceptible to different sorts of manipulation at whatever level one happens to reside.

Daley has resided at all levels. Starting as a member of a neighborhood gang he consistently hung around with the right person until he could overtake him and move on to the next. With each rise in the hierarchy of the Democratic party machine he had access to the sorts of information and know-how that placed him in strategic positions so that he could effect the next step. Everybody belongs to the Machine (“after all dis is a democracy”), it’s just that some people are value-loaded, and some are nobodies. The Machine decides, and Daley’s singular achievement is that he is now the Machine.

Daley, the man, has pursued the goal of absolute power with the continence of a Jesuit, but throughout he has maintained an even view of his alter ego, the Machine. When it appears that the Machine is faltering due to something such as a scandal, Daley falters too. He loses his health and composure, and he must withdraw while the Machine straightens things out by recourse to lies, leaning on people, fabricating counter-scandals, in short, anything that works. Game Theory has not been lost on Daley. The game is the totality of the rules, and Daley is, after all, the rulemaker.

In his very precise manner Royko has presented data and analyses which constitute a significantly American document: Boss offers up in popular vernacular an example of a capitalist system having to consistently sterilize the seeds of its destruction, or burn them out by overfertilization. Royko’s prognosis is unclear, but is certainly not optimistic. Chicago and Daley, for all their style, do not constitute a unique case, and the health of the Machine is contingent, to a degree, on national events and connections with other Machines; as a result, even though such things as the political affiliations of the White House occupants appear to have little to do with the nature of the Nation’s policies, the affiliations can have great effects on the state of local machines, and vice versa. After Daley’s re-election in April ’71 he received congratulatory calls from Presidential hopefuls Kennedy, McGovern, Humphrey, and Muskie, all of whom realize that the Daley Machine is a good one to have in your garage.

Stephen Nugent