“We rambled Armageddon roads for a mighty long time,
paying no mind to the signs.
Got lost after becoming perfect war hammers,
when Dutch hoisted our victory flag.
Talk show fumes now choke out sun’s light.
Many pray and clean their guns at night.”

– A Nuclear Pal’s take from Key West, with inspiration by Son House
 
We are peeling the onion this week in Washington. One of my Government bubbas scheduled a meeting for Wednesday and I freaked. The marble part of the city is filled with the delegations of 47 sovereign nations, and consequently cross-town traffic sucks. The center of gravity is the Convention Center downtown, not far from my old office on New York Avenue above the Bus Station.
 
The whole neighborhood is patrolled with a heavy security presence. Streets are closed and a battalion of troops, the DC cops and towering temporary high fences restrict access.
 
Trying to exist in this town is sometimes like living at the Opera, or the Circus, though both of those venues have a certain order that we lack.
 
I was concerned that the Nuclear Summit was going to be going on through the week. I got a gentle note back regarding my concerns about traffic to remind me that the Summit would be over in two days.
 
I checked the media sources my pal was right- the whole thing is going to be wrapped up in only two days. This is the biggest gathering of world leaders since Franklin Roosevelt summoned the world to create the United Nations. If this was speed-dating, no one could get past the first round and see if there was anyone worth being serious about.
 
The deal is the selected meetings, and who is speed-dating whom. The President opened things up with bilateral talks with a handful of cute nations on Monday, including Chinese President Hu Jintao and Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
 
The latter, who is also dating Mr. Putin, announced he will get rid of his highly enriched uranium within the next two years. He has enough for a couple weapons, so this is good. The Canadians, bless them, also swore to ship their enriched uranium to the States for re-processing into fuel.
 
There is supposed to be a joint declaration to guide future work toward “cleansing the globe” of materials still too easily accessible to terrorists. There will be some real simulated progress with resolute but vague promises. That is better than the alternative, and other potential suitors may make similar declarations, according to the White House.
 
Everyone will be out of town by Wednesday afternoon. World disarmament and I can get to my meeting tomorrow. It is pretty good news all around.
 
I woke up the other day and realized my thinking had changed while I had been occupied with other things. Having been in the wholesale annihilation business for several years along with a bunch of my pals, I was accustomed to think of throw weight, SIOP and weapons fratricide as the issues of the working day. The disembodied voices in Main Radio that murmured 24-7 the codes of doom were a familiar presence:
 
“Strongbox, Strongbox, Alpha Whiskey Romeo Delta India Golf. Strongbox, Strongbox….”

We took it very seriously at the time, which is appropriate to the gravity of the enterprise, but even then things were more than a little surreal.
 
If you had a literary bent, as a couple of us did, it was a unique environment. You could not write about it, and only years later did the words start to crystallize into something coherent. My nuclear pal in Key West penned the stanza above. Another writes intricate sonnets near Puget Sound.
 
I am stuck in the prose mode, since I am limited in imagination.
 
Our nuclear world was limited to the traditional club, plus China. My last field trip as a government official was to talk to the Indians about maybe not blowing their pals in Islamabad into molten slag when the Indian Sub-continent went atomic. The thrust of this summit is generally about trying to out the genie back in the bottle, but what the speed-daters are really concerned about is Iran’s nuclear program, and additional sanctions.
 
China’s media said this morning that despite the very pleasant date yesterday with the handsome President that sanctions were not the answer, even though they were open to seeing him again and maybe do dinner and a movie.
 
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited, but he said he was doing his hair and that the whole thing was intended to humiliate him.
 
I think he should feel humiliated. I really can’t imagine who in their right mind would go out with him. I have come a long way from the theory and practice of hell to a more thoughtful view about what constitutes a strategic reserve. I am deeply opposed to seeing the sudden elimination of Delhi and Islamabad, or Tehran and Tel Aviv.
 
So here is to the conferees in town, and may their dating result in exciting companionship with the prospect for long-term commitment.
 
Once they are all safely out of town, I will have a couple vignettes about living with the bomb, and learning how not to like it.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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