It was cold this morning and Splash was up early, hurling some logs toward the shy mass in the Fire Ring. He was clearly a couple cups of Chock Full o’ Nuts ahead of the rest of us. Our dawn’s early light brought the first conscious thoughts of the first morning of a bright and shiny new month. A month of transition that will bring Spring to the Piedmont. Real Spring, not the meteorological one the Lady in Red told us about in the local news last night. The real one, in which the buds begin to swell.

So, there was a fraction of hope in an otherwise thin grey sky. But there were others. Like everything else, there were new words for perfectly normal things. And some old words describing things that were past-tense made suddenly current and electric in their impact. They had caused a stir among those who remembered those words as a function of routine normal operations. The Young Attorney, assigned by the Legal Section to monitor what the old folks were talking about had to go to the internet to find their old meaning and apply them to new times.

“You old people need to go slow on this stuff so we can stay up on our potential liabilities. The New York Times has published some old articles, ones that pre-date their transition to digital formatting of the news in the mid-1990s. It is helpful for people who have never heard them before. It is an old language with a new audience.”

There was some generalized nodding, since the last meetings that used the terminology were conducted thirty years ago. The Strategic Command must have still used them, we hoped. We all had heard them used in those surreal meetings about their use. Loma is the only one left at Refuge Farm who actually had to worry about loading nuclear devices on the aircraft he was preparing to board and operate. The Marines who guarded the devices were scarier than usual in these sorts of training evolutions. Even in practice they were authorized use of “deadly force” should the situation require it. Practice, as they say, makes perfect.

Loma said it was an odd thing to be part of those evolutions with an active role. That included the entire process as the things were loaded on the elevators from the magazines deep in the ship, rolled out on loading dollies to the deck and attached to hard points on the wings of the aircraft. Then the Marines had to stand back as the jets were hitched to the catapult shuttles and hurled from the ship to be delivered to targets a medium distance away.

The words that had the Old Salts of the Writer’s Section at Refuge Farm agitated this morning. The Young Attorney was still experimenting with her utterance of the words. They had not been used in public since before the Times went digital in its delivery. The pundits on the flat screen yesterday were talking about numbers of things. Number of rockets, and the amount of weapons they could carry. The words described something that used to be part of everyday use by a surprisingly large group of scientists and aerodynamic experts.

There was a recent term some had heard of. It was an acronym called “Eee Em Pee,” which had been the only practical use of nuclear devices in our modern times. An “Electromagnetic Pulse” event was something intended to use the shock of a nuclear blast to instantaneously render the electronic circuits of all devices in line-of-sight into melted junk. It was a mass-destruction phenomenon that would leave modern societies in cold and darkness. It had been used around the Fire Ring when the Russian assault in the shock-and-awe phase seemed to falter. A demonstration of will and resolve without direct mass casualty.

But there was an older term that came up on the television yesterday. “Throw-weight.” It sounds like a term that could be used by a baseball pitcher, a matter-of-fact term used to describe the payload weight a missile can carry from launch to impact. It was a shorthand description of the number of missiles required to launch a number of devices intended to achieve discrete policy objectives. It took some of the horror out of something unimaginable. But quite real in terms of the number of rockets that would fly Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” from launch to impact. Pynchon used that term to describe the trajectory of a German V-2 rocket from Peenemunde to Britain. A terrifying weapon whose blast arrived before the sound of its passage in the sky.

If you were part of the machine in those days, it was a matter of simple terminology. DeMille, for example, was an engineering officer for seek machines that carried rockets under the ocean waves. His submarine carried a “throw weight” calculated by total payload carried by the crat on which he served. It was also a term that the Times article claimed “has long bedeviled arms control negotiators.” That was because “Throw-Weight” was generally understood to include not only the weight of the warheads but more. The weight of decoys, carried to improve target penetration, and the so-called ‘bus’ that houses them with weapon atop the rocket. All odd terms not in popular use for years.

Throw-weight has been a problematic term since at least 1979, since there was a treaty directly limiting the amount of weight permitted to be carried by both sides in the Cold War. Under the treaty terms, neither side could test a missile with more warheads than it is defined to have. But some Administration specialists were concerned that the Soviet Union could take its SS-25 SICKLE missiles, which carry one warhead each, and with a small expansion in throw-weight, develop a new type of missile that would carry three weapons.

The treaty was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, and hence the numbers are a variable in our morning discussion. This particular morning, we are talking about the possibilities of “nuclear demonstrations” as though that were not the first operational use of horror in more than sixty years. Mr. Putin announced a heightened alert posture for his nuclear forces. And otherwise rational people are talking about the weight of things that could be thrown through space between continents.

We have thus arrived at a peculiar place in time not seen since the missile crisis in Cuba. In that moment in time, the Soviet Union sought to move throw weight across an ocean to only ninety miles from the United States. We were still kids then, those of us who actually existed and remember a school curriculum that included a thing called “Duck and Cover.”

And although we know what the words and terms mean, there is something quite surreal under the thin gray skies. For all of us under that sort of rainbow. The graceful parabolic curve that belongs to Thomas Pynchon, not Judy Garland.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com