Under the Bomb

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Emily Dickinson

IN OCTOBER OF 1962 a group of young girls with their dance teacher drove up to the main entrance of the United States Air Force Base in Bermuda. The mini-bus paused at the gate and the guards, who seemed to be on high alert, surrounded it. There was a great deal of fuss, questions were asked over and over, the armed soldiers were clearly most anxious about these young visitors in their leotards. On the side of the mini-bus the words: THE BERMUDA SCHOOL OF RUSSIAN BALLET.

This was the fortnight when politicking and posturing by three very different world figures with troubles at home brought the world rather close to nuclear war. The Americans had recently put intermediate-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads in southern Italy and Turkey, all aimed at the Soviet Republics. In the spring of 1961 American forces and Cuban exiles trained by the CIA had attempted to invade the Caribbean island of Cuba and had been turned away by the troops of Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara (a clear embarrassment for American President Kennedy). In the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev was struggling with domestic policies including difficulties with agriculture. Hungry citizens are rarely happy. Khrushchev was aiding the Cubans, glad of a client state near America’s underbelly.

Kennedy, Castro and Khrushchev were all flawed and dangerous. If religion may be said to be dangerous, this was in part the committed non-religion of the atheistic Communists. I’m not sure that the Kennedys preached their Catholicism as most Americans were a different kind of Christian and didn't seem to trust Papists. One wonders if Kennedy dreamed of restoring Catholic leaders in Cuba, and dreamed of getting praised by the Pope for doing so. Who knows? We know Kennedy lied and cheated. Khrushchev had to tell a few fibs to keep his position as Premier of the USSR. Fidel Castro may have been the most open and honest just then.

So, in October of 1962 the USSR shipped intermediate-range ballistic missiles to Cuba and got found out. Castro, in the style of the totally mad revolutionary you’d think could only exist in bitter comedies starring Peter Sellers, wanted the Soviets to make a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USA, even though it would certainly mean Cuba being wiped off the face of the Earth. Think about that: Annihilation is good for the Revolution!

Armed submarines set sail, and aeroplanes flew about, with nuclear-tipped devices. The guards at the gate at Kindley Field in Bermuda stopped the School of Russian Ballet mini-bus and worried about little girls not yet in their teens armed only with slippers. And I cannot say that much of this registered with me. I met some of those ballet students a few years later and heard their story. We laughed at it all.

In the 1950s I had seen photographs and film of nuclear explosions. Those wonderful mushroom clouds. The British were setting them off on atolls in the Pacific, I believe. The Americans would light up the sky in Nevada. I would, years later, come across the Down-Winders in southern Utah who had been bathed in radioactive fallout as their military practised the extermination of humanity in the desert to the west. One finds it hard to believe that the devastating effects of radiation could be so conveniently ignored. Was it for the common good?

There is something rather exciting, amazing, about the cloud an A-Bomb or H-Bomb can kick up. There’s art in it. There is natural art in a tornado, in a tsunami, in a landslip. But the nuclear bomb is our invention, and we drop it, or bury it in the sand, having set the trigger and moved sharpish to one side. In the 1950s I recall fabulous sunsets, courtesy of atmospheric nuclear tests. How could a young boy be fearful of that? I never sensed guilt at Hiroshima or Nagasaki in the conversation of my elders.

Despite Castro’s malicious goading, Khrushchev did a deal with Kennedy. The missiles were taken out of Cuba and the Americans removed their missiles from Turkey and southern Italy. Kennedy kept his part of the bargain secret, and that made Khrushchev seem to have lost the face-off. Khrushchev was removed from office a couple of years later. Kennedy was unpopular enough in some circles (those conspiracy theories continue today) to take a bullet. Fidel Castro was condemned to a half-century in fatigues. I don’t think even the Russians took Castro that seriously, and he was a constant drain with the need for foreign aid and only the Communists willing to give it.

One woman, it is said, links Castro, Khrushchev and JFK. Lady Jeanne Campbell - daughter of the 11th Duke of Argyll, granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, and grand-niece of Queen Victoria’s daughter Louise – was a socialite and foreign correspondent for the Evening Standard. Lady Jeanne was, apparently, the intimate of the Cuban, Soviet and American leaders. Some claim she was the lover of all three. It’s a wonderful story, if true, and would make for a great film plot. In fact, even if it is a fantasy, it would entertain. One of my cousins is married to Lady Jeanne’s daughter. (Her father was American author Norman Mailer who was the subject of FBI monitoring for 15 years after J. Edgar Hoover decided Mailer was a possible Communist sympathiser.) My grandmother rather liked Lady Jeanne, not at all concerned by the exotic history. She also liked Norman Mailer, who was only briefly married to Lady Jeanne Campbell.

I was living in the history of 1962 without being aware of it. My friends from the Russian Ballet were closer to it, but hardly alarmed. Their mini-bus was cleared at the gate and went through to complete whatever business they had on that patch of the USA in Bermuda’s East End. I was told the story in 1965.

Almost fifty years on, we have a few rogue nations, and some dodgy friends, with some nuclear capabilities. Bush and Blair lied about Iraq. However, we do have North Korea – a peculiar, family-run state where the millions seem to take no notice of their fearless leader’s dubious sanity. Kim Jong-il is a nutter. Kim has nuclear devices and missiles, though not many of them. North Korea could take out a very large, populous city in that part of the world. The thing is, the reaction would involve countries with far greater military force. And I suppose that is a cloud I must live under. We all must.

If one is to fear something, best to stick with the knapsack left unattended on the platform at the village station. Report it if necessary. It may just contain history.

WHEN PROTONS COLLIDE - Politics, Religion & Bombs

Knowledge rains down and floods the Earth like a Bermuda hurricane;

wisdom grows deep below the surface like stalactites in crystal caverns,

perhaps an inch added every ten thousand years,

and that incredibly fragile.

YESTERDAY WAS SUNNY very nearly to a fault. I don't like to get sweaty and my around-the-town jaunt with Cailean got me moist (and not in a nice way). Odd to have a holiday weekend in Britain with bright, warm sunshine, though Amble by the Sea is more temperate and cooperative than most of the Isles.

Did I lie out in the sun by the River yesterday, Cailean on his long-lead sniffing at the air while I listened to the noises in my head? Actually, no. I'd taped the film Pearl Harbour on Saturday night and decided to put my feet up on the sofa and spend three hours in 1941. I'd rather expected a remake of Tora! Tora! Tora! And was relieved that it wasn't as that's a hard film to beat. Pearl Harbour is an action film in the Jerry Bruckheimer tradition: two handsome flyboys fall for the same pretty nurse and single-handedly take on the Japanese air force on 7 December 1941 when every other aeroplane is destroyed or grounded. They also bomb Tokyo for good measure a few months later. One boy comes back in a box, but the pretty nurse is expecting his baby. The other boy marries the girl, adopts the baby, names him Danny after his father, and takes him for a spin in a crop-duster. Life goes on.

As I watched the film, I wondered what in the world the Japanese were thinking in 1941. They'd been making simply horrible decisions about their role in the world for some years before that (Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking should be compulsory reading). I wondered if it was religion that prompted the Japanese to take such a dim view of peace, love and life. The sort of religion that says you must lose your life in order to gain it. Like Christianity. Like Islam. Like Dictatorship.

The Japanese revered their Emperor as a god. Perhaps some still worship his descendants. The writer Yukio Mishima denounced Hirohito for renouncing his divinity at the end of the Second World War. Did Mishima consider Hirohito no longer a god? Can one turn off godhood so easily? It seems to me that even fallen gods should turn up somewhere and face the music and not claim to be retired from all that and spending their time reading foreshortened poetry.

I would have hanged Hirohito, god or not. The Western Powers turned hundreds of thousands to dust at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the god kept his haloed crown and his head to set it on. And for all we know, Hirohito's family and friends still called him God at the dinner table.

I'm not much on religion these days. In fact, I'm nothing on religion these days. I was Sunday-Schooled in the Church of England; my first book (which I still have) which I received on my third birthday was a child's hymnbook from Canterbury Cathedral. At Warwick Academy I had Religious Knowledge classes until I was about fifteen years old. We sang hymns and chanted prayers every morning until I left that school at the age of seventeen. By then I had joined the social set that went to Sunday services and youth group events at the Anglican parish church. Had I a clue about God? Looking back, I think not.

I was excited by Mormonism because it promised family togetherness. Whether it has ever delivered on that promise, I'm not sure. Most of the Mormons I know have struggled at best. But that's good they claim. You have a rubbish life and then a splendid hereafter. Lose your life to gain it.

I am asked, now and then, how I managed to believe that Joseph Smith stuck a seer stone in his hat, then put it over his face and translated the golden plates. In such a posture, he wouldn't have seen any golden plates lying around. I didn't know about this, actually, back in the day. I thought he wore fancy spectacles, the Urim and Thummim, clear stones set in silver bows and sat at a table flipping golden pages pretty easily, reading the translated text to Oliver Cowdery and others. Nothing as easy as that. Pull down the hat.

Joseph Smith taught that our God (the Christian one at least) had been a man once upon a time and had moved on up, as it were, having been an obedient and successful man. Joseph also taught that a plurality of gods created the Universe and that there are gods responsible for other worlds besides ours. Many houses, many mansions, many tenants, and quite a few landlords. The Bible can be interpreted to agree with this. The Bible can be fiddled with to justify anything, and is.

The Bible, probably all bibles, is foremost a political text. Laws listed by a ruling class to perpetuate itself. Eat this, don't eat that. Don't go there. Make war, not love. Men are not ruled by a god but by men. Or men who claim to be gods. As Oscar Wilde said: The worst sort of tyranny is that of the weak over the strong.

[I watched several programmes on Himalayan places and customs this past week. I rather enjoy the prayer flags in the high places, scattering good wishes over the world. One commentator explained Buddhism and reincarnation a little and summarised by saying that all life is transitory. Everything is transitory. Things are moving along. That fits in with the Big Bang Theory. This is what I believe in just now. Life, everything, flows. As a bonus, life overflows after death into another life, perhaps lesser, perhaps greater, perhaps much the same. My dust may raise poppies; my spirit may raise a bug that climbs a poppy stalk.]

There was talk in the news this week about the Hum. The background noise so many of us hear when we stop shuffling our feet and rest our tongues. Someone said it sounds like a fridge. The Hum is not new; there was a Hum in Bristol in 1979. However, one wonders if there was a Hum 200 years ago. Perhaps lovers, lunatics and poets only heard the voices of the gods?

In North Korea today a nuclear or atomic test of some sort has been triggered deep underground. Everybody is having a bit of a fit about it. North Korea seems like a most unhappy place. Any place where happiness is mandated must be unhappy. What in the world, or above or below it, does North Korea want with an atomic bomb? Why do hungry nations spend their resources on munitions? What do North Koreans believe? Is Kim Jong-il considered to be some sort of god? Do the people of North Korea have a bible of some sort? A little red or green book? Is it acceptable for thousands of children to be hungry while dozens smile at some computer screen showing troughs and a sudden peak and the world picks up a new hum from six miles below North Korea?

Why do I think that Kim Jong-il sees the stars in the sky as so many blemishes on his preferred black universe?

Is North Korea, I'm wondering, in about the same place that Japan was in the 1930s?