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Nuclear Strategy and the Code of the Warrior:
Faces of Mars and Shiva in the Crisis of Human Survival
North Atlantic Books 1984
ISBN: 0-938190-49-0 $12.95
This anthology was compiled by Richard Grossinger and I during the mid- eighties, a period of real fear in the country about the build-up and possible use of nuclear weapons. My piece in it, “Misslemen,” reflected my western roots in Denver as the daughter of a father involved in gas and uranium, a family who had watched the boom and bust syndrome of Denver dominated by the surrounding natural resources. I was very affected by the work of Freeman Dyson (Weapons and Hope) and Tom Powers, both of whom we asked for work and were able to publish. But we didn’t want only a political anthology, we wanted to show how artistically and spiritually, nuclear weapons was so life-extinguishing (all life on the planet!) that it wasn’t rational to be even considering them as part of a military policy.
This issue hasn’t improved, and if anything the level of understanding and awareness about their danger is even greater. The entire religious right is dominated by Republican senators and congress people who are irresponsibly silent on weapons proliferation and the dangers of nuclear weapons. In fact, our present Secretary of State, Condolezza Rice, was one of the worst hawks of the arms control cadre in the 80s, and of course the present administration immediately did away with the major nuclear weapons proliferation treaties painstakingly put in place in the early 80s.
I went on to write about this material again in the present novel, Loving Cinnamon Blue, which uses the backdrop of Los Alamos and the uranium boom on the Colorado Plateau in 1953 to tell the story of adults and children trying to attain some agency themselves and reach out to other people. I still, in 2005, continue to be freaked out about the presence and possible use of nuclear weapons, and amazed that our population is distracted and ignorant (or perhaps hopeless) about it.
Excerpts:
As I go about the garden and house doing the routine tasks any women does, I don't regret my compulsive almost mantric-like visions and thought about nuclear war. In such thoughts are a first awareness about it as a real possibility. In such terror is probably embedded conscience and an awareness of responsibility: I, like so many others, entrusted our safety to others, who did what they thought was correct. Maybe they weren't right. When one takes on one's own heritage and connection to a collective guilt, admits one has had a hand in creating the problem, a massive amount of internal, personal energy is mobilized to help solve the problem. The problem is solvable (although perhaps not in time) if enough people become involved in thinking through our posture. Leaving such matters to "specialists" has resulted in technology in a moral vacuum. It is very much our business.
And:
Embedded in the sheer terror one first experiences upon becoming fully aware of nuclear peril lies a modesty which may be the beginning of constructing a new order of self-honesty free of some of the arrogance and deceit we've wound ourselves up in, tight as a ball. We need to be able to tell our children that there is a way to deal with an enemy without destroying ourselves and them and the whole planet. The children who can be reassured about nuclear holocaust are not those whose parents will not speak of it, but those whose parents have made it a central issue to solve in their lifetimes.
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