Blue Highways: New London, Connecticut

Unfolding the Map

I heard something that shocked me recently.  Those children born 18 years ago have most likely never known cars with anything other than a CD player. Being 48 years old, I remember 45 rpm records.  I also remember the Cold War.  Something as distant in time as those events and the threat of nuclear annihilation only registers on the minds of those younger than 30 if they read it in history books.  About 10 years ago, a young friend, then in her early 20s, asked my wife "so what was this Berlin Wall thing all about?"  For those of us that lived in the Cold War and remember, it was a shadow of terror over our lives that were otherwise lived normally.  This post, as we wait with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) for a ferry in New London, remembers some of that time period.  To pinpoint New London, target the map.

Book Quote

"...I asked where they built the submarines, and he pointed to a dagger of a shadow.  'That black thing is the Ohio.  She's the first Trident.  The orange bull on blocks is the Michigan.'

"'How can anything that big move under water?'

"'They're longer than the Washington Monument.  The Ohio will carry twenty-four missiles, each one with a dozen warheads: two hundered eighty-eight atomic explosions.  One hell of a bitch with twelve sisters coming along behind at a billion dollars each.'  He offered a Chiclet.  'They used to name battleships after states because they were the dreadnaughts of the sea, but there's your dreadnaughts of the next war.'

"'....You think war is finished?  Whatever peace we'll know will come because of things like those devils...Those Tridents are the new Peacemakers...'"

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 6

New London, Connecticut. Photo by Ralph Thayer and hosted at Wikipedia. Click on photo to go to host page.

New London, Connecticut

Recently, on a work trip to San Diego, I took time out from the conference I was attending to spend some time at the Maritime Museum with my wife.  The harbor's star attraction was the USS Midway, a decommissioned and historically important aircraft carrier.  But for me, the highlight of the visit was a tour of a decommissioned Soviet submarine.

I've been, at least somewhat, a fan of submarine films.  Movies like Das Boot, The Hunt for Red October and U-571 are filled with drama and tension.  I suppose such tension comes with the tight, cramped and even claustrophobic environment of a long metal tube submerged for days and weeks beneath the surface of a deep, dark and unforgiving ocean.  One mistake, one faulty rivet or plate, or one engine (or nowadays nuclear reactor) accident could mean a cold, dark and unpleasant death.  In wartime, the stakes and terror can be even higher, and death could come in the form of a torpedo or a depth charge.

The most recent movie I saw on submarines, K-19: The Widowmaker, was about a Soviet submarine much like the one I toured in San Diego.  But only by going into such a submarine can one really get a sense of the conditions in one.  Touring through the sub, I understood why the pay was greater and the honors greater than in other parts of the Soviet Navy.  Pipes and valves stick out in odd places, guaranteeing that if you don't watch your head you will probably crack it open on something.  There were cramped toilets where the sailors had only weekly shower privileges.  Other features: a tiny kitchen with a cook trying to stretch stores as far as they will go, helping men forget with an unauthorized shot of vodka or beer; miniscule berths that sailors shared - one used the berth and slept while the other did his duty; everywhere the smell of diesel and hot machinery.  When I did my tour, I realized that the mother and her son passing through the sub behind me were Russian, and they spoke Russian with each other while looking into cabins and berths.  I closed my eyes and imagined that where once a chorus of Russian voices filled that ship, the strains of Russian now probably echoed infrequently off the inner hull.

It is easy to forget, or not even realize, that from the end of World War II until 1989 the world was at the mercy such metal tubes, whether they rode under the waves or rocketed through the air.  As my studies in international relations remind me, many scholars believe that these engines of war were what saved humanity.  Submarines and missiles, goes the argument, were what kept the peace between two of the most powerful nations the world has ever seen.  Such subs. loaded with nuclear missiles and nuclear-tipped torpedoes, were the trump card of the Cold War.  If a devastating attack was launched, even if the enemy was taken by complete surprise and completely annhilated, its subs could launch a similarly devastating counterattack from off the coasts, destroying the other nation in a matter of minutes.

That was the world I grew up under - nations held hostage to peace under the threat of weapons of mass destruction pointed at each other.  It was called a peace, but it was a damn frightening peace.  Just as two gunslingers, hands at their sides, face each other in the dusty street in movies about the Old West, the United States and Soviet Union stared each other down, weapons in plain sight, each knowing what the other was capable of, each waiting for one to either move or back down.  Think of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the Soviets decided to station nuclear missiles in their ally Cuba, and the United States responding with a blockade.  It was steely-eyed feint and counter-feint, each probing for weakness and backing off if there would be disadvantaged.  For almost five decades, these gunslingers, the US and the Soviets, faced each other until finally, the Soviets blinked, turned and walked into the sunset.

But we who grew up under this peace had no idea that, unfathomably, it would end so peacefully.  When I was old enough to understand the international situation to a degree, I began to have nightmares involving flashes and mushroom clouds.  Nuclear tests were common until banned by international treaty.  Small wars often sprung up in far-flung and distant places, leading to sharp words and threats from the United States and the Soviets.  The Soviet government was painted as evil and ruthless, the Soviet people were described as dour, wretched, and lost.  I thought, like many others, that when the standoff did end, it would end civilization as well.  We just didn't know when.

A common phrase taught to me as a child was "believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see."  When my parents took our family on a cruise to Alaska on a Soviet cruise ship in 1980, I saw Soviets for what they were - people.  I even got a crush on our server, a young Russian girl named Larissa.  At the time, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, and I had trouble reconciling the words of our government condemning the Soviet government and the incredibly friendly people, sharing their rich culture with us, staffing the ship.

My studies taught me that the international drama of the Cold War was, in many ways, carefully stage-managed.  Knowing that they faced annihilation and that there would be no winner in a major conflict, the United States and the Soviet Union minimized the opportunities for direct conflict and instead fought through proxies.  The argument that these nuclear-armed antagonists deterred each other from direct conflict therefore has much merit. 

I often hear the same argument made for arming individuals in our society.  The argument goes that if someone knows or suspects that you are armed, they won't harm you because it could lead to harm to themselves.  However, there is a difference between national action and individual action.  Nations are collectivities of people and therefore the risk of irrational action is less.  Nations are rarely impulsive - even the actions of Hitler and the Nazis was a well-thought out plan, and based on self-preservation.  All nations will choose self-preservation over destruction - even Nazi Germany made some overtures toward peace at the very end to try to preserve itself. 

Individuals, however, can have moments of irrationality with no cultural and collective filter to put the brakes on those thoughts.  I think of the times when, in the heat of passion or disappointment or anger, I have done irrational things.  The United States and the Soviet Union managed their conflict in a rational manner and usually considered the potential consequences of their decisions carefully.  The person who kills, or the person who feels threatened whether or not there is an actual threat, can often behave irrationally and give in to impulsive actions.  That's why I cannot buy the argument that a safe society is one where individuals are armed.

But back when I was growing up, I didn't understand such.  And I feared, greatly, that one day my life and my world would end in a flash of light.  It seems that the chances of that were, and remain, low.  I might have more to fear from a greater number of individuals packing heat within my own country than a nation-state packing a nuclear bomb.  I hope I never experience either.

Musical Interlude

The first song for the musical interlude is Yo La Tengo's Nuclear War, a remake of a Sun Ra song.  I like the images the creator of the video put in to accompany the song, as well as the clip of J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist on the Manhattan Project, at the very end.

Of course, leave it to The Beatles to turn a weapon of destruction into a children's song in Yellow Submarine.  The video uses clips from the movie Yellow Submarine, interspersed with footage of swimming Beatles.

If you want to know more about New London

City of New London
Connecticut College
TheDay.com (newspaper)
Mitchell College
United States Coast Guard Academy
Wikipedia: New London

Next up: Orient Point, New York

Blue Highways: Langdon, North Dakota

Unfolding the Map

Hey Littourati!  What is burrowed in the ground, usually has two brains, four eyes, four arms, four legs, is totally computerized, and when it moves will probably kill millions?  Give up?  A nuclear missile in a silo, of course!  William Least Heast-Moon (LHM) gets into a discussion about nukes with a resident of Langdon, North Dakota.  Let's think about that for a post.  If you want to target Langdon, triangulate your coordinates at the map.

Book Quote

"After breakfast in the city park at Langdon, a Nordic town of swept streets and tidy pastel houses with pastel shutters at the picture windows, a town with the crack of Little League bats in the clear Saturday air, a town of blond babies and mothers wearing one hundred percent acrylics and of husbands washing pastel cars to kill time before the major league Game of the Week, this happened:

"In the park, a man walking with a child saw me staring at a 'retired' Spartan missile that now apparently served the same function as courthouse lawn fieldpieces with little pyramids of cannonballs once did....

"'She's a nuke,' the father said with proprietary pride....

"'Make you feel good, don't they?  Proud and taken care of, like.'"

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 8

Bed and Breakfast at Tiffany's in the frost at Langdon, North Dakota. Photo by "bedandbreakfastattiffanys" and housed at Flickr. Click on photo to go to host site.Langdon, North Dakota

Once again, which has really been a rarity on this trip through LHM's book, I can say that I've been to the area of the country through which he is traveling.  You might wonder why I have visited this region of North Dakota.  It was because of a job that I had that required me to drive to Dunseith, North Dakota and check up on some people that I had placed in a volunteer position there in the early 90s.  I can't remember for sure, but I most likely went through Langdon to get to Dunseith.  My girlfriend, now my wife, went with me.  I certainly remember, on my return trip, traveling along North Dakota 5 until it met Interstate 29, and passing by nuclear missile silos.

Of course, they weren't marked as silos.  It supposedly wouldn't do us well if everyone knows where they are.  However, they are probably the worst-kept secret in the world.  As we passed by, we realized that they were obviously some kind of installation that was not related to energy-distribution or water-distribution.  Locals know where they are, and even our enemies at the time, the Soviets, knew where they were from satellite flyovers.  When we passed them, all we saw was a chain link fence surrounding a concrete pad with a kind of cap on top of it, and maybe a small utility structure.  There might have been an antenna of some sort as well.  Usually, a sign or multiple signs warned against entering and that the "use of deadly force is authorized."

On the nuclear missile, nuclear silo issue, I have been related with people who manned the silos, and who tried to get rid of them.  In the mid-1980s, I did volunteer work in Milwaukee, and came to know a group of local activists connected with the Plowshares Movement.  Plowshares took its mission from the biblical injunction:

"And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

King James Bible Online (1769 version)
Isaiah 2:4

The goal of the Plowshares Movement, then, is to call attention to these weapons of mass destruction and eventually get them eliminated.  Toward that end a number of people began civil disobedience actions where they trespassed onto nuclear silos, usually by cutting through the fencing or locks, symbolically damaged the top of the silo by cutting wires or splashing red paint or even their own blood on the concrete lid of the silo, and then waited for the military to show up and arrest them.  Often the activists would get a minimum of six months in federal prison for their action.  In Milwaukee, I was friends with a guy who was close to our volunteer community.  After I left Milwaukee, he participated in a Plowshares action and received at least a year in prison.  The last I heard, he is out of prison and affiliated with the Omaha Catholic Worker, where he works on day-to-day issues of the poor and to bring attention to larger world issues such as nuclear weapons.

On the below-ground side, I remember reading how the silo actually works.  There are two military personnel stationed below ground at the silo at all times.  If it is still like I read, these members of the military, when they receive a transmitted code, must look up the code for the launch sequence and then each must insert a key and turn it at the same time to activate a launch countdown.  Should one of them balk, I had thought that the other has license to kill in order to make sure that the launch goes through, though the concept of the two keys is considered a safeguard against accidental launch and would not really lend itself to one killing the other.  This came home to me when I met Bob.  He had manned a silo while in the Air Force.  He was a nice, quiet guy from South Carolina who did on-call work for the university medical school where I have my daily employment.  Retired, he was soft spoken and I had trouble reconciling him with a person who literally had the fate of millions at his fingertips.

I also had that trouble when I met another man named Bob who worked had worked at one of the national labs in New Mexico.  Bob is another quiet, gentle unassuming man who was passionate about his Catholicism and passionate about peace and justice.  In his 80s, he put together a proposal and saw it through so that now a pilot project is testing how villages in Africa can grow food with better irrigation.  After a few times of speaking with Bob, he told his story.  His initial job at the labs was coming up with a better system to defend Europe in case of a Soviet invasion across the border.  All the models said that a full scale invasion could not be countered by NATO without the use of nuclear weapons, so Bob and the rest of the people on his team came up with the fastest and most effective way to put these nuclear warheads into play.  At some point, the labs spun off his business about the same time that he realized that what he was doing was incompatible with his faith, and so he sold out that side of the business to partners.

My father was a person who felt that nuclear weapons saved his life by forestalling an invasion of Japan, and thogh my father-in-law is more circumspect in saying it, he also argued that millions of lives would have been lost in such a campaign.  For years we lived under the protection of a nuclear umbrella.  So I understand how people might see nuclear weapons as safeguarding their way of life, like the man quoted by LHM. 

But when I visited the Trinity Site in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was exploded, I saw a sight that signaled the diversity of the U.S. feelings about nuclear weapons, and perhaps the hypocrisy as well.  The site, located in the middle of the White Sands Missile Range and open only twice a year to the public, was off-limits to any kinds of demonstration.  But here and there in the midst of the space, encircled by a chain link fence, where a stone obelisk marked the fateful detonation, small groups prayed silently together.  Some were pacifists praying for world peace and an end to the nuclear insanity.  Others were evangelical Christians, praying for America and the greatness that conquering the atom stood for.  Some might have been praying for Armageddon, in keeping with their faith that the last battle will herald the Kingdom of God.  Others, blissfully ignorant of these groupings, posed for pictures next to the obelisk and looked for trinitite, slightly radioactive glass fused from the sand when the plasma of the blast seared the desert. 

That blast, which raised a terrible, yet beautiful, flower from the desert floor, caused even its architect, J. Robert Oppenheimer to tremble a little before its might and wonder what type of horrible genie was released from its bottle.  "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," he said, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita.  In our silos in North Dakota and other states, on submarines cruising the oceans, and in Russia, China and other places, many destroyers of worlds still sit waiting for a time when they might be called to wreak their horrible vegeance.

Musical Interlude

Another double-shot, Littourati!  About the time that LHM was pondering nuclear missiles in North Dakota, Iron Maiden was writing 2 Minutes to Midnight, referencing the Doomsday Clock and the launch of nuclear missiles.  Around this time also, Nena was penning 99 Luftballons, about an accidental nuclear launch because, of all things, red balloons.  It's the height of anger, fear and hysteria in Cold War era music, and two very different styles!

If you want to know more about Langdon

City of Langdon
Facebook: Cavalier County Republican (newspaper)
North Dakota State University Langdon Research Extension Center
Wikipedia: Langdon

Next up:  Backoo, North Dakota

Blue Highways: Kremlin, Montana

Unfolding the Map

We pause for a moment at Kremlin, even as William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) flies through with a short mention, as I reflect on what the word Kremlin meant for me and the world while I was growing up.  Who knew we had appropriated Kremlin in the middle of Montana?!  In Cold War fashion, learn where Kremlin is by targeting it on the map!

Book Quote

"...Kremlin.  Russian settlers, half mad from the vast openness and the sway of prairie grass, thoght they saw the Citadel of Moscow.

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 6

Photo of Kremlin, Montana from the blog Ramblin Reflections. Click on photo to go to host page.

Kremlin, Montana

Kremlin is one of five towns, spots on the map really, that LHM blew through on his way through Montana.  I had thought about grouping them all together in the last post, but really, how can I resist making a special post on Kremlin, and especially the name itself?  If you have any memory about life before the Berlin Wall fell, then the name Kremlin certainly has definite, and often ominous, meanings.

I was born in 1963, just about a month after the events that arguably brought the United States to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I write arguably because there is some scholarship that suggests that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. managed the conflict well and never really were in danger of letting the situation escalate into a full-blown hot war.  Whatever the reason, whether Krushchev was blustering to appease party members back home, and Kennedy understood that, or Krushchev got himself into a situation where he needed to have some to back out and save face is irrelevant to the greater part of the U.S. population who might have been aware of the high-stakes showdown over Cuba.  For many people, the ups and downs of U.S.-Soviet relations were always at least on the edge of awareness and provided a low-grade stress that can be seen throughout U.S. culture from the 1950s until the late 1980s.

As I grew up I gradually began to understand that one war could end everything as we knew it.  In my teens, the news constantly had updates on our direct relations with the Soviet Union, and on the myriad of small conflicts around the world that could have consequences for our relations.  News was often reported from Moscow by reporters who always identified the Kremlin or an official Soviet news agency (i.e. Kremlin-approved) as being the source of much of the information on the Soviet stance toward the world.  "Sources close to the Kremlin..." we would hear Walter Cronkite or other anchors solemnly intone.

Why was this so important?  I know that people not old enough to remember the Cold War find this hard to relate to, but we really lived under a nuclear-tipped Sword of Damocles.  Academics in international relations nowadays write about how the Cold War actually made the world more stable, because both sides realized that war would end them, and neither side wanted to be the one responsible for the downfall of their particular society.  Therefore, the argument goes, each side was very careful to not engage the other in direct hostilities, but instead minimized their direct conflicts and carried out their ideological battles through espionage and through conflicts in developing world client states such as Vietnam, Nicaragua, Angola, and other places.  Even major hostilities such as in Korea did not bring the U.S. and U.S.S.R. into direct conflict.  The theory rests on assumptions of rationality - such as the assumption that each side's leaders like being in power and therefore were risk-averse to nuclear war - and those assumptions held up in this case, thankfully.

Still, the reality of what we lived under was enough to scare me silly at times thinking about what might happen.  I remember seeing a movie with Henry Fonda called Fail-Safe.  The premise was that the United States accidentally sent planes to Russia which nuked Moscow.  Much of the movie was filled with tension - would the U.S. be able to recall the planes, and if not would they be able to help the Russians stop the planes in time. They weren't, and the only recourse left to avert a nuclear war was for the U.S. to nuke it's own city, New York, without warning.  I couldn't get the last scene out of my head for a long time. 

I also had nightmares involving mushroom clouds once in a while.  It was hard to forget that in both the U.S. and U.S.S.R., everyone was a target.  Each side's missiles were permanently aimed at points in each other's country.  If someone launched, within 30 minutes it would be the end of civilization.  My dreams would be filled with hopeless despair - reddening skies and large mushroom clouds popping up - and I would wake up sure that the end had come.

In that way, the Kremlin was the enemy.  It was like a nasty creature sitting halfway around the world plotting our destruction and doom.  I watched the facial expressions of our presidents on the news when they met with Russian leaders to see if I could read anything.  I remember being very nervous when Reagan met with Gorbachev in Iceland, and came out of the meeting scowling.  The irony of this all, at least to me today, is that I know that I thought that I would be living in a Cold War world for the rest of my life.

Imagine then the astonishment we had when we saw crowds dancing atop the Berlin Wall, the ever-present and seemingly permanently set symbol of the Cold War.  Imagine our amazement as the Soviet Union allowed this to happen and then, unthinkably, allowed itself to break apart relatively peacefully.  I'll admit I had another nervous moment when hard liners in the Soviet army, seeking to stem the tide of democratic forces, launched a coup attempt and the news showed pictures of Russian tanks in the streets.  But then, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, climbing on top of a tank, seemingly saved the day.

Of course I was naive.  The U.S. and Russia still have their nuclear weapons, though they are not pointed at each other.  The seeming order that the Cold War imposed on the world sometimes seems attractive as we deal with the possibility of war between newly nuclear states such as hereditary enemies India and Pakistan, the rising ambitions of nuclear power China, the nuclear goals of Iran, and the ominous spectre of nuclear terrorism.  While countries negotiate arms treaties and non-proliferation pacts, academics struggle to understand this new multi-polar and nuclear-armed world.  Some academics have suggested in the past, in a global mirror of our U.S. Second Amendment debates suggesting that arming citizens will make them more safe, that all countries be allowed to pursue nuclear weapons because proliferation will breed world stability.  Are we seeing this theory put to the test in the world now?

To me this is crazy.  Just as crazy, if not more so, than two ideologically distinct world powers in a dance of Mutually Assured Destruction.  We now have lots of new names, ominously intoned, out there to worry about - Beijing, Tehran, Islamabad, Pyongyang, Al Qaida, Taliban - all with less restraint, it seems, on slinging their arrows of outrageous fortune should they be put under grave threats.  It almost makes me long for that now quaint little old Kremlin, loudly plotting our doom but in reality simply trying to survive.

Musical Interlude

Pop culture was filled with references to nuclear war in movies, TV, and song.  Movies like Dr. Strangelove allowed us to laugh at the insanity of the world, while others like On the Beach dealt more seriously with the end of the world.  In early 1980s, a major TV event called The Day After gave a pretty horrific view of the aftermath of a nuclear war while probably not making it horrific enough.  The Nation magazine recently put on its website the top 10 songs about nuclear war.  The song I'm highlighting in this post is not on that list but is out of that era and I knew it because of the amount of airplay its video received.  Distant Early Warning, by Rush, was yet another commentary on the threat of nuclear war, and the image of the child on the cruise missile both paid homage to Dr. Strangelove and was a striking image in itself.

If you want to know more about Kremlin

Kremlin, Montana History
Russell Country, Montana: Kremlin
Wikipedia: Kremlin

Next up: Somewhere along Highway 2 around mile 465, Montana