the motel was about two miles from campus. I walked out there along the edge of the road. Fragments of glass flared in the sun. I passed a number of dead animals, just scraps of fur now, small pieces of flesh completely macadamized, part of the highway. Finally I reached the motel. It was a gray bunding, barely distinguishable from the land around it. Major Staley had been staying there since the school year began. I didn't know what kind of car the major drove so I went into the office 'and got his room number from an old woman halfasleep over a bowl of Shredded Wheat. The major had a towel in his hands when he came to the door. He was wearing his uniform trousers and shirt, the shirt unbuttoned and outside the pants, sleeves rolled up around the forearms. Some blue ROTC manuals were stacked on a table. Above the bed was a threedimensional picture of mountains.

"Wife and kids are still up in Colorado. I sure as hell miss them. I hope to have them down here real soon now. Our house should be ready in ten days. I've lived in more places than, a stray cat."

"There's a kind of theology at work here. The bombs are a kind of god. As his power grows, our fear naturally increases. I get as apprehensive as anyone else, maybe more so. We have too many bombs. They have too many bombs. There's a kind of theology of fear that comes out of this. We begin to capitulate to the overwhelming presence. It's so powerful. It dwarfs us so much. We say let the god have his way. He's so much more powerful than we are. Let it happen, whatever he ordains. It used to be that the gods punished men by using the forces of nature against them or by arousing them to take up their weapons and destroy each other. Now god is the force of nature itself, the fusion of tritium and deuterium. Now he's the weapon. So maybe this time we went too far in creating a being of omnipotent power. All this hardware. Fantastic stockpiles of hardware. The big danger is that we'll surrender to a sense of inevitability and start flinging mud all over the planet."

"We're talking about a onemegaton device. All right, you're standing nine miles from ground zero. If it's a clear day, you get seconddegree burns. Guaranteed. One hundred megs, you may as well forget it. If you were seventyfive miles out, you'd still get seconddegree. Depending on the variables, your house might even ignite. That's just the first flash. After that comes the firestorm, like Tokyo, like Hamburg, like Dresden, like Hiroshima. Structurally the older cities in the U.S. are very susceptible to firestorms. Building density is high and combustible material per building is high. Tucson might escape a firestorm. New York, Baltimore, Boston—forget it. Nagasaki didn't get too much burn. They had a low density and the wind was blowing right. Hamburg was something else. Hamburg was a hot place to be. Over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit if you can imagine what that's like. They found bodies naked except for shoes. That was heat that did that, not fire. Heat disintegrated d the clothes. They found bodies shrunken, dry as paper. That was the intense heat. The other thing in a firestorm is carbon monoxide."

"I've had a checker ed career at best."

"I think what'll happen in the nottoodistant future is that we'll have humane wars. Each side agrees to use clean bombs. And each side agrees to limit the amount of megatons he uses. In other words we'll get together with them beforehand and there'll be an agreement that if the issue can't be settled, whatever the issue might be, then let's make certain we keep oar war as relatively humane as possible. So we agree to use clean stuff. And we actually specify the number of megatons; let's just say hypothetically one thousand megs for each side. So then what we've got is a twothousandmegaton war. We might go further and say we'll leave your cities .alone if you leave ours alone. We make it strictly counterforce. So right off the bat you avoid the fallout hazard and millions of bonus kills, or deaths from fallout. And at the same time you eliminate citytrading and punishing strikes against the general population. Of course the humanistic mind crumbles at the whole idea. It's the most hideous thing in the world to these people that such ideas even have to be mentioned. But the thing won't go away. The thing is here and you have to face it. The prospect of a humane war may be hideous and all the other names you can think of, but it's still a prospect. And as an alternative to all the other things that could happen in the event of war, it's relatively acceptable. My fellow coliberals are always the first to jump all over me when I talk about something like humane warfare. But the thing has to be considered. People close their minds. They think nuclear war has to be insensate, both sides pushing all the buttons and the whole thing is over in two hours. In reality it's likely to be very deliberate, very cautious, a kind of thing that's almost fought in slow motion. And the limited humane variant is the most acceptable. Negotiations could easily take that turn. A war may have to be fought; it may be unavoidable in terms of national pride or to avoid blackmail or for a number of other reasons. And negotiations, whatever remains of negotiations, whatever talking is still going on, this could easily lead both countries to the humane war idea as the least damaging kind of thing in the face of all the variants. So they hit our military and industrial targets with any number of bombs and missiles totaling one thousand megatons and we do the same to them. There'd be all sorts of controls. You'd practically have a referee and a timekeeper. Then it would be over and you'd  make your damage assessment. The sensing devices go to work. The magnetic memory drums are tapped. The computers figure out damage and number of casualties. Recovery time is estimated. We wouldn't be the same strong industrial society after one thousand megs but our cities would still be standing and the mortality rate would be in the fairly low percentiles, about eight to twelve percent. With no fallout in the atmosphere, or a relatively minimum amount, we'd have no problems with environmental stress, with things like temperature changes, erosion, droughts, insect devastation, and we'd avoid the radiation diseases by and large, the infections, the genetic damage. So we'd get going again relatively soon. It wouldn't be nearly as bad as most people might expect. On the other hand this entire concept is full of flaws."

"Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war."

"The nuclear nations have a stockpile of fissionable material I would estimate in the neighborhood of sixty thousand megatons in terms of explosive power. That's a personal estimate, based on whatever techdata I've been able to accumulate in the journals and bulletins, accurate within a factor of maybe three or four. But just for the heck of it, figure that out in terms of pounds of TNT. That's pounds now, not tons. I bet you can't do it without paper and pencil. The trick is to keep count of the zeros."

"War is the ultimate realization of modern technology. For centuries men have tested themselves in war. War was the final test, the great experience, the privilege, the honor, the selfsacrifice or what have you, the absolutely ultimate determination of what kind of man you were. War was the great challenge and the great evaluator. It told you how much you were worth. But it's different today. Few men want to go off and fight. We prove ourselves, our manhood, in other ways, in making money, in skydiving, in hunting mountain lions with bow and arrow, in acquiring power of one kind or another. And I think we can forget ideology. People invent that problem, at least as far as the U.S. isconcerned. It has no real bearing as far as we're concerned. Obviously we can live with Communism; we've been doing it long enough. So people invent that. That's the grotesque sense of patriotism at work in this country. Today we can say that war is a test of opposing technologies. We can say this more than ever because it's more true than it ever was. Look, what would our cartoonists do if they wanted to satirize the Chinese, if we were in a period of extreme tension with the Chinese and the editorial cartoonists wanted to stir up a little patriotism? Would they draw slanted eyes and pigtails the way they drew buck teeth for the Japanese in the forties? No, no, they wouldn't make fun of the people at all. They'd satirize the machines, the nuclear capability, the weapons and such of the Chinese. They'd draw firecrackers and kites. War has always told men what they were capable of under stress. Now it informs the machines. It's the best test of a country's technological skills. Are all your gaseous diffusion plants going at top efficiency? Are your ICBM guidance and control mechanisms ready to work perfectly? You get the answers when war breaks out. Your technology doesn't know how good it is until it goes to war, until it's been tested in the ultimate way. I don't think we care too much about ind............