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4 / Unthinking the Thinkability of the Unthinkable In Tim O’Brien’s 1985 novel The Nuclear Age, the increasingly hysterical protagonist has only one “practical” response to his fear of imminent thermonuclear war: he digs a big hole in his backyard in the hope of completing a fallout shelter for himself, his wife, and his daughter before the missiles fly.1 A pure product of the Cold War, and a disenchanted veteran of one of the New Left’s aggressive subfactions, William Cowling’s dreams are haunted by destruction.2 O’Brien’s novel reminds us of just how intractable the Cold War seemed to be in 1985; no one could have foreseen that the conflict would end only a few years later.3 However, the punch line that accompanies his decision in the first chapter to start digging complicates the picture: “No metaphor, the bombs are real.”4 In contrast to those who would regard him as crazy, Cowling here claims special insight, and suggests the form of action appropriate to that knowledge. In view of the threat that everywhere surrounds him, his family, his nation , and his planet, Cowling wants to focus on the truth that figurative language works to conceal. Cowling thus insists on a form of pure reference : tellingly, Cowling’s wife is a poet, and Cowling’s argument with her about the appropriateness of metaphor is an argument with any form of linguistic mediation of the bomb—the threat is so huge that it must be approached without any intervening aesthetic or anesthetic.5 In a critical reading of arms proliferation discourse, and especially of the West’s tendency to imagine Third World nations’ nuclear ambitions as motivated principally by religious extremism, Hugh Gusterson surveys some of the reactions to Pakistani and Indian nuclear proliferation. Unthinking the Thinkabilit y of the Unthinkable / 77 After noting that Western commentators mistranslate weapons’ names in order to claim that the developing world names its weapons after instruments of divine violence and retribution (and thus can’t be trusted to have them), Gusterson points out that “if Western commentators were looking for a country that names its nuclear weapons after ancient gods and dead warriors, they need have looked no further than the United States, with its Jupiter, Thor, Poseidon, Atlas, Minuteman, and Pershing missiles.”6 O’Brien clearly has something similar in mind when he has Cowling describe his marital troubles in these terms: “Bobbi doesn’t understand. She’s a poet, she can’t help it. I’ve tried to talk things out. I’ve presented the facts. I’ve named names: Poseidon, Trident, Cruise, Stealth, Minuteman, Lance, Pershing—the indisputable realities. Trouble is, Bobbi can’t process hard data. The artistic temperament. Too romantic, too sublime” (58). While there is no evidence that Cowling is being ironic, O’Brien certainly is: the distinction between fact and art collapses in the face of the narrative baggage that those facts carry, and the implicitly gendered opposition between “rational” thinking and poetic “intuition” falls apart when facts are named for myths. So it would seem that Cowling’s initially laudable quest to access the reality of the bomb is actually impossible, and when reread the full passage deconstructs itself under the weight of its desire: “I’m a man of my age, and it’s an age of extraordinary jeopardy. So who’s crazy? Me? Or is it you? You poor, pitiful sheep. Listen—Kansas is on fire. What choice do I have? Just dig and dig. Find the rhythm. Think about those silos deep in fields of winter wheat. Five, four, slam the door. No metaphor, the bombs are real” (4, italics in original). As the “rhythm” of digging becomes the “rhythm” of thinking, we realize Cowling is closer to his poet wife than he knows. While it is tempting to continue to trace the ways in which O’Brien complicates the distinction between fact and metaphor, what I would like to note at this point is that part of Cowling’s resistance to metaphor might lie in how comprehensively he was once seduced by a very common and instructive rhetoric: the comparison of nuclear war with sport. Paul Boyer has noted with some frustration that the public has had only episodic outbreaks of nuclear fear despite the continual presence and near-constant expansion of the weapons since 1945.7 While Cowling’s own periods of nuclear fear don’t map perfectly onto Boyer’s account, they do...

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