by Amis, Martin
A well-grooved simplifier, Dr Mense gave me his pitch: up-front, down-home, frenziedly, cravenly demonic. Once a fusion-energy expert at McDonnell Douglas, he is now mainly a coordinator. He translates technical data 'into eighth-grade English for the guys on Capitol Hill' and goes out 'to debate the critics with my anti-tomato shield'. Linguistically, this is the jock end of the market. Robust simplicities are delivered like slaps on the back.
'Protection? No. Hey, folks, you're playing the wrong game! If deterrence fails, we're all out to lunch. We'd all be gone. No more Americans! And we don't think, "Gee, by having this system we can just ride out a nuclear war." All we're really doing is planting doubt in the mind of the Soviet offensive mission planner. All we're doing is denying him a free ride.'
'Then why are so many Americans against it?'
'I don't think I'm talking out of school here, but. . .' (And this was before the Tower Report and the palpable sapping of the Reagan momentum.) 'It's not that they're against SDL They're against the President. You know, here's this bad guy. Food stamps, abortion. All we're saying is, Come on! Jeesus: we don't have the data yet!'
'Then why are the Russians against it?'
David, at Present Danger, had given me the Gap answer to this question: 'Because they've done the research. They know it works.' Dr Mense didn't have an answer. He didn't seem to think there was an answer. He shrugged hugely, spread his arms, and bulged his eyes, as if to say, 'Go understand people.'
I made my way out of the Pentagon, or I tried. When I stopped every few yards and asked directions, I was proudly told how easy it was to get lost in here. They were right. Getting lost is not a problem. The Pentagon is one of the largest edifices on earth. Its corridors are as wide as boulevards, but they point nowhere, they double back, they leave you where you were before. Signposts and billboards told me everything except how to get away from them. pentagon prayer breakfast (continental $2).
PRAY FOR AMERICA. SPECIAL MUSIC: ARMY CHORUS. My requests for help became more querulous and self-pitying. Bobbing uniforms, dog-tired secretaries, bales of paper, split cardboard boxes, proliferating doorways: the minute administration of an inconceivably vast concern. At last I walked weepily through the shopping malls to the Metro, telling myself that there was no chance whatever, no hope at all, of ever starting to unpick the dreamlike complexity of this.
Since 1979 US arms policy has been avowedly 'dual track'. New deployments have been combined with new negotiations; America has rearmed so that she may disarm. Under Reagan, dual track has become a cruder matter of saying one thing while doing another. Dual track is often clearly visible, it seems to me, in the President's face, in the President's eyes. One part of him likes the idea of dramatic reductions (or likes the idea of making speeches about them); what the other part of him wants can best be called nuclear free enterprise, with the American system naturally 'prevailing', naturally 'winning'. Star Wars is the technological fix to his dilemma, his confusion, his imposture.
It is also, incidentally, the missing link in first strike. Useless as a peace shield (and useless against bombers, cruise and low-trajectory missiles, suitcase devices, et cetera), it might yet mop up a 'degraded' retaliation. This among other things is what the Kremlin worst-casers fear; and in a worst-case world, intentions and capabilities are indistinguishable. What do you do with a first-strike capability? You don't go ahead and strike first, unless the Russians look like they're doing it (and, in a crisis, they will look like they're doing it). No, you coerce, you play hardball. Thus you gamble the future to serve local and temporary ends. You show American willingness, American 'resolve' to bet the planet. The weapons improve until they are capable of anything. And, in a crisis, people deteriorate until they are capable of anything. Perched on a twanging ladder of instability, the President will have 'options' unlimited. Humanly, morally, politically, militarily, they will all be zero options. That's what nuclear options are: zero options.
On the nuclear issue, as on so many others, Ronald Reagan has deceived the American people. 'Ronald Reagan has deceived the American people,' I was told, more than once, not just by Pressed Men but by analysts and onlookers in federal buildings, sitting there with their computers and their cherry Coke. 'Don't name me - I'll lose my job.' The hidden aim was broad superiority (only one superpower); the intention was to outbuild and outspend the Russians, while throwing lopsided offers their way to keep public opinion quiet. To the administration's fuddled alarm, Gorbachev called the bluff.
Now, owing to a world-historical fluke, we may get the first arms-reduction deal ever (but watch out for those Soviet violations). The prime mover in this reduction is not Ronald Reagan. The prime mover is Oliver North, with the help of some pillow talk from Nancy, as she attempts to spruce up a tousled presidency for the history books. Reagan's avowed policy was to negotiate from nuclear strength. In 1987, he must negotiate belly-up, from domestic impotence. 'You hear that, Ivan?' Colonel North used to shout during his lectures on geopolitical strategy. Well, you hear that, Ollie? Such are the cosmic jokes, the astronomical cheap shots, that fashion our destiny in the nuclear age.
After forty years of concerted thought, no one has got anywhere with nuclear weapons. No one has discovered what to do with them; no one has discovered how to do without them. The story of their management is a story of repetition, false summits, the retracing of steps. Nuclear technology changes, the procurements change, but the situation does not change. By a radiant paradox, public opinion has changed only that aspect of policy that directly concerns the public: it has killed off civil defence. (Remember the films and drills, the blast-shelter singsongs, the pathetic docility of the human actors?) Public opinion is there, however, and it is waiting. Imagine nuclear weapons as sentient beings: there they are, preposterously savage, stupidly inert, yet not quite fearless. For they fear what they most threaten, ordinary people, people who have felt their mortal insult, people who have grasped a simple truth: that there is something wrong with the planet.
Fred Kaplan is among the more recent nuclear chroniclers. He completed his classic study, The Wizards of Armageddon, at the age of twenty-eight. Four years later, his young face bears the orbits of care and strain; but these I partly attributed to his two-year-old twin daughters, who swayed and staggered around the lunch table as we ate. 'You go into this subject with certain feelings and instincts. Then you're confronted by endless complexity. The complexity has no limit, and you can take on as much of it as you want. But when you come out the other side, you're left with the same feelings and instincts. They're completely unchanged.' Although Fred will talk about nuclear weapons, and talk well, his eyes are resigned and long-suffering. 'He wants to give them up,' says his wife, 'and just write about hi-fi or something.' Fred nods and sighs. We all want to give them up. We are all long-suffering. We all want to give them up and get on to something else.
Seeing the Kaplans' children made me anxious to see my own. If you spend too much time with this subject, if you spend too much time in nothingland, you begin to feel marginal, spectral, insubstantial. You want to get away from the death-ubiquity; you want to get back to life. And when I took my seat in the smoking section of the 747 at Dulles, I realised I was flying back just as I had flown in: with extra sadness, bitter complexity, with extra nuke fatigue — but unchanged. However far you go into nuclear weapons, there is no understanding to be had, only more knowledge. This is as it should be, because nuclear weapons are nothing.
And everything, also, at the same time. In The Fate of the Earth, Jonathan Schell stressed the need for sobriety in the nuclear debate; the Pressed Man must be civil to the Recruiter, despite the enticements of exasperation and anger, I have always assented to the justice of this tenet, while often wondering why I find it so hard to abide by. I genuinely don't want to be civil to, or civil about, the Pentagon handyman, the peanut at Present Danger, the charm-school colonel on the phone with his You betcha and That's what we're here for (but what else are they here for?)
, the princes of darkness, the foolish and complaisant President. How strictly do civilised rules apply to civilisation's enemies? This is a human story, and human pressures, human mobilisations, can be brought to bear upon it.
The answer to a predicament must be of the same size as that predicament. It must have congruence. The nuclear debate is a debate conducted with our fathers — but it is about our children. If the Recruiters are to be isolated and eventually pathologised - if the planet is to grow up - then our children will have to act in self-defence. We must fix our kids so that they will have nothing to do with anyone who has anything to do with anyone who has anything to do with nuclear weapons, with instruments of blood and rubble. The process will begin at that moment of mortal shame when we acquaint them with the status quo, with the facts of life, the facts of death. So come on. In an inversion of filial confession, we will have to take deep breaths, wipe our eyes and stare into theirs, and tell them what we've done.
Esquire, 1987
WATFORD IN CHINA
In 1983 Watford Football Club paid an off-season visit to China. A modest, obscure, suburban team, Watford were newcomers to the higher ranks of the sport — where they have not remained. Their controversial 'long-ball' game (the mid-field punt towards the big blokes in the opposition's penalty area) lifted them from the Third Division to the First. Star player: John Barnes (now of Liverpool). Manager: Graham Taylor (now of England). Chairman: Elton John.
Fearing the worst — and hoping for the best possible copy — I expected Watford to play the China card. That is to say, I expected half the squad to play pontoon and drink beer in their hotel rooms, while the other half would play pontoon and drink beer out by the pool. I expected the players to eat steak and chips, do Sun crosswords and make frequent calls home, to the wife, the girlfriend, the agent and the bookie. I expected the team's only cultural concession to their historic tour would be the odd racist taunt, the occasional self-destructive experiment with rice wine, and one or two requests for a Chinese takeaway. How would these stormy individualists fare, how would they cope, in the unsmiling termitary of Red China?
Wearing a Billy Bunter suit, a banded boater, purple sunglasses and a diamond earring, Chairman Elton John gazed down fondly at his proteges. Kippered and sallowed by the twenty-hour flight, in regulation blazers, flannels and club ties, the players impassively awaited their baggage in the chaotic kiln of Peking Airport. For a moment they looked far more inscrutable and regimented than the quacking Chinese who bustled about them ... I knew then that all my expectations were misplaced. And so it proved.
The Press has often been blamed for the poor image of footballers and football in general. There is a tacit conspiracy in Fleet Street - but it is a conspiracy of silence. The world of the athlete — where unnurtured youth is confronted by adulation and money — provides opportunities for yahooism rivalled only in the rock-music business (of which more later). Off the field, and especially away from home, footballers behave so outrageously that it's a full-time job looking the other way.
And yet, one by one, the Watford squad approached the Hall of Preserving Harmony, peered into the Pavilion of Universal Tranquillity and passed through the Gate of Benevolence and Longevity. Somewhat reluctant, homesick and disorientated, they broached the Forbidden City, and emerged as creditable ambassadors.
The man responsible for this, as for so much else at Watford, is the manager Graham Taylor. Six years ago Watford were a nothing club in the dregs of the Football League. Elton John, a fan since his schooldays in Pinner, took over the chairmanship, injected a good deal of money (the usual estimate is £1.6 million) and hired Taylor from Lincoln City. In 1983 Watford finished runners-up to Liverpool in the First Division. But Taylor wants more than success from his players: he wants to form them as individuals. It is a little-known fact, for instance, that the Watford team are contractually obliged to do seven hours of community work each week. Footballers are often no more than chattels to their clubs; and when the game is finished with them, they blunder out into the world like stranded adolescents. But Watford remains a paternalistic, smalltown outfit, as I saw for myself. The stands and terraces are dotted with women and children, not with National Fronters and bald hooligans. Compared to most other grounds in the First Division, Vicarage Road is a vicarage tea-party.
The day after our arrival Watford turned out for a joint training session at the Workers' Stadium, the 80,000-seater where they would play China the following night, the first of two meetings with the national side. Taylor was wearing full strip and throwing off as much sweat as anyone in the ninety-degree heat. 'Work! One touch and go! Give it. Go. Give it. Go.' Stocky, grinning, intense, Taylor puts his men through their hoops with a spurring candour, a flattering brutality. There is intimacy in his bellowed orders: he is the canny schoolmaster who knows your vanities and soft-spots, who forces you beyond your limits and then sues for peace with a slap on the back. Taylor told me that he had had to gear himself to use the hefty obscenities of the footballing idiom — that he wasn't accustomed to 'the industrial language' that is the language of the game. Well, he seems accustomed to it now, jovially effing and blinding as he stokes his players to the boil.
Elton John (also present, in Humpty Dumpty outfit, baseball cap and purple shades) would later admit that it was Taylor who had saved him from the traditional immolation of the rockstar life. Elton had showed up to a Watford match, looking more like Big Ears than usual, and bearing all the signs of bodily abuse. Taylor summoned him to his house that night and offered him a pint glass brimmed with brandy. 'Here. Are you going to drink that? What the fuck's the matter with you?' Elton mended his ways, and not before time. All superstars, it seems, must get off the fast lane before they crash. Some find religion, some find family life. But Elton has found Watford F.C. He delights in his team; and he also enjoyed the anonymity of China, where his music is unknown and he is no more than an exotic curiosity, like a video game or a Beefeater. Only the tourists recognised him.
As Taylor set about exhausting the China goalkeeper ('Catch and roll. Catch and roll. Again. Again. Again.'), I strolled across the pitch and talked to Shen Xiang-fu, the team's number eleven and major star. In what looked like size-two boots, with his square, vigilant face (and with that strange, glassy distance between eye-surface and lid), Shen answered all questions with the same laconic caution.
He was unmarried, like all the China players. He was a student and instructor at the Peking Sports Institute. He earned 75 yuan a month (£25, a fraction above the national average) plus 20 more for dietary expenses (steak, butter). Did he enjoy travelling with the team? Yes, he did. Would he like to play in England one day? Yes, he would. Which British players did he admire? This time the response was immediate: 'Cheega!' The interpreter looked at me helplessly, but I knew who this must be: none other than Keegan Kevin. I told Shen how much Keegan earned in a month. He giggled — in embarrassment, as an Englishman might giggle at the sudden mention of sex — and then reassumed his blank and watchful stare.
That night Watford dined at the Great Hall of the People, where their quivering chopsticks negotiated the usual menu of fish stomachs, sea-slugs and ancient eggs. Lustrously dinner-jacketed, Elton John was introduced as 'the world's greatest superstar' by the General Secretary of the China FA. Elton did his stuff, very nicely, and silver salvers and plastic footballs were exchanged. When it comes to banqueting, the Chinese have something else to teach the West: speeches come first, at which stage sobriety and greed can be relied upon to keep them short.
The star guest at my table was the manager of the Workers' Stadium. (His groundsman was seated at the next table along.) He looked like a handsome Thai pirate out of a documentary about the Boat People. From accounts of the West Bromwich Albion tour of China in 1978, I had gathered that the Peking football crowds were as hushed and respectful as a first-night audience at Covent Garden. No 'oooooh, wanky wanky'. No 'you'll neAGHver walk alone'. I asked the chainsmoking, mao-tei-quaffing bi
gwig about this, and his reply was reassuringly serene.
That's right - Chinese crowds do not indulge in partisanship, and why should they? If your team is winning, you're happy. If your team is losing, you're even happier — because the superior team is schooling you for the future. I wondered how this line would go down with the Anfield Kop, say, as Liverpool trailed 0-4 to an Albanian eleven in the European Cup. How thrilled were the Chinese, I asked, when their team so narrowly failed to qualify for the World Cup in 1982? But my interlocutor's face had closed and hardened. He was as relieved as I was when a voice abruptly announced: 'That's all for the banquet. Goodnight!'
From the outset the Watford Group had been split into three parties, each served by its own coach and guide: Players, Directors and Tourists. This last contingent was made up of businessmen associated with the various club sponsors, and included a cadre of epic drinkers (known as the Gang of Four) who were clearly destined to become the true heroes of the long march. Due to some administrative whim - or to Taylor's protectiveness of his players - it was with the Tourists that the small Press corps was initially billeted.
So while Watford repaired to the luxurious mosque of the Fragrant Hill Hotel, I took my chances at the musty Yan Jing on one of the great avenues of downtown Peking. Here in the bar, the Gang of Four began its nightly skit on the comic Britisher abroad. Soon their table was a float of dead beer bottles. The volume, treble and bass controls all turned steadily upwards. They sang songs, and verbally goosed the passing girls. Thus did they strive to convince themselves that they were not in a coffee shop in Fu Xing Street but in the Butcher's Arms back home.
