My Father and the Cruise Missile

Posted on March 26, 2003 in Adolescence Morals & Ethics War

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
– Henry David Thoreau

The mass of Americans lead lives of quiet, desperate ambivalence.

My father was no pacifist. For one thing, he worked on the cruise missile at the National Weapons Center in China Lake, California. His role was marginal: he worked as a cost analyst, checking the numbers to be sure that the project stayed on financial track. He believed in the nuclear deterrent, in keeping up with what the Russians were supposed to be working on as well, so that no one would be tempted to disrupt world peace. I also know that he came to oppose the Vietnam War, like most Americans of the middle and the left did. Dad didn’t much care for seeing small weapons used on civilians. The Bomb, he believed, would protect that. And no one would ever think of using Tomahawk, the Navy’s cruise missile, for anything but strikes against Soviet nuclear bases.

For the two summers before he passed on, I worked at the NWC as a typist in the safety and the contracts management office. Like Dad’s job, these were places removed intellectually and physically from the real business of the base which was the testing of new weapons system. Somewhere out in the desert, Dad told me, there was a mockup of an aircraft carrier. They had proving grounds where they flew aircraft just over the tops of stretched wires lined up across the desert like croquet hoops. I went out into the desert once on a fire inspection. I remember one stretch of road along which they were doing some microwave experiments. A sign said “Drive as fast as you can: Microwave Experiments in Progress.”

NWC (now NAVAIR) was the scene of the most crucial developments, where the future of weaponry was decided and forged as prototypes. I once saw a map that I wasn’t supposed to see, showing the ten mile long course along which a Tomahawk missile was fired and run through obstacles. Dad came home with a keychain celebrating the acceptance of the project. My mother still owns it, as a kind of trophy of his life.

My pacifism started to develop in junior high school when the images of the Vietnam War shot into my eyes every evening on the news. I felt my family leaning against the war and I followed; then I leaned farther still. I took the jobs at China Lake during the summer because I needed the money, especially the summer before I went to Greece for a semester abroad.

At least once before he died, we discussed our views about war. The feeling I got from my father was that while he hated war, he had to make a living. And he honestly believed that Tomahawk would never be used. It was, in his mind, primarily a vehicle for nuclear weapons and had they not kept the world peace since 1945? His life was like that of many who worked in defense plants: it was a job. They hated war, they loved how the things went boom, the engineers loved the special challenges, and they appreciated the money. Most of them, I think, did not want the devices used on people. They hoped that they would be frightening enough that no one would ever use them.

These were lives of quiet, desperate ambivalence of which I spoke at the beginning. Few of the men and women who worked at NWC were what I would call warmongers: the occasional right wing kooks were shunned by the majority, left out of the social circle. They could not figure out why. The men and women of NWC wanted peace and they thought that through mutual assured destruction they would have it. They did not see the fall of the Berlin Wall, they did not remember that a missile that could carry a nuclear warhead could also carry a high explosive charge.

In the years between my father’s death in 1980 and the First Gulf War, the focus deviated from nuclear devices to high-explosive ordinance. In the public mind, anything that wasn’t nuclear couldn’t be bad. During the eighties we spoke of nuclear winters and the death of our species. When the first cruise missiles left the fleet in the Persian Gulf, most people didn’t blink an eye because the dying were confined to Bagdad.

When I returned from my 1992 trip to Croatia where I saw what high explosives could do to cities, I tried to speak about the terrifying developments in conventional weaponry. I made several visits to the Hoover Institution Library and I read the defense contractor magazines. I realized, after I reviewed the history of warfare since 1945, that the 1980s peace movement had been focusing on the wrong thing: no one wanted to use The Bomb: the military was working hard, therefore, on making “acceptable” weapons deadlier. I tried to explain this to people, but many, including many peace activists who felt they’d won the victory to end all victories with Glasnost and the end of the Cold War in the eighties, didn’t grasp what I was saying.

The need for new directions had been apparent to me before I went to former Yugoslavia.

The night the cruise missiles rained on Bagdhad in 1991, I lay in my bed. I was desperate; I was in a distinct, determined minority because of my opposition, and I was not at all quiet: I was screaming.