Creating Beauty or Making War: The Wizards of Armageddon

 

Creating Beauty or Making War: The Wizards of Armageddon

Peter Schultz

 

                  Thoughts spurred by the book, The Wizards of Armageddon, by Fred Kaplan.

 

                  “…there was no conceivable circumstance under which using nuclear weapons would create an advantage [for the US]….Brodie’s fundamental conclusion [stood]: that there could be no winners….And so the analysts had to keep going back to the problem over and over again, even if the problem could never be solved….[And] nobody wanted to be the man in … a ghastly conflict … say to the President of the United States: ‘I’m sorry, sir, but there are no good options…, and there is nothing you can do about it.’” [p.371] (And Sheriff Bell appears.)

 

                  Oh, those vicious circles with no way out politically or militarily. The only way out is philosophically: reconceiving the human story as being about the contemplation and creation of the beautiful. The Wizards of Armageddon, while theorizing about and making war, merely succeeded in futilely spinning their wheels. There is no way to fight a nuclear war rationally. Wars are always obscene – and there is nothing to be done about that.