Mutually assured destruction was supposed to keep the world safe. That was crazy enough to make you start believing in the mystical secrets of Fatima. The story was that if Catholics said the rosary enough times, then God would, with a wave of his almighty hand, save the world from annihilation. And if we fell short by a rosary or two, he wouldn’t. The details of the providential plan were not revealed. We didn’t know if, on account of the rosaries, there would be a last-minute change of heart at the National Security Council, or a presidential heart attack just before The Button got pushed. We also didn’t know how many rosaries were required. It was a mystery.

Oppenheimer’s deadly toy was modeled on the emblematic ball that inspires passion in the roaring crowd worldwide. It was not the elongated pigskin that has caused so much glory and suffering and injury and pregnancy and alcoholism and opportunity and failure and pain and despair and motor cycle accidents in Permian Basin high schools. It was the spherical white ball that the rest of the world chases around grassy knolls and kicks without using their hands. Scientists needed a way to create a sphere out of exploding flat hexagons. The first atomic bomb was a trinitrotoluene shell of soccer-ball size and shape with an enriched uranium core. When the TNT got blown to smithereens, it caused such evenly distributed pressure on the enriched uranium core that nuclear fission occurred. Boom.

And that got very messy. E=MC squared and all that business. That’ no tornado Dorothy, it’s a mushroom cloud. Can’t go back to Kansas, now. It’s not there. Except for the hardened silos. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. 

The atom bomb became obsolete because hydrogen bombs were even messier. And the generals liked it messy. The mechanics of delivery were the same. The sacred payload was placed in the tip of a phallic rocket ship and fired at innocent people half a world away. 

Airplanes were used at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but they were a little tricky, as bombs got bigger. The explosions got so powerful that a pilot couldn’t drop a nuclear weapon without blowing himself up. Also, airplanes were good for dropping one bomb. Rockets were best for global thermonuclear annihilation. They could all be fired at once.

It seems absurd to spend billions developing a foreign policy based on the total annihilation of human life. It might have been cheaper just to feed poor people, to deflate the dreams of a Marxist Red Dawn, post-Armageddon. But Puritans couldn’t let go of earning and deserving, that “sweat of your brow” business, though most of them seemed to live by the sweat of other people’s brows.

So, they created nuclear weapons and threatened to blow up the planet. The technical termed Mutually Assured  destruction, or MAD. The theorist, John Von Neumann, liked cute acronyms. Most guys will also remember MAD as a magazine that appealed to sardonic adolescent masculinity. Back then, adolescent nonsense made more sense than US foreign policy. I am not sure things have changed very much.

Von Neumann’s theory was actually the brainchild of Alfred Nobel. Nobel thought that dynamite, his legacy to humankind, was so horrible that it would force humankind to embrace peace. He obviously made a lot of money on dynamite. Maybe felt a little bit shitty about it, toward the end. He needed some backup in case he had to argue his case at the Pearly Gates. Nobel became the awarder of lucrative prizes for peace. They gave one to Henry Kissinger, in 1973. Yeah, him. No shit.

Politics and religion spawned the arms race, but there was another element to the thermonuclear madness of the Cold War. Daddy thought that Mr. Hines built tall buildings to compensate for erectile dysfunction. If you were from Gary, Indiana, and you managed to borrow pots of money from banks and insurance companies, you could satisfy your secret longings by building seventy-three story skyscrapers that could last a hundred years. That was more than enough for Gerry Hines. But if you were Ivy League, if your family had wielded money and power for eight generations, you had to put the future of the planet in the balance to get it up.

Global thermonuclear peril was the thing. Think of it. Allen Dulles wore his house slippers around the office at Langley. With his aristocratic spectacles, smoking his East Coast pipe. He had horrible gout; he could barely walk. The earliest thermonuclear climaxes were not as big as they are today, but they were big enough to destroy a medium-sized city. That was very hot.

The lethal contraption was designed in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is a very strange town. It’s easy to get lost there. The streets follow the curves of a winding arroyo and the bridges to get across it are in strange places. When you do get lost, which you most certainly will, a black sedan will appear in your rear-view mirror. The driver in dark shades will want to know why you are in Los Alamos anyway. The main drag is called Oppenheimer Avenue, out of gratitude to the man who made this all possible.

Los Alamos is the urban center with the highest per capita income of any place in the world. Not Dubai, not Kuwait, not London, not Singapore. Los Alamos. Our family dog, Mandy, came from there. She was a German Shepherd with curly hair and white toenails. German shepherds don’t have curly hair or white toenails. We never knew if she had curly hair and white toenails because of radiation exposure or because some local dog of dubious pedigree had been stalking her mom. Daddy drove to Los Alamos to pick her up when we lived in Santa Fe. It was 1961.

I remember her as a big puppy lapping up her puppy chow and milk on her first day at 512 Camino Lejo. That was our address. The house is still there, but the neighborhood went posh. The semi-circular driveway is paved now, and there is an automatic gate out front with an intercom.

Mandy used to chase cars on that road. She was trying to protect the family. She and her big hairy son, Mike. Mike and his only littermate, Pat, were sons of Thor. Really. Thor was a purebred shepherd from across the street. German nobility, formal attire, a European accent and an engraved invitation. He got laid on the first date. Doggie style, of course. Ten of Mandy’s twelve puppies were born dead, but Pat and Mike were canine super-mutants. We gave Pat to the Santa Fe police department, where he became a local hero and sired a generation of crime stoppers before he retired from the force. But we kept Mike for a long time.

After getting run over, Mandy stopped chasing cars. She became convinced that they were not all about to descend upon the family with intentions of mass murder. The red-button-pushers in Washington and Moscow haven’t learned that yet. Perhaps someone should take the initiative and run them over with cars. Kind of, you know, as therapy. Mandy wasn’t put down until we lived in Houston. It was 1973, the year of the Chilean coup and Kissinger’s Nobel Peace Prize. That would have made her about thirteen; pretty old for a big dog. She couldn’t walk any more.

One Saturday morning, Daddy took her to the vet. I was in the sixth grade. It was the first time I ever saw Clayton cry. It was partly the dog, of course. Guys get caught up with their dogs, even if they have curly hair and white toenails, but mostly, he was torn apart by the dream of a life he once had, back when Mandy came into the family in Santa Fe. That dream got old and creaky. It had to be euthanized, too.

Eliza Gilkyson, Land of Milk and Honey