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been militarised, digitised. We are all on the front line.
    Someone new to this subject, someone innocent of it -an extraterrestrial, a pre-nuclear Rip Van Winkle — would have no trouble choosing between the arguments of the Recruiters and the Pressed Men. There is, emphatically yet ironically, no contest. In their styles of discourse the Pressed Men are as varied and distinctive as all human discourse is. The only unquestionable achievement of nuclear weapons is the goaded eloquence of their opponents: the moral inerrancy of Jonathan Schell, the elegant historicism of Solly Zuckerman, the sensitive hardheadedness of Freeman Dyson, the witty tenacity of Robert Scheer and Daniel Ford. Passion, humour, memorability, appositeness - against all this, against this everything, the Recruiters offer precisely nothing. What else can they offer? What else have they got to give? They can field the desk-job manliness of George Will and Norman Podhoretz, the prideful frigidity of Colin Gray and Keith Payne; the rest is a desert of business language, euphemism, and cliche, with an occasional chant or whoop from the school yard or the rumpus room. It is the voice of the technophiliac, the tough guy, and the toady. With the Recruiters you are not in the presence of active thought; you just sit there and watch the laborious bolstering of stock response, the steady fattening of prejudice. Besides being called 'war criminals' and 'mass murderers' (phrases used with surprising freedom here in Washington), the Recruiters are referred to as 'the megadeath intellectuals'. But the term is a contradiction. There is no intellectual content in megadeath. There never has been and there never will be. The mind can do nothing with it.
    Addiction is a resilient theme in the story of nuclear weapons, and many a Pressed Man has got hooked on the hardware, the beautiful physics, the undoable Rubik's cube of nuclear strategy. 'There's nothing worse', the writer Andrew Cockburn said to me, 'than listening to some Freezer going on about — I don't know — the Circular Error Probable of Trident II.' But there is something worse. There is something worse than listening to a Pressed Man going on about hard kill and blast over-pressure, PACFLT and AFSATCOM, choke points and back-fit cancellations, FROLIC and SIZZLE and PINCHER and BROILER. And that is listening to a Recruiter going on about them.
    This little guy in the three-piece suit is just coming out of his twenties. ('You look a bit older than that.' 'It must be the beard.') On the other hand, he sounds a lot younger; at moments of emphasis his vocal cords twang with an adolescent yodel. His name is David Trachtenberg. On his desk are scale models of intercontinental ballistic missiles (look at the size of those Soviet SS-18s!). On the wall behind his chair is a customised poster, jokingly accusing David of being a wanted man, 'convicted of supporting the SDI program'. Next to the poster is a cartoonish watercolour of an unreservedly grinning David, straddling the globe while missiles squirt this way and that; to his right is Uncle Sam, to his left the Russian Bear. David's pals or loved ones evidently felt relaxed enough to present David with this picture, and David evidently felt relaxed enough to hang it on his office wall.
    David works for the Committee on the Present Danger ('Present Danger?' sings the lady on the phone), the Recruiter think tank that has supervised Reagan's nuclear policies. Reagan is a member of the board, and close to sixty fellow directors have found work in his administration. Though fairly eerie in its own right, talking to David is not as bad as reading the Present Danger literature, namely a buxom volume called Alerting America ('What Is the Soviet Union Up To?' 'Has America Become Number 2?'); with David, at least, there is a human dimension, however subdued. On the other hand, you can smoke while you're reading the literature, and you can't do that while you're talking to