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has brought no simplification with it. It has brought only more of the same — more bitter complexities. On every level it will merely add to the epic fairy tale of cry-wolf, brier-patch second-guessing on which, for some strange reason, our existence now depends.
    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! Jee sus : 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