On Nuclear Corruption
I suspect (well, actually, I hope against hope) that all nuclear weapons systems, worldwide, are deeply corrupt. You may call that wishful thinking, but my reasoning is material and secular. If you threaten everyone’s lives, then some people might act out.
For instance, what motivation has a bomb-maker for paying 1 cent extra, or 1 ruble extra, to make sure that the nuke will go boom? They’d be in legal trouble if it didn’t, but if nukes were being dropped, then lawsuits would be the least of their worries.
My friend Stan Tenen, recently deceased, once told me that during the Cold War, he stood up at a board meeting, for a defense corporation, and said, “Gentlemen, you know that the device we’re contracted to build is supposed to do something physically impossible. You know this.” They replied, “Yes, we know that, but we signed the contract, and we will deliver the product.” That was when Stan started to drift away from corporate technocracy to visualizing Kabballah in four dimensions. Nerds gotta nerd, but corruption is corruption.
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