October 2006
Watching Space Race was a mad time-warp. Curious memories sprang from nowhere. I had grown up in Werner von Braun’s America, and suddenly it all came back.
(For those who missed the TV show, von Braun led the US space program).
They were times of hope and fear. Hope that science was a force for good, embodied in the quest to send a Man Into Space; and fear that the Soviets would beat us to it, which was a terrible prospect because science had also emerged as the great destroyer. For all the talk of peace the space race and the arms race were inseparable, because rockets could deliver payloads, so control of space was above all a military necessity for Moscow and Washington. Why else so much gnashing of American teeth over sputnik?
In 1969 I would go out into the street and gaze up at the moon, as thrilled as von Braun in the TV show, imagining Neil Armstrong up there walking around. But as a little boy in the early fifties I had three nightmares about nuclear war; enough to plague my parents with worry. Dreams a bit like those in Bob Dylan’s Talkin’ World War III Blues.
They got their start in school. This was a place to hear exhilarating tales about satellite launches (except when they blew up), and at the same time a stage for paranoid war-games. Daily science classes dwelt on the space race, and each morning the classroom loudspeakers blared out the national anthem and the Pledge to Our Flag. (Blech. Yet I can also smile, remembering how some wag in the back row would call out “play ball!” after the anthem, just like at the baseball games.)
Then one day the speakers came to life in the middle of the day, bringing us a test run for Conelrad, the clunky round-robin radio system designed to shift signals from one transmitter to another before the Russian rockets could home in on any fixed broadcast. Awkward voices scratched clichés to us through the static, in that pompous fifties announcer style: “This Is The Voice of Conelrad.” Bob Dylan recalled it with fitting irony:
Well, I remember seein’ some ad,
So I turned on my Conelrad.
But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill,
So the radio didn’t work so well.
No, it didn’t work well at all, I can confirm that.
Another time the whole school marched home in an evacuation drill, my contingent trooping along the railway tracks. Back at home my dad was building a house on a slope from concrete blocks. The under-story formed a spacious basement, which could serve as a bomb shelter. Or at least that’s what the neighbours brightly announced. Why, it would add value to the house. Later Dylan made me wonder how we might have behaved if we had ever put it to use:
Well, I rung the fallout shelter bell
And I leaned my head and I gave a yell,
"Give me a string bean, I’m a hungry man."
A shotgun fired and away I ran.
I don’t blame them too much though,
I know I look funny.
A talented boy at my school wrote a play on this same theme: a family in their shelter with some fearful spectre knocking on the door. The private bomb shelter was a study in social alienation. But we had to stop the Communists, didn’t we? By the time of the 1962 missile crisis, I did scratch up enough original thought to ask why America got to decide whether Cuba had missiles. After all, America had secured them without asking anyone. Why couldn’t Castro join the space race too? My mother told me sharply that we had to stop the Communists. Temporarily convinced, I joined a school excursion to the local missile base.
Yes, no bullshit, that’s where we went. Can’t you just see us schoolboys at a missile base? Awesome.
Some of the boys thought the air force should shoot off a rocket, just so we could watch. They wanted the Werner von Braun experience. The military guide shook his head; then he condescendingly asked if we knew why the answer was no. I guessed: “What goes up must come down?” Yeah that too, he laughed, before getting to the main reason: these rockets cost like a million dollars each.
So what, it was worth it to stop the Communists.
It took a war in Vietnam to shake me up. Forget nobility or logic, at the start this was all about naked self-preservation. I’d been vaguely pro-war until I realised I could be sent off to die, and then my ideas started to change. Slowly I ditched the bomb shelter mentality, the space race craze, the Conelrad mind set. The Communists became fellow human beings, and in a growing movement against the war I discovered a curious new thing called solidarity. Like that Dylan guy said:
I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.