some notes about MAD (and but-for causation about meeting PJ)

Re-reading A Canticle for Leibowitz along with the rest of the group.  I like it better each time.

I was reminded of my first encounter with the book - in an "International Relations" class in November 1976 (junior year at ND) - the book was on the syllabus.  I don't recall that we spent much time discussing the book in class (though more on that below); it definitely was useful background for a lecture or two on the topic of "Mutual Assured Destruction."

Given that few nuclear weapons have been destroyed - and quite a few more nations (including some less-stable ones) hold them - it's somewhat surprising how much the popular concern over nuclear war has receded in recent decades.  (Easier to understand why MAD theory is less relevant, however.)

Buddies:  Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro.

Last week, I was looking for the floor plan of our house in connection with some upstairs redecorating we're planning, and found it - along with a few notebooks from my college classes.  That gave me the idea to post my notes from the 1976 classes on MAD/Leibowitz - not because they're particularly unique or insightful - but to recall how intense those issues were even in 1976, and to suggest that those issues (MAD, in particular) were considerably more intense when Canticle was written in 1959.  Which is useful context for reading the book.

[Something interesting about these class notes:  as the below-posted notes indicate, I missed class on November 12, 1976.  That most likely was the day on which the class would have discussed Canticle.  Per my diary, my absence was due to a plausible academic reason - I was registering for spring semester classes.  I burned extra time registering that day because I decided to make a second trip to the registrar to swap out one of the classes for which I had originally registered.  My diary indicates ". . . then [went] to O'Shag [home building for College of Arts & Letters] to change into a GP [General Program] Seminar, should be better [than the Collegiate Seminar initially chosen]."  Why are these few words interesting?  I would never have met PJ (who, unlike me, was a General Program major) but for skipping the Canticle class on 11/12/76 to switch into that General Program seminar.  Which would have had consequences for all of us, not the least in relation to our five children.]

Back to MAD:  this simple chronology may be instructive:

• 1945:  Hiroshima
• 1950s and onward:  Cold War between nuclear-armed and ideologically-divided East and West
• 1959:  Miller writes A Canticle for Leibowitz
• 1962:  Cuban missile crisis in October; civil defense drills for grade-schoolers in St. Joe, Iowa; as winter arrives we're told not to stick out our tongues to catch snowflakes because the snow might have fallout from various nuclear weapons tests going on; etc.
• [Early 1960s:  we make a Tinkertoy elevator, wind the elevator car - with lone passenger being a toy figure we named "Nikita Khruschev" - to the top floor, and drop the elevator five or six Tinkertoy-stories, presumably to his disadvantage.  That showed him.  Do today's six or seven year olds have this kind of thing on their minds?] 
• Since 1962:  no really close calls.
• 1989:  Berlin Wall comes down.

No wonder popular concern has receded - though the monsters (or Lucifer, we might say) certainly remain available for unleashing.

Class notes follow (and, I must admit, my 1976 handwriting was really quite excellent).

MAD notes November 1976.pdf