A plastic scale model of a rocket sits on a miniature launch pad on the stage. Holding a remote control device that resembles a garage door opener, Professor Morton throws back his head and in a voice that is part Olivier, part Brando, calls out dramatically, “I shot an arrow into the air… ”
He pushes a button on the remote, and whoosh… The rocket blasts off.
“It fell to earth I know not where.”
The rocket arcs above the students’ heads, sailing up the tiers where it lands in the top row, squarely in the center of a cardboard bullseye.
“Horse feathers! Henry Wadsworth Longfellow didn’t know a damn thing about ballistics.”
The students titter and exchange looks. They have witnessed Professor Morton’s antics before. Part entertainer, part academician, he plays many roles. He knows the students call him Dr. Strangelove and doesn’t discourage it.
“Why, we could hit Lenin’s tomb or Quadafi’s condominium with a nuclear warhead any time we like,” the professor says with a touch of pride. “Pyongyang, Tehran, Baghdad, Beijing, Moscow… downtown Newark. We can nuke them all.”
Nervous laughter from the students. They can never tell when the professor is joking.
“Of course, it wasn’t always that way. On a cold March morning in 1926 on a farm in Massachusetts, Dr. Robert Goddard fired the world’s first liquid-fuel rocket. It was ten feet long and traveled 61 yards before crashing into the snow. And that, I assure you, was an event as significant as Kitty Hawk.”
Professor Morton pauses, wondering if he should explain the Kitty Hawk reference to these young knowledge seekers, then figures if he has to, it isn’t worth the trouble. “In the following years, Goddard fired hundreds of rockets, always making improvements, gyroscopes for stabilization, movable exhaust vanes for steering, multi-stages to decrease weight and increase distance.”
A hand goes up, and Professor Morton nods in the direction of an earnest young Asian woman in enormous round eyeglasses. “Professor, weren’t rockets used in battle long before the 1920’s? I mean what about the national anthem, ‘in the rockets’ red glare?’”
“Quite right,” he says. “There were rockets at Fort Sumter. Hell, the British used Congreve rockets in the War of 1812, but they were little more than self-propelled artillery shells, and they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. We’re talking about something else here, the ability to launch a rocket with a substantial payload, and using the principles of ballistics, telemetry and inertial guidance, squarely hit a target. Now, after Dr. Goddard’s experiments in the 1930’s, you would think that the American government would pour money into rocketry research, wouldn’t you?”
The students nod in unison.
“But you would be wrong!” the professor thunders. “Goddard’s work was virtually ignored here. Not so in Germany, however, where the Nazis built a rocket station at Peenemunde on the Baltic Sea. By September 1944, Hitler was raining V-2’s down on London. At the end of the war, Walter Dornberger, Wernher von Braun and 600 other German scientists came to the United States, and a damn good thing, because the Russians had their own advanced rocket program, even without the Germans they shanghaied.”
Professor Morton pauses a moment and surveys his class. Some of the faculty complain about today’s X-generation. To Morton, every class was the same. Ten per cent are brilliant and motivated; eighty per cent fall into the bulbous blob at the middle of the bell curve; and ten per cent who gained admission through family connections, computer error or downright bribery should be used for painful medical experiments. “The German scientists who came to the U.S. took the V-2 and modified and improved it into the MX-774, the forerunner of the Atlas and Titan missile systems that kept the Russians at bay before any of you scholars were born.”
“But the Cold War is over,” pipes up a studious young man in the front row. “What you’re talking about is ancient history.”
The professor smiles, admiring the lad’s gumption, if not his perspicacity. To the students, ancient history is anything that occurred prior to MTV. “Yes, they say the Cold War is over. They say Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD, is obsolete. Hell, they say I’m obsolete. But they are idiots!”
The students roll their eyes and drop their pens. No use taking notes. It won’t be on any tests. Besides, they’ve heard it before, a great soaring riff of a diatribe against the National Security Council, various presidential administrations, both Republican and Democratic, the C.I.A., the D.I.A., the Pentagon, Congress, and just about everyone else in Washington except the men’s room attendant in the V.I.P. lounge at Dulles Airport.
Lionel Morton is at the juncture of tenure and academic freedom, an intersection where the driver has the unbridled right to preach, to rant, to defame and defile. It is, in fact, wondrous therapy for the professor, though it does little to teach theoretical physics to his students.
“If we let down our defenses, if we downsize and streamline and depend on Special Forces and quick-strike commando operations, we’ll be a second-rate power. We must not only maintain our nuclear weaponry, we must constantly improve and refine it if we are to remain the greatest power the world has ever known.”
“But nuclear weapons are just for defense,” says a young woman in the back. “Without the threat of an attack from the Russians, why do we need—”
“Do you know why the Soviet Union crumbled?” the professor interrupts.
“‘Cause they wanted Big Macs and Levis,” says a long-haired guy in the first row.
Professor Morton hits a button, and the wheelchair buzzes closer to the front of the stage. “Because we bankrupted them with defense spending. They had to keep up with the Joneses… and the Reagans. Now, ask yourselves this. If the American nuclear arsenal was merely for defense, why would the Russians have to keep up? Why build the SS-17’s, 18’s, 19’s, 24’s and 25’s? Why build a 25-megaton warhead, bigger than anything we’ve got, a digger that could penetrate Cheyenne Mountain and vaporize NORAD headquarters and obliterate any of our underground bunkers including ACC Command Post outside Omaha or the National Military Command Center underneath the Pentagon?”
No one answers at first, but a guy in the first row fiddles with his gold earring and seems to think about it, then says, “‘Cause the Russians didn’t trust us.”
“Right! Because the Russians were afraid of preemptive deterrence.”
Blank looks from the back rows.
“A first strike!” Professor Morton roars. “It was our first-strike potential that shriveled the commies’ testicles, and don’t ever forget it. From the last days on World War II right up through Reagan’s second term, the bastards were afraid we’d hit ‘em first. And they were right! The blockade of Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis, the Arab-Israeli wars of ‘67 and ‘73… hell, we came damn close a bunch of times.” He pauses, maybe for effect, maybe to consider whether to say it at all. “And there were some of us who thought we made a mistake not doing it as soon as possible and as hard as possible.”
No one is laughing. No one is moving. Few students even take a breath.
Professor Morton dabs his forehead with a handkerchief. He has worked up a sweat. “So ladies and gentlemen, never forget that we need that might, that ability to slick ‘em with submarine launched missiles and glick ‘em with land based missiles, the ability to make the rubble bounce with a clean fusion bomb, the ability to take out specific targets with a cookie cutter. Take away the missiles and you’re castrating America.”
The young woman in eyeglasses raises her hand. “You’re not opposed to the START treaty, are you Professor? I mean, we have enough nuclear weapons now to—”