Joan Didion - Vintage Didion

I never saw this mentioned again. I never heard anyone refer to it. Not even during the discussions of nuclear intentions that occurred six months later, after the administration released a reminder that the U.S. reserved the right, if it or its allies were attacked with weapons of mass destruction, to respond with nuclear as well as conventional force. But let’s look at where we are.

The idealists of the process are talking about the hinge of history.

And the Department of Defense was talking as early as last June about unloosing, for the first time since 1945, high-yield nuclear weapons.

In the early 1980s I happened to attend, at a Conservative Political Action conference in Washington, a session called “Rolling Back the Soviet Empire.” One of the speakers that day was a kind of adventurer-slash-ideologue named Jack Wheeler, who was very much of the moment because he had always just come back from spending time with our freedom fighters in Afghanistan, also known as the mujahideen. I recall that he received a standing ovation after urging that copies of the Koran be smuggled into the Soviet Union to “stimulate an Islamic revival” and the subsequent “death of a thousand cuts.” We all saw that idea come home.