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Sliding Doors - a new World

Had John Fitzgerald Kennedy not won the 1960 US Presidential election then the 1960's would not have been as we remember them. 

If there had been no escalation of the Vietnam War: 'to make US power seem credible', then there would have been no conscription in Australia; no American or Australian 'Draft Dodgers'; no calls to 'give peace a chance'; no protest folksingers. No 'swinging sixties'? No hippies?    

On the other hand it's probable that racial tensions in the United States would have been handled less sympathetically and it was Kennedy who founded the Peace Corps.

Kennedy's nuclear standoff with the Russians evolved into the MAD (mutual assured destruction) doctrine. Soon sufficient weapons of mass destruction were, and still are, held by both the US and Russia to assure the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender should it ever come to nuclear war.

Kennedy's 'robust' confrontation with the Russians continued under Johnson and eventually a nuclear test ban treaty was signed. Successive administrations have been more conciliatory.  President Regan proposed talks leading to START I (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) signed by President Bush (Senior) and President Obama more recently signed New START with the Russian Federation.  Meanwhile Marxist economics failed in every country that tried it and the world (including the those countries that are still nominally Communist) has largely returned to a market based economic model.  Nevertheless US confrontation with Russia (and vice versa) has become a habit and the MAD doctrine still hangs over the World like the Sword of Damocles.

Kennedy's other competition with the Russians was the 'Space Race'.   Kennedy was famously opposed to the rather ragged US space program until April 12, 1961, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became 'the first man in space'.  The evident Russian lead in rocketry obviously had defence implications.  It meant that the Russians could potentially deliver a nuclear bomb to any point on earth.  It was Kennedy's epiphany.  With this flash of Russian light in the sky he became a convert to space technology.

On May 25 1961 he announced to congress:  "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."  It was to be enormously costly and needed to be sold.  In September the following year he told a public audience in a televised speech:

No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. ...
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Rice University, September 12, 1962

 

The impact of this program on the future is difficult to overstate.  It gave us the technology of the 21century:  everything from silicone chips to non-stick frypans. The ability to cheaply travel the world and to communicate electronically even faster rely on technologies developed for that programme.  A myriad of spin-off  technologies flowed from the Space Program, like all those that depend on small powerful computing devices; as well as new understandings and abilities in medicine and genetics.

But more than all these changes in the fabric of time, the sixties was when those of my generation met and wed (or not) and bred.  We met at sixties parties and produced a generation of children who would not be here if the times had been different.  Perhaps their siblings would be here but many pairings simply wouldn't have happened at all.   Those children are now producing children of their own.

So we now have a world of people who simply wouldn't have been had Francis Gary Powers done as he was told.

 

 

 

 

 

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Travel

Malta

 

 

Almost everyone in Australia knows someone who hailed directly from Malta or is the child of Maltese parents. There are about a quarter as many Maltese Australians as there are Maltese Maltese so it is an interesting place to visit; where almost every cab driver or waiter announces that he or she has relatives in Sydney or Melbourne.

Read more: Malta

Fiction, Recollections & News

The Meaning of Death

 

 

 

 

 

 

'I was recently restored to life after being dead for several hours' 

The truth of this statement depends on the changing and surprisingly imprecise meaning of the word: 'dead'. 

Until the middle of last century a medical person may well have declared me dead.  I was definitely dead by the rules of the day.  I lacked most of the essential 'vital signs' of a living person and the technology that sustained me in their absence was not yet perfected. 

I was no longer breathing; I had no heartbeat; I was limp and unconscious; and I failed to respond to stimuli, like being cut open (as in a post mortem examination) and having my heart sliced into.  Until the middle of the 20th century the next course would have been to call an undertaker; say some comforting words then dispose of my corpse: perhaps at sea if I was travelling (that might be nice); or it in a box in the ground; or by feeding my low-ash coffin into a furnace then collect the dust to deposit or scatter somewhere.

But today we set little store by a pulse or breathing as arbiters of life.  No more listening for a heartbeat or holding a feather to the nose. Now we need to know about the state of the brain and central nervous system.  According to the BMA: '{death} is generally taken to mean the irreversible loss of capacity for consciousness combined with the irreversible loss of capacity to breathe'.  In other words, returning from death depends on the potential of our brain and central nervous system to recover from whatever trauma or disease assails us.

Read more: The Meaning of Death

Opinions and Philosophy

The reputation of nuclear power

 

 

One night of at the end of March in 1979 we went to a party in Queens.  Brenda, my first wife, is an artist and was painting and studying in New York.  Our friends included many of the younger artists working in New York at the time.  That day it had just been announced that there was a possible meltdown at a nuclear reactor at a place called a Three Mile Island , near Harrisburg Pennsylvania. 

I was amazed that some people at the party were excitedly imagining that the scenario in the just released film ‘The China Syndrome’  was about to be realised; and thousands of people would be killed. 

Read more: The reputation of nuclear power

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