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The farm on which the procedure would take place belongs to Everett King, a burly man in his late 30s whose face is sun-red from his cap line down. King is less troubled by the capsules in his land than by a rabid skunk in the area that might threaten his children, and by a raccoon that commandeered the basketball backboard over the garage and will not back off. Besides missiles and Air Force personnel, King's 5,000 acres contain spring wheat and fallow land in alternating green and brown stripes, a crop of oats, malting barley, a sleepy horse, a donkey and a 60-mile view extending to the Rockies. On a late-spring afternoon, the mountains glow like dark ice.
King sees the presence of the missiles as an unfortunate necessity. "Anyway, nobody's safe from 'em anywhere." He does not spend his days worrying over nuclear war but he is almost certain one is coming. "You've got all those toys around. Someone's going to fool with them sooner or later. Look at Hiroshima. The Bomb was already used once. Things are building all the time. The Middle East, Central America. I listen to the radio a lot when I drive my tractor, and they were just sayin' the other day that there was--what was the name of that country? Pakistan--they were sayin' that Pakistan might get the Bomb. So nobody's safe. No, I don't mind the missiles on my land. If they go off, it'll probably happen at night. I'll never know."
The most likely circumstances under which nuclear war would occur, says Nixon, are the following: 1) an accident, 2) proliferation, 3) a small war in which U.S. and Soviet interests collide, 4) a miscalculation by one superpower of the other's interests, 5) a Soviet pre-emptive strike against China: "They cannot allow China to gain sufficient nuclear strength." Elaborating on the small-war theory, Nixon says it is unlikely that a nuclear conflict would be ignited in either Afghanistan ("too far away for us") or in Central America ("too far away for them"). The most probable place would be the Middle East. "But, you know, the Russians might be a little goosey about going in there because they could think, 'Those Israelis have a Masada complex.' Someone pushes the Israelis, the Israelis might just bomb the bastards!"
Nixon's office is much hotter now; the air conditioning is missed. Outside, an early Fourth of July celebrator has set off a brief volley of Chinese firecrackers. By nightfall the East River will be ablaze with rockets.
"I found a far different world and a far different presidency in 1969 than when I left the Eisenhower Administration in January 1961. In these respects: first, the overwhelming superiority that the U.S. had over the Soviet Union in terms of nuclear weapons was gone. In 1961 we had a first-strike capability. That was gone. The Soviet Union was not yet ahead of us, but they certainly were equal to us. In the campaign, I made the point that we must be No. 1. I made the point not out of an appeal to ego, but because I remembered what superiority had meant to us when we had it. I felt it was very important that the Soviets not have it. But in the interests of avoiding nuclear coercion, we had to have sufficiency, which meant parity. And what parity meant for nuclear diplomacy was this: the U.S. had to develop a nuclear strategy to deal with the world as if nuclear weapons did not exist.