Abstract
Both Steven Dietz and Tom Stoppard have written plays that enact modern physics to rupture the ordinary logics of spatio-temporal causality within their plots. Viewed together, the two plays suggest a gamification of nuclear warfare and, more generally, international relations. As the stakes had been elaborated throughout the Cold War, both plays turn from those to concerns with the players of these games and the effects not of winning or losing but of the game itself. Ultimately the limitations of knowledge experienced by the characters, limitations created by the disarrayed space-time accepted and created within the plays, work to alter both the decisions the characters can make and the judgments audiences might cast on those characters.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout the play, Dietz’s script treats YOU grammatically as the second person pronoun rather than as her personal name, and I follow Dietz’s convention.
- 2.
See page 111 of the script for similar text in the author’s note to be included with the programs for performances of this play. With minor differences, the language YOU are scripted to read aloud on stage matches what is to be printed in the program.
- 3.
This portion is also read onstage, with minor variations, late in Act I.
- 4.
Another character, Jesse, briefly appears to have been acknowledged by Luke as a part of NECKTIE, but this is ambiguous and, even if it is the case, does little to suggest that others beyond Luke’s acquaintance have assumed “ties to save the world.”
- 5.
“Pilot Lights ,” somewhat absurdly, has its initial counterattack directed at Denmark because its citizens had reportedly been throwing produce at a statue given by the USA (219).
- 6.
Manuel De Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines usefully considers the Cold War era efforts to short circuit the decision . Drawing on the distinction between the “advisory” role of weapons that suggest targets to their remote human operators and the “executive” capacity to act on that information, De Landa considers that the war games drawing on artificial intelligence “blur the distinction” between advice and execution (2). Where computers once merely assessed the effectiveness of the players’ strategic decisions within a game, nuclear war has given such games greater prominence and has led to changes in them. They substitute for “a real war” in attempting to give commanders “battle experience” (2).
Viewed along a continuum of “intelligent” or “agential” machines, the computer war gamers appear to be designed toward crossing the threshold, too, in bringing decision -making contexts down to determinations. That is, in making nuclear weaponry just another element in the arsenal, and in the effort to give the machines “some ‘common sense’ in order to eliminate irrelevant details from consideration,” war games straddle the divide between “games” and calculations (2).
- 7.
As De Landa explains, the war game the computers play have been programmed to treat war analogously to two prisoners, separately offered the same scenario: a standard sentence for both if each informs on the other; a reduced sentence for one and an extended sentence for the other if one informs on the other without this being reciprocated; or minimum sentences for both if neither informs (84).
- 8.
The nuclear deterrence policy known as MAD is sometimes expanded as Mutually Assured Destruction . This elides the intended deterrent effect of the policy. The point of MAD was not that together (mutually) the Soviets and Americans could destroy the planet but rather that both nations could be assured that both were in a position to respond in sufficient force to destroy Earth.
- 9.
Though Scarry focuses on the disproportion between the leader and the residents of a nuclear-armed nation, her larger point about the abuse inherent in such a disproportion is applicable in a limited way to Mac as a person with the power to deploy the weapons in ‘his’ silo.
- 10.
These are President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush. Dietz accurately quotes Reagan’s joke of August 11, 1984, offered up as a microphone test phrase prior to his weekly radio address. The remark he attributes to then-candidate Bush is a paraphrase.
- 11.
This passing allusion to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest suggests that play’s confusions in its two Ernests; Hapgood’s doublings are considerably more prolific and tangled. See Toby Silverman Zinman’s treatment of twinnings in “Blizintsy/Dvojniki Tiwns/Doubles Hapgood/Hapgood” and especially his treatment of Wilde’s play (316).
- 12.
Such omissions from the dialogue, and the often extensive information provided in the stage directions, make the play easier to read than to watch. Yet even in the directions the ideas are densely written and not always clear.
- 13.
The first half of the play’s epigraph comes from the final volume The Feynman Lectures on Physics, a three-volume publication of Feynman’s lectures for the introductory physics course. The second half comes from The Character of Physical Law, a series of lectures for a popular audience .
- 14.
Popular science writers have related this experiment and its quantum weirdness on many occasions. Kenneth W. Ford’s treatment, in The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone, and Brian Greene’s, in The Fabric of the Cosmos, are among the more accessible. Although The Feynman Lectures are rather difficult, his more popular lectures in The Character of Physical Law are fairly clear and engaging. J.C. Polkinghorne’s The Quantum World and Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality each rely heavily on mathematics for their presentations, both of which are nonetheless intended for a lay audience .
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Halpin, J.G. (2018). Playing Nuclear War: Learning Postmodern War from Modern Physics. In: Contemporary Physics Plays. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75148-1_2
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