Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals

For two weeks, I listened to men engage in dispassionate discussion of nuclear war. I found myself aghast, but morbidly fascinated-not by nuclear weaponry, or by images of nuclear destruction, but by the extraordinary abstraction and removal from what I knew as reality that characterized the professional discourse. I became obsessed by the question, How can they think this way? At the end of the summer program, when I was offered the opportunity to stay on at the university’s center on defense technology and arms control (hereafter known as “the Center "), I jumped at the chance to find out how they could think “this " way.