Notional Missile Defence

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Credits

The hippopotamus image is an engraving from the Proceedings of the Royal Society, ca. 1860. So it's out of copyright, unless the engraver was 20 and lived to 90.

The hippopotamus story comes from a collection of suggestions for how Star Wars Senior might best be implemented. It was made in 1985 or '86 - three or four years before the Web was invented - so once it was lost it stayed lost. From memory, it was compiled by grad students at a Californian institution. Again from memory, one proposal was to:

keep herds of hippos in constant readiness, fed exclusively on baked beans and each tethered to a stout stake. Judicious application of axes to the tethers and Zippos to the hippos in the event of missile attack should produce a rapidly ascending and almost impenetrable barrier.

If you have a copy, or especially if you worked on or contributed to it, please get in touch.

The rocket is a German V-2/A4 rocket being fired at the White Sands range in New Mexico in 1945 or '46. Being a US government image, it's public domain. Of course the V-2 was the grand-daddy of all rocketry. The 'merkins, the russkies and the brits couldn't wait to get some home from the Mittelbau factory under the Harz mountains, where they were built by slave labour from the Dora camp, and spark them up. Wernher von Braun was another famous US import of the time.

The dark moods which inspired some of this may be attributed to re-readings of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. If you've read it, you'll understand. If not: among many other things it's a history of the V-2 and of the death-fetish of the last half of the 20th century. Which we're still in, it seems.