missed those crucial, central AT&T nodes, would still reduce American military communications to a bunch of hissing, empty phones. “Our communications were so vulnerable,” Baran said, “that each missile base commander would face the dilemma of either doing nothing in the event of a physical attack, or taking action that would mean an all out irrevocable war.” You could, uneasily, picture the moment of decision: Some Colonel alone in his bomb-laden plane over Europe or deep in some cornfield missile silo wondering “Launch or not?”. This was a horrifying possibility. Baran began to ask: Was there some other way to send a counter-strike signal? There was a sense of life-saving preciousness in such a setting about connectivity itself. To hold it, manage it, protect and control it - in the face of the extreme pressures of a nuclear balance, such connection marked the difference between safety and catastrophe.
2.
You can, at the heart of many revolutions, find the warm hints of human psychology pressing out. This is the roiling, unscratchable instinct for change that marks a really revolutionary temperament - and that often is the only sort of personality that can imagine and then deliver a solution to impossible problems. Conservatives like things as they are, even if “as they are” is sometimes broken or dysfunctional or dangerous. Revolutionaries are different. They don’t seem to choose their role. They have a vision for how the world ought to be, a vibrating and instinctive picture of power, and driven by passion or anger or faith or some wild genius, they chase that vision relentlessly, even into madness. If they are lucky, however, they live in an age where their crazy hopes catch onto some larger human hunger. Khomeini worried that the Shah would never fall. Lenin was preparing to abandon revolutionary politics in 1916. Jobs was told the iPhone could never be built as he wished. Then, in an instant, revolution.
We might ask: What set Martin Luther on his revolutionary course to demand instant access to God? Luther would tell you that his first inspiration had come to him one night in the summer of 1505, while he was walking home in a thunderstorm, when a lightning bolt landed a foot or two away.!°° Luther had been struggling for years with an inner battle, with a tension between his faith and what it demanded of him. Then, when that lightning cracked free from the storm, a sensation of total terror was replaced by a new feeling. The nearness and power of God snapped past him in that moment. It clarified everything. He dropped his law studies the next day and within a year he was an Augustinian monk, preaching - often hundreds of sermons a year, ever angrier, ever clearer — about the closeness of God, the real, tangible, bolt-from-the-blue passage of faith to faith. He was totally, completely converted.
106 Luther would tell you: Albert Beutel “Luther’s Life” in Ed. Donald K. McKim, The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 4
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