| napalm
As We May Incinerate
“Ah. They destroyed all the napalm in 2001, you see,” writes Jill Walker. “What they dropped on Iraq wasn’t napalm, it was Mark 77. Well, yes, it does has the same effect but the chemical structure is slightly different. Really!”
Reading Jill’s entry—after I’d read the Sydney Morning Herald article to which she refers—and knowing that Jill is a hypertext theorist, I couldn’t help reflecting on the connection between hypertext and napalm, via Vannevar Bush, whose seminal essay As We May Think was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945.
[...]
In the ABC radio documentary, Tokyo’s Burning, B-29 pilot Chester Marshall recalled the experience of bombing Tokyo that night:
You know, you didn’t know whether you were killing a lot of women and children or what. But I do know one thing, you could at 5,000 feet you could smell the flesh burning. I couldn’t eat anything for two or three days. You know it was nauseating, really. We just said “What is that I smell?” And it’s a kind of a sweet smell, and somebody said, “Well that’s flesh burning, had to be.”
As for Vannevar Bush, “the father of hypertext,” it seems he never forgot either napalm or Tokyo. In his biography of Bush, G. Pascal Zachary writes that Merle Tuve, whose team developed the proximity fuze under Bush’s direction, believed
that Bush suffered from war guilt. Not from the atomic bomb, but from his role in aiding the ghastly firebomb raids against Japan. “For years after the war Van Bush would wake up screaming in the night because… he burned Tokyo,” Tuve later recalled. “The proximity fuze didn’t bother him badly… even the atomic bomb didn’t bother him as much as jellied gasoline [napalm].”
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