DUGWAY sets the world, the world half a world away, on fire ...

Michael Marshall

Dugway, Utah is in the American West -- one of the last strongholds of American Isolationism in late 1941 -- a part of the world still convinced it was a "fire-proof house, far from inflammable materials."

But a short year and a half later in 1943, Dugway (unlike the Inkspots) "was trying to set the world on fire" -- at least the German and Japanese parts of it anyway.

The firebombs and firebombing techniques developed there killed about a million people during WWII and God only knows how many millions since.

By the 1950s, Utah was home to HILL AFB   and hence the new home of the major Air Force base maintaining America's missile defenses.

 Naturally, the Soviets returned the possibility of 'death by fire' to Utah, in spades.

 Rest assured that both AFB Hill and Chemical and Germ Warfare Proving Grounds Dungay were well up there on their secondary nuclear target list, in the event that the Cold War got hot.

Far from being  isolated and insulated, Utah was now well in the crosshairs.

Nuclear War, that poisoned fruit of WWII and MOdernity, means that we can all 'die together' around global commensality's COmmon table.

Small world innit ?

Funny old world innit ?