Interaction as an aesthetic event

Lev Manovich

Media theorist Lev Manovich is a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San
Diego, and a Director of The Lab for Cultural Analysis at the California Institute for Telecommunications
and Information Technology. He's author of Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database
(MIT Press 2005), and The Language of New Media (MIT Press 2001) which was hailed
as "the most suggestive and broad-ranging media history since McLuhan". Currently he is
completing his new book Info-aesthetics. In receiver, Manovich takes a look at the playful
user interaction in recent cell phone models and other personal information technology.
http://www.manovich.net/
Manovich's site
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=8830&ttype=2

The Language of New Media

Have you realized that the phone that you own – assuming it is a model that came
out in the last couple of years – constantly plays games with you? It seduces you
with its animated icons and sounds, the shape and surface finishes, the feel of its
buttons and every other detail of its material and media definitions. If you can
recall the very first mobile phone you owned – let’s say at the end of the 1990s or
maybe even in the first years of this decade – the difference in design is striking.
The change in the design of mobile phones is just one example of a larger trend
which I call "aesthetization of information tools". During the 1990s, interacting with
information via computers and computer-based devices gradually entered people's
lives outside of work. Because of its inherent multifunctionality and expandability,
a computer and other devices built on top of it such as a mobile phone came to be
used for all kinds of non-work activities: entertainment, culture, social life, communication
with others.
As these devices – mobile phones, laptops, PDAs, media players, digital cameras,
portable game stations – came to function as consumer objects to be used in all
areas of people's lives, their aesthetics were altered accordingly. The associations
with work and office culture and the emphasis on efficiency and functionality came
to be replaced by new references and criteria. These included being friendly, playful,
pleasurable, aesthetically pleasing, expressive, fashionable, signifying cultural
identity, and designed for emotional satisfaction. Accordingly, the modernist design
formula "form follows function" came to be replaced by new formulas such as "form
follows emotion".

Something else has happened in this process. Until this decade the design of user
interfaces was often ruled by the idea that the interface should be invisible. In fact,
the really successful interface was supposed to be the one that the user did not
notice. This paradigm made sense until the middle of the 1990s – that is, during
the period when, outside of work, people used information devices on a limited
basis. But what happens when the quantity of these interactions greatly increases
and information devices become intimate companions of people's lives? The more
you use a mobile phone, a computer, a media player or another personal information
device, the more you "interact with an interface" itself.
Regardless of whether the designers have noticed this consciously or not, today the
design of user interaction reflects this new reality. The designers no longer try to
hide the interfaces. Instead, the interaction is treated as an event, as opposed to
"non-event", as in the previous "invisible interface" paradigm. Put differently, using
personal information devices is now conceived as a carefully orchestrated experience,
rather than just a means to an end. The interaction explicitly calls attention
to itself. The interface engages the user in a kind of game. The user is asked to
devote significant emotional, perceptual and cognitive resources to the very act of
operating the device.
When does this new paradigm appear? Over the last few years, journalists and technology
observers have noted how designs of personal information technology came
to emphasize aesthetics. (In retrospect, the key event which started this trend was
the introduction of colorful iMACs in 1998.) But this is only a part of the story. Since
industrial design has been central to modern consumer society for many decades, it
enjoys recognition from press and cultural institutions. In contrast, because the fields
of interface design and interaction design are quite young, so far they have been below
the radar of public attention. Therefore, while journalists have noted how recent
designs employ expressive shapes, make use of transparency and translucency,
adopt interesting material finishes, and so on, they have not explicitly recognized
that similar aesthetization affected another dimension of technological products
– their interfaces.

http://www.designmuseum.org/digital/jonathan-ive-on-apple
Jonathan Ive on Apple

Today a typical information device such as a mobile phone has two kinds of interface.
One is a physical interface such as buttons and the phone cover. The second
is a media interface: graphical icons, menus, and sounds. The new paradigm that
treats interaction as an aesthetic and meaningful experience applies equally to both
types of interface.

The most dramatic example of the historical shift in how interfaces are understood
is the difference in user interface design between the successive generations of the
operating system (OS) used in Apple computers – OS 9 and OS X. Released in October
of 1999, OS 9 was the last version of Mac OS still based on the original system which
came with the first Macintosh in 1984. Its look and feel – the strict geometry of
horizontal and vertical lines, the similarly restrictive palette of grays and white,
simple and business-like icons – speaks of modernist design and "form follows
function" ideology. It fits with gray suites, office buildings in International Style,
and the whole twentieth century office culture.
The next version of the operating system introduced in 2001 - OS X - was a radical
departure. Its new user interface was called Aqua. Aqua's icons, buttons, windows,
cursor and other interface elements were colorful and three-dimensional. They used
shadows and transparency. The programs animated when started. The icons in Dock
playfully increased in size as the user moved a cursor over them. And if in OS 9
default desktop backgrounds were flat monochrome, the backgrounds which came
with Aqua were visually much more complex, more colorful, and assertive – drawing
attention to themselves rather than trying to be invisible.
In OS X, the interaction with the universal information processing machine of our
time – the personal computer – was redefined as an explicitly aesthetic experience.
This aesthetic experience became as important as the functionality (in technical
terms, "usability"). The word aesthetics is commonly associated with beauty, but
this is not the only meaning which is relevant here. Under OS X, user interface was
"aesthetized" in the sense that it was now to explicitly appeal to and stimulate senses -
rather than just users' cognitive processes.
The transformation of Apple from a company making hardware and software to a
world leader in consumer product design – think of all the design awards won by
iMACs, Powerbooks, iPods and other Apple products – is itself the most clear example
of what I call aesthetization of information tools. It is relevant here to recall another
classical meaning of aesthetics: "the coordination of all parts and details of an
artwork or design" – lines, forms, colors, textures, materials, movements, sounds.
(I talk about classical aesthetics because twentieth century art has often aimed at
opposite effects – shock, collision, and establishment of meaning and aesthetic experience
through montage rather than unification of parts.) The critical and commercial
success of Apple products and the truly fanatical feelings they evoke in many
people to a large extent relate to the degree of this integration which until now has
not been seen in commercial products in this price range. In each new product or
version, the details are refined until they all work together to create a rich, smooth,
and consistent sensorial whole. This also applies to the way hardware and software
work together. As an example, think of the coordination between the circular movement
of the user's finger on the track wheel of the original iPod and the corresponding
horizontal movement of menus on the screen (which borrows from OS X column view.)
At the beginning of the 2000s other personal technology companies gradually began
to follow Apple in putting more and more emphasis on the design of their products
across all price categories. Sony started using the "Sony Style" phrase for its catalogs,
website, and Sony stores, and its VAIO laptops brought high-level industrial design
to the category of Windows laptops. In 2004 Nokia introduced its first line of "fashion
phones" declaring that personal technology can be "an object of desire". (Two years
later this became true for the whole mobile phone market). By investing in industrial
designs of its consumer products, Samsung was able to evolve from being an unknown
supplier to a top world brand. Even the companies whose information products
were almost exclusively used by professionals and business users started to compete
in the design of their products. For instance, the new 2006 version of the
BlackBerry smart phone popular with business people and professionals was introduced
with this slogan: "BlackBerry Pearl – Small, Smart, and Stylish".
Since mobile technology products such as mobile phones are made by a variety of
companies, each designing its own interface (at least until now), at any given moment
in time we can find a variety of interface designs. However, if we look at the evolution
of media user interfaces in mobile phones from the late 1990s until now (2006), in
general it proceeded along the following lines. First, user interfaces were changed
from black and white to color. Next, the menu items were changed to colorful icons
which, depending on what a company has decided would appeal best to people buying
a particular product, were designed as cute, or cartoonish, or elegant, etc. Still
later, animation was added throughout the whole cell phone interface, with icons
and menu items sliding, rotating, enlarging, and doing other more complex motions
when activated. (Thus, when in 2006 the Samsung USA website introduced the company's
mobile offerings with the heading "Never a Dull Moment", this could refer
equally to a phone's media capabilities and the very act of interacting with it.) In
parallel to this gradual movement from monochrome text-only UI to color, icons,
and animation and Flash-based interfaces (as in LG Chocolate), mobiles were also
made progressively more customizable – which simultaneously allows people to
change phones to reflect their aesthetic preferences and patterns of use, and also
supports a whole commercial market for customization elements such as wallpapers,
ringtones, and themes.

In retrospect we can see that aesthetization (or perhaps, "theatrisation") of the user
interfaces of laptops, mobile phones, cameras and other mobile technology which
took place between approximately 2001 and 2005 was conceptually prepared in previous
decades. Based on work done in the 1980s, computer designer and theorist
Brenda Laurel published a ground-breaking book Computers as Theatre in 1991.
She called interface an expressive form and compared it with a theatrical performance.
Using Aristotle's Poetics as her model, she suggested that interaction should lead to
"pleasurable enjoyment".
The notion of interaction as theatre brings an additional meaning to the idea that a
mobile phone engages its user in a kind of game or play which I put forward at the
beginning. In suggesting this I was thinking of how the buttons on LG Chocolate suddenly
appear in glowing red when you switch the phone on; or how when you select
some option on the same phone it confirms your selection by replacing the current
screen with a whole new graphic screen; or how pressing the cover of Motorola
PEBBLE opens the phone in an unexpected and unique way. In other words, I was referring
to a variety of ways in which the current generation of mobiles responds to
user actions in a surprising and often seemingly exaggerated manner. (This applies
to both physical interfaces and media interfaces). The notion of interaction as theatre
makes us notice another dimension of this play-like behavior. As I will describe
in more detail below using the example of switching on an LG Chocolate mobile, various
sensorial responses which a mobile generates in following our actions are often
not single events but rather sequences of effects. As in a traditional theatre play,
these sequences unfold in time. Various sensorial effects play on each other, and it
is their contrast as well as the differences between the senses being addressed –
touch, vision, hearing – which together add up to a complex dramatic experience.
In 1991, when Laurel published her book, the use of technology products was still
limited to particular professions but as the designers of iMAC have clearly recognized,
at the end of the decade these products were becoming mainstream items of
the consumer economy. And this economy as a whole was undergoing a fundamental
change. In their 1989 book Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business
a Stage, Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore argued that the consumer economy was
entering a new stage where the key to successful business was delivering experiences.
According to the authors, this new stage followed previous stages centered
on goods themselves and later on services. The authors stated that to be successful
today, a company "must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience". If Laurel
evoked theatre as a way of thinking about the particular case of human-computer
interaction, the authors of Experience Economy suggested that it can be a metaphor
for understanding the interaction between consumers and products in the new
economy in general.

The aesthetization (my preferred term) of hardware design and user interfaces of
information products which took place throughout the industry in the following decade
fits very well with the idea of the "experience economy". Like any other interaction,
interaction with information devices became a "designed experience". In fact, we
can say that the three stages in the development of user interfaces of computers –
command line interfaces, classical GUI of the 1970s to the 1990s, and the new sensual
and entertaining interfaces of the post OS X era – can be correlated to the three
stages of the consumer economy as a whole: goods, services, and experiences.
Command line interfaces "deliver the goods", that is, they focus on pure functionality
and utility; GUI adds "service" to interfaces; and at the next stage, interfaces
become "experiences".

http://www.nokiausa.com/phones/fashion/
Nokia

The concept of the experience economy works particularly well to explain how the
physical interaction with technological objects - as opposed to their physical forms and
screen interfaces only - was turned into the stage for delivering rich sensorial and
often seductive experiences. For instance, early mobile phones did not have any
covers at all. The screen and the key were always there and they were always visible.
By the middle of the 2000s, the simple acts of opening a mobile phone or pressing
its buttons were turned into real micro-plays: very short narratives complete with
visual, tactile, and three-dimensional effects. In the short history of mobile phones
examples of particular models whose commercial and critical popularity can to a significant
degree be attributed to the innovative sensorial narratives of interaction with
them are the Motorola RAZR V3 (2004) and LG Chocolate (2006).

http://www.mobile-review.com/review/motorola-v6-en.shtml
On Motorola's Pebble
http://www.mobiledia.com/reviews/lg/chocolate/page1.html
On LG's Chocolate

LG Chocolate sold over one million units in only eight weeks following its introduction.
This phone offers (from a 2006 point of view) a unique interactive narrative
which can be called a real Gesamtkunstwerk – directly engaging the three senses of
sight, hearing and touch, and evoking the fourth sense of taste through the phone's
name and color. When the phone is closed and off, it appears as a solid monochrome
shape with its display and touchpad completely invisible. It is a mysterious Thing.
When you switch the phone on, the whole multimedia drama unfolds. The Thing
gradually awakens. Suddenly, previously invisible buttons appear in a glowing red
color. The screen lights up and it begins to play an animation. As the short animation
unfolds towards its finale, the phone suddenly vibrates at exactly the same time
as the LG logo comes onto the screen.
Given that the process of aesthetization of information tools started less than a decade
ago, I am sure that what we have seen so far are just initial shy steps. More wild
effects and experiences which we cannot even imagine today await us in the future.
But for now, I have to admit that I am so mesmerized by the simple act of switching
on my LG Chocolate, I keep switching the phone off and on again much more
often than is "functionally" necessary.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: manovich.lev@gmail.com

Pigs in Cyberspace!

FIGHTING THE FRONT

I'm pretty sure I know what Dr. King would think of a protest against an anti-immigrant political party, but if you asked me what he'd say after the thing devolved into a virtual conflagaration of mini-guns, cursing Frenchmen, and exploding pigs, well, there I'm somewhat at a loss.

The first night I arrived at the protest against the Second Life headquarters of Front National, the far right French political party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, it was ringed on all sides by protesters with signs to wave and statements to distribute. By the second night I came (this was late last week), the conflict had become more literal, for many Residents had armed themselves. Multi-colored explosions and constant gunfire shredded the air of Porcupine, a shopping island which FN had inexplicably picked for the site of their virtual world HQ, in December.

The server lag from so many people throwing up so much gunfire slows the battle to a slow motion firefight, but I manage to wade up to TonTonCarton Yue, who is strafing the FN building with a chaingun usually associated with an AC-130 gunship, than a political protest.

"Can I ask," I begin, "why are you shooting?"
"Because I hate Front National," Yue tells me simply.
"If you use violence, doesn't that reduce you to their level?"
"I don't know," Yue answers, after awhile. "I don't care. FN equals violence."

And having offered that axiom, he returns his aim to the enemy, and unleashes another barrage.

It didn't begin like this. After Front National took root, at least two groups, antiFN and SL Left Unity, rose to oppose them. They had placards and T-shirts, and billboards on the land of sympathetic neighbors, all making plain that FN's arrival in Second Life was distinctly unwelcome. For their part, Front National members-- mostly muscular young men dressed in white T-shirts with the FN logo-- stood inside their headquarters, impassively watching the outrage build outside.

An unneighborly message from the nearby Autistic Liberation Front

"This nationalist idea that Front National is advocating is something that has spread all over Europa like a virus," Ichi Jaehun tells me. "It's [as if] the history of the 20th century has already been forgotten. It is time to say enough!"

Ichi Jaehun rallies the protest

Her concern is not alarmist. On a US spectrum, Front National is perhaps one or two notches to the right of Pat Buchanan, but unlike Buchanan (who garnered just half of one percent in the 2000 Presidential election), Le Pen's political base is far more substantial.

Diverse avatar protesters gather outside FN headquarters

In France's 2002 election, Le Pen forced a runoff against President Jacques Chirac, and with his belligerent nationalism and calls to forcibly exile non-European immigrants from the country, garnered a popular vote of 18%. (An 18%, it's worth noting, who were evidently unconcerned or agreeable to Le Pen's grotesque dismissal of Nazi gas chambers as a mere "detail of history".)

Another Presidential election looms this June, and the fear is recent immigrant riots in Paris and other woes will bring more French to the flame-shaped banner of Front National. When they arrived in-world, an official press release boasted that FN was "the first political party in France and in Europe to open an official and permanent representation in Second Life"-- an evident move to position themselves as a technologically savvy, forward-thinking party of a new Europe. (Their version of Europe, that is.)

FN's new neighbor, the SLLU

But the SL Left Unity group had press releases of their own. "We have acquired land next to the FN office," one announced, "and will be manning a protest there until FN go or are ejected. Wherever fascists are we will ensure they get no peace to corrupt and lie to decent people."

The announcement went on: "The whole idea of a 'race hate' group is in direct violation of Linden Lab's own Terms of Service, and if the rules are being read to say they aren’t in violation, then Lindens need to look at the rules again." (This is an apparent reference, by the way, not to the TOS, but Linden's Community Standards, which forbid "use of derogatory or demeaning language or images in reference to another Resident's race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation". But while Front National may have run counter to those standards in the real world, it's uncertain if their SL chapter ever has.)

Besides such organized oppostion, at least some resistance was impromptu.

"I find the FN in type 'francais' in the Search mode and I was revolting by this," a French Resident named Zok Greene tells me in fractured but eager English, explaining why he'd joined the protest. "And more because it's the presidential election in France in Juin and Le Pen was 'presenté'... and why?!! You can't try to get vote like this, it's a game!"

Thomas the Tank Engine's Holographic Attack

It's unclear when the shooting started, or who fired the first shot (several witnesses claim FN security forces assaulted them with "push guns", weapons capable of flinging a Resident across the island like a ragdoll), but in the final days of last week, at least, the assault raged from both sides. It's also unclear if the anti-FN protest groups were involved in the escalating violence-- Officers with both antiFn and SLLU haven't replied to my Instant Message-- though by personal observation, at least a few members seemed to be. Since Porcupine is not a damage-enabled area, weapons there have about as much stopping power as pointing one's finger at the computer screen and saying Bang Bang. But get enough projectiles flying, and server lag is bound to ground anyone's use of the area to a halt. (Or in my case, cause the Second Life viewer to crash.)

And so it raged, a ponderous and dreamlike conflict of machine guns, sirens, police cars, "rez cages" (which can trap an unsuspecting avatar), explosions, and flickering holograms of marijuana leaves and kids' TV characters, and more. By California time, the battles often culminated at 2am, 3am, and even later into the small hours of the American clock, when Residents in Europe are most active. So amid the exchange of salvos, the chat log was choked over with pro and anti-Le Pen curses, most in French. And when the lag was not too overwhelming to stream audio, the whole fracas was accompanied by bursts of European techno.

A pig munition, primed to blow

One enterprising insurrectionist created a pig grenade, fixed it to a flying saucer, and sent several whirling into Front National headquarters, where they'd explode in a starburst of porcine shrapnel. A few native English speakers joined the fray, though at least one missed the point in either direction, unhelpfully shouting "The French stink! Get out of Second Life!" and the like amid the conflict.

And so, while America slept, the battle against extremism raged on thus in Europe.

By last weekend, whole sections of the FN office were gone, apparently lost to lag or sabotage, their banners and posters floating in mid-air. And FN members seemed notably absent, too. Frenchman Zok Greene pronounced himself satisfied with that turn of events.

"Would it have been better to debate their ideas or even just ignore them?" I ask him. "Now they can claim they were 'suppressed' and their free speech was infringed."

"No," Zok insists. "With this persons we can't debate or ignored. We can't because it's not acceptable."

By today, the headquarters of Front National has entirely disappeared from Porcupine; in its place, a tiny casino has sprung up overnight, and is already receiving customers.

In honor of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a special sun is made to arc across the grid of Second Life today. If you look close enough, you'll see it's inset with the face of the man who was so untimely cut down, when far too much of his work remained. In his country, the world beyond, and, perhaps, in worlds he never could have imagined.

And in this way, Dr. King literally shines down on an empty field, where once the forces of division made a bid to establish themselves. But I wonder what he'd make of the subsequent reaction, from high-minded words and protest, to decidedly violent uncivil disobedience. (Like intolerance, most physical attacks are also prohibited by Second Life's Community Standards.)

As for Front National, though they're gone from the land of Porcupine, they claim to be unphased.

"They're a bunch of losers," FN Officer Wolfram Hayek tells me grinning, when I ask about the protesters. "We're gonna tighten security and come back."

Monday, January 15, 2007

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

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News Analysis: Chirac says what many have been thinking

By Elaine Sciolino

Friday, February 2007

PARIS

When President Jacques Chirac said this week that he was not overly worried if Iran had a nuclear weapon or two, he stated clearly what some arms control experts have been saying for some time: that the world may have to learn live with a nuclear Iran.

Chirac quickly retracted his remarks, and the Élysée Palace reaffirmed France's commitment to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. But in veering from the prepared script and letting the veil of caution fall, he was sparking discussion of whether containment of a nuclear Iran is less bad than other options — and certainly preferable to war.

"Jacques Chirac said things that many experts are saying around the world, even in the United States; that is to say, that a country that possesses the bomb does not use it and automatically enters the system of deterrence and doesn't take absurd risks," Hubert Vedrine, the French foreign minister from 1997 to 2002, said Friday on LCI television.

The logic of the argument goes this way: Iran is manufacturing enriched uranium, which can be used for making electricity or nuclear weapons. If Iran masters that process for military purposes, it may be able to build a bomb or two. The only realistic goal is to delay the process as long as possible. But even if Iran has the bomb, the classic doctrine of nuclear deterrence that restrained nuclear powers during the Cold War will prevent it from ever using it, according to this argument.

"There is a growing realization that the international community is failing to stop Iran from acquiring a uranium enrichment capability," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "The U.S. government wouldn't accept it, but it's becoming a fait accompli. Can the next step — a nuclear weapon — be prevented? Chirac skipped over that question and cut to the chase in saying that, 'We can live with a nuclear- armed Iran.'"

The Bush administration rejects the idea of an Iranian bomb and has made stopping it the object of an increasingly aggressive policy. Among the Europeans, however, there is an overwhelming consensus that the American-led war in Iraq has been an unmitigated failure and that Washington's Iran strategy could end in an even more destabilizing military confrontation.

It was Chirac who led Europe's opposition to the invasion of Iraq, and in a told-you-so speech last month he said that his predictions that the war would spread more chaos, regional instability and terrorism had come true.

In his remarks this week, he could have been speaking for most of Europe when he said that what he called "the Iraq affair" has "shifted red lines."

Even inside the Bush administration, some officials have acknowledged over the past year that Iran eventually may have a nuclear weapon or at least the technology and components to assemble one quickly. Outside of government, the view that the world might have to coexist with a nuclear Iran was laid out in a study by two U.S.-government-financed scholars at the National Defense University in 2005.

"Can the United States live with a nuclear-armed Iran?" the report asked. "Despite its rhetoric, it may have no choice." The report added that the costs of rolling back Tehran's nuclear program "may be higher than the costs of deterring and containing a nuclear Iran."

In a sense, Chirac was trying to make just that point when he said in interviews to three publications, including the International Herald Tribune, that a bomb would do Iran little good because it would never be able to use it without facing swift retaliation.

He also made clear that Tehran must not be completely humiliated and isolated, but encouraged to become a positive regional player. "How can we impose sufficiently strong constraints on Iran?" he asked in the Monday interview. Calling the Islamic Republic "a bit fragile," he said, "One has to know what Iran can withstand or not."

The following day, he stressed the importance of having a "dialogue" with Tehran, which he said had an important role to play to stabilize the region.

What was lost in the furor over Chirac's remarks was his clear statement that Iran was secretly trying to become a nuclear power. "Iran wants, through the enrichment of uranium, to make a bomb," he said. In the past several years, Chirac has tried to navigate between the United States on one side and Iran on the other. It was France, in the months after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, that conceived a diplomatic initiative joined by Britain and Germany in which Iran would freeze its uranium enrichment activities in exchange for political, economic and technological incentives.

The Europeans felt that the United States was moving closer to an open confrontation with Iran that looked too much like the prelude to the Iraq invasion. But the initiative failed, even after the United States, Russia and China joined in. Sanctions, even in the unlikely eventuality that they can be toughened substantially, are not likely to be tough enough to change Iran's behavior.

As for the Islamic Republic, it says its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes and that charges it is developing a nuclear weapon are lies. It views UN sanctions to punish it for enriching uranium as unjust and a violation of its rights as a signatory to the nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty. It justifies its presence in Shiite-controlled Iraq as necessary to preserve its own national security interests and protect itself should that nations dissolve into chaos.

On Thursday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Iran was becoming a "superpower" and that the UN sanctions would not deter it from pursuing its nuclear program. Indeed, the Iranians are well aware that possession of the bomb would transform them immediately into the dominant power in the Middle East.

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