The firebombing of Korea wasn’t enough for Pat Partridge. He also wanted to destroy North Korea’s rice supplies. In his microfilmed diary, which I got (unredacted) from the Air Force Historical Research Agency, Partridge observes, on March 3, 1951, that a certain Dr. Cohen, a bomb-damage statistician, is visiting. (I think Partridge is talking about A. Clifford Cohen, a mathematician from the University of Georgia, who spent some months with the Fifth Air Force in 1951.) “I took advantage of his presence to pitch him a problem regarding the destruction of rice supplies,” Partridge writes. The North Korean rice supply was stacked in straw bags, visible from the air. “It seems to me that there should be some way of insuring that this can be made inedible:

Nicholson Baker, Baseless- My Search for Sec…, loc. 545