Loose Nuke Talk
The world has become obsessed with nuclear weapons. Is there a danger in daily normalizing the abnormal and casually thinking the unthinkable?
By Victor Davis Hanson
April 13, 2022
Americans, like the planet’s other 7.5 billion people, are not prone to talk or think much about nuclear weapons.
Of course, some of us are old enough to remember how “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD, was supposed to ensure the general peace.
Some recall the eerie Cold War-era nuclear bomb movies like “Dr. Strangelove” or “Fail Safe” or more recent postnuclear armageddon films like “The Book of Eli.”
Millions have grown up referring to the scary “doomsday clock” of atomic scientists that usually ticks closer to a midnight nuclear holocaust in times of crisis.
So the planet is not naïve about the dangers of its 13,000 to 15,000 nuclear weapons. In 1961, the Soviet Union terrified the world when it exploded history’s greatest nuke—the 50 megaton “Tsar Bomba.”
The Cuban Missile Crisis a year later brought the United States and the Soviet Union closer to a nuclear exchange than at any time since.
In 1983, Ronald Reagan countered the Soviet nuclear-tipped SS-20 ballistic missiles aimed at Europe by stationing American Pershing II missiles in Germany.
In response, for a few months Hollywood and the media began talking about a “nuclear winter” to follow the supposedly reckless war talk of the American cowboy president. But what followed was a series of superpower missile negotiations that lowered the tensions of the waning Cold War.
more
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/13/loose-nuke-talk/
