I'd Rather Not Be Vaporized
Dementia or a coup?
Like everyone my generation and older, I grew up under the very real threat of nuclear annihilation. I remember the Atomic Clock being discussed on the news, when a committee of learned people would decide if we were further from nuclear armageddon or closer to it from week to week, sometimes day to day. I remember the movies and the books exploring how the death of humanity could all unfold.
Then one day, a Pope returned home to visit Poland. The wall in Berlin came down. Soviet tanks rolled in Moscow, but the Russian people decided no more. The world became safe from the potential for nuclear horror at any moment.
And how much better that was.
We were allowed, for decades, to forget that always present threat, that darkness covering everything during the Cold War.
But, I’ve been worrying about the nuclear threat once again.
These past few years the President of Russia has been talking a good deal about possible nuclear strikes against the West.1 His rhetoric continues to ratchet up.
While our governmental officials are downplaying these threats, that does not mean that the threats are without meaning. Certainly just the threat of nuclear attack is well outside the norm.
And the United States, in turn, has decided to crank up the heat in the final days of the Biden Presidency.2 Choosing to play a dangerous game of chicken with a nuclear armed power.
Most alarmingly, according to the New York Times, unnamed government officials:
“Several officials even suggested that Mr. Biden could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union. That would be an instant and enormous deterrent. But such a step would be complicated and have serious implications.”3
That such a thing is even being discussed within our government is deeply disturbing.
Have we forgotten that when the Soviet Union began installing nuclear weapons in Cuba we took that as seriously as an act of war against our homeland?4 For thirteen days the world lived on the very brink of armageddon.
How could our government officials possibly believe that Russia would not react in exactly the same way if we were to begin arming Ukraine with nuclear weapons? The very notion is insanity.
Extremely troubling to my mind is that the New York Times didn’t, and I presume couldn’t, name these “several officials.”
The fact is, we do not know who is currently in charge in the United States. We do not know who is escalating our war posture. We do not know who is moving us closer to nuclear war.
What we do know, what was clear to every thinking American in June of this year when President Biden debated President Trump, is that our current President is suffering from severely diminished mental capacity. Extreme partisans may try to hide from that uncomfortable truth, but it was clearly on display, for all to see. And of course that is why President Biden dropped out of the electoral race for reelection.
What we also know is that someone has the nuclear football. Someone, an individual, has the ability to launch a nuclear attack. Someone holds that godlike power.
If President Biden holds the ability to launch our nuclear weapons, then our collective fate, the fate of the world, is in the hands of a man suffering from severe cognitive decline.
If on the other hand President Biden does not now hold the ability to launch our nuclear weapons, a coup has occurred. The people elected to run this country have been silently supplanted by unelected individuals from the military-industrial complex.5
Either scenario is shockingly dangerous.
We can only hope, and indeed pray, that cool heads and rational minds prevail in the days and weeks to come.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/putin-nuclear-doctrine-changes-russia-ukraine-war-west-rcna180772
https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-lifts-ban-ukraine-using-us-arms-strike-inside-russia-2024-11-17/
https://archive.is/4G56L#selection-5157.0-5157.264
https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/cuban-missile-crisis
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address
I served my first four years in the Air Force at Fairchild AFB just outside of Spokane Washington. I was a member of the Security Police, charged with guarding three things: Alert B-52s loaded with nuclear weapons, KC-135 tankers also on alert to refuel those B-52s to make them able to strike any target in the world. Lastly the storage area where the bombs and missiles were kept and assembled before being loaded in the bombers.
During the Cold War, Fairchild had around 17 or so B-52s, five of which were on 24/7 alert status. When the US was at a heightened state of tension, those extra B-52s could also be brought online and ready to go as well. Each B-52 carried up to 20 Air Launched Cruise Missiles. Each ALCM had a nuclear yield of 170-200 kt. To put in perspective, the bombs dropped on Japan had a nuclear yield of about 10kt. Thus, FAFB could send up to 340 nuclear weapons to their targets. That is one base.
Standing 60ft away, watching the weapons loaders lifting such devices into the bombers is a very sobering experience. It’s hard to describe just what you feel, knowing that you were looking at a device capable of killing 100,000 people, it just sends chills.
We’ve gone so far away from those days. Most Americans don’t realize just what we’re dealing with, and even worse, they think this is all ok, as its all over some country far away that they can’t even point to it on a map.
And yes, the clowns are in charge of this circus.
I’d hate to think the current administration is purposely doing this to leave the country on the brink of nuclear apocalypse just to make trump look bad when he inherits this mess.
Like you I also grew up with the atomic clock. I was even more aware of a possible nuclear attack living within the first strike target zone of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. I also knew that an exchange of nuclear weapons could occur at any moment if one of the leaders of the atomic bomb group was having a bad day or temper tantrum, let alone the real risk of a leader with mental decline. When we’ve used words like “detente” or phrases like “mutually assured destruction”, shouldn’t we stop and re-evaluate our military strategies. When rhetoric and posturing, regardless of where it comes from, falls back to the use of such destructive weapons or to consider the use of “Battlefield nuclear weapons” is a leader who is unable to step back and take a pause. When the consequence of losing face, appearing weak and having to win at all costs are added to an added to any narrative, then we,as a humanity have lost, and maybe the only thing left to hope for is the comet.