Here we are again
When I was a young lad, in my catholic
school, I noticed that there were these strange blue and yellow signs posted
around the gymnasium and cafeteria. Being naturally curious, I went home and
asked my mother what exactly a “fallout shelter” was. My mother then dutifully
explained their purpose, and why in the case of an actual nuclear attack they
wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. It may have been a harsh lesson for an
8 year old boy, but it’s one that needed to be taught. One should not cover up the horror of the possibility
of nuclear annihilation.
It’s one of the things of growing up
a child of the ‘70s and ‘80s, that the possibility of nuclear war hung around
like an ever present stench. Until about 1989, the fear that any moment that the
world could disappear in a a blinding flash of light was the subtext of almost
the first half of my life. Then the
world appeared to get sane, and to wake from history as the song goes. But here
we are again now, the stench is back stronger than ever.
The thing is, it’s not just North
Korea we should be concerned with, it’s the whole god system of enemies, this
nuclear club held apart by the concept
of MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction.
It’s India and Pakistan, it’s
China, and Russia, all of them. I knew this man once who worked for DARPA, and
had wargamed various scenarios in which the result was the same, that one spark
would set everything off. Yet with this
knowledge we sit here rattling sabers, it’s madness.
A few months ago, when this idiocy first
started, my daughter wanted to know what the big deal was with North Korea
launching missiles. It was a conversation that I had hoped to avoid, but she
needed to know. So my wife and I, sat her down and taught her the same terrible
lesson I had learned so many years before. We showed test footage from Alamogordo and the
Bikini Atoll. After we were finished, my
daughter wanted to know why anyone would do such a thing, and you know, I’ve
been asking myself that for 34 years.
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