Children of the atom, all grown up

"The folly of winning a nuclear exchange is as foolhardy as thinking that hiding under your school desk would spare you. It was and still is all smoke and mirrors."

I have recently noticed something interesting going on with You Tube. There seems to be a proliferation of "shorts" about what life would be like in the last few minutes before the bombs hit. Bombs hitting? What bombs? The big ones. The nukes. In most of these "shorts" the sirens are going off, the TV has emergency notifications going on, and people are running around, dazed and confused. Then in most of them, it ends with a blinding light and then nothing.

The "children of the atom", the ones who went to school during the "duck and cover" era, are all now all grown up. Most are grandparents; some are no longer with us. True confessions? I was part of that era. I remember the "duck and cover" days. Many of our fathers went to war in Europe or the Pacific to fight for peace. Kind of like World War One was going to be the war to end all wars. So was World War II. Didn't last long. World War III, fought between NATO and the Soviet Union, seemed to be looming right over the horizon. Only this war will be played with nukes. It will be for keeps.

The "duck and cover" kids, sometimes referred to as the "children of the atom", really thought those nuclear horrors we had growing up, ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. Turns out we were foolish to think that. Why? Russia, coming out of the Soviet Union, still had thousands of nukes. Plus, the "nuclear genie" was out of the bottle. All of a sudden you get countries like China, North Korea and Pakistan who also have nukes. Soon we can add Iran to that list. 

Now we are in a new era. One with hydrogen bombs, many times more powerful than atomic bombs. And we have super missiles to deliver them. Russia is reported to have an "unstoppable" hypersonic missile which can go 20 times the speed of sound. If or when the sirens ever go off, and if a missile is incoming, we will all have just a few minutes between notification and impact. And then the blinding light, and then nothing.

How did we get here? How did we go from MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) to this madness? I think it all started with having a nuke meant deterrence, to having nukes meant you could win a war. Here is a fact which has not changed over all these decades. A nuclear war will yield no winners. Just losers. A poisoned planet, where all will starve. A nuclear winter, where many will freeze.

The folly of winning a nuclear exchange is as foolhardy as thinking that hiding under your school desk would spare you. It was and still is all smoke and mirrors. Right now, we have a madman in Russia, home to the world's largest stockpile of nukes, threatening us almost daily now with nuclear war. One itchy finger on a sensitive trigger, and our final war could start. Intentionally or unintentionally, our final war could start and be the end of everything for everyone forever more. Sorry about the somber note, but it had to be said.