Our ongoing love affair with the threat of nuclear war...

[PeaceWave]

I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War and wasn't part of the generation for whom Duck and Cover was a thing, the bizarre commercialized prescribed response for an existential threat. That said, I was - as a child - vaguely aware of the implications should someone decide to test the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). "What would we do if?" was a question that occasionally popped up over the olive green formica kitchen table in those days, to which the answer seemed to be something along the lines of "Pack up the wood paneled station wagon and drive East." Such discussions quickly went away when the Berlin Wall came down, a once threatening Soviet bear dying a far away death. "If a bear dies in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" These thoughts too went away for several years - until North Korea joined the nuclear party, a boor crashing what until that time had been a cocktail party, admission to which was generally expected if not totally accepted. With the turn of the millennium, the issue has arisen again in context to Iran's nuclear ambitions. And so, we find ourselves again with thoughts of Duck and Cover, MAD, the wood paneled station wagon, the Soviet bear and uninvited guests attempting to crash the cocktail party, wholly unaware that the true price of admission is measured not in dollars spent on research and development but in souls lost.

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[Blue Owl]

1. The GOP can't exist without a healthy dose of FEAR! FEAR! FEAR!

[no_hypocrisy]

2. ABC's broadcast of "The Day After" did it for me.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After

[La Coliniere]

3. Our ongoing affair with the utterly unspeakable horror

of nuclear annihilation that we have lived under since the 1950s was enough to make me think long and hard about bringing up children in such a horrific reality. I’m a baby boomer who grew up during the Cold War and was repeatedly terrorized with the many in school duck and cover drills we seemed to have weekly back in the late 50s. I recall quite vividly the terrifying nightmares I had as a child in regards to a nuclear attack. The great film director Stanley Kubrick believed than our embrace of the nuclear/hydrogen bomb and our willingness to live under the constant threat of total destruction was proof enough that human beings were an inherently insane species, particularly Americans (hence his move London in 1962). Now we subject our children to active shooter drills; I can’t dispute Kubrick’s opinion.

[PeaceWave]

4. And, just like that, here we go.