An old anxiety returns

[talkswithwind]

The Useful Idiot's tweets about the US nuclear arsenal have been triggering many friends old Cold War anxieties. Let's talk about that.

The first decade I lived through fully was the 1980's. This was the era of Star Wars / SDI, and Reagan defense spending as a way to attack the Soviets in their economy. We had stopped duck-and-cover drills as pointless, but I still knew where my local fallout shelter was.

Not that there was a point. By 1988 I was politically aware enough to know where the nukes would be falling around me. I would be dead of blast-effects from the nuke aimed at the Air National Guard base (also international airport) south of me, and I was in the firestorm radius of the nuke aimed at the nearby downtown. In short, if the shooting started I'd be dead within the hour. And knew it.

This lead to gallows humor of the type immortalized in Weird Al's "Christmas at Ground Zero". The air-raid sirens at the end still give me the horrors and I have to SHUT IT OFF RIGHT NOW.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a huge relief. And stayed that way, until the US/Russian relationship started souring. I knew the nukes were still there and going to kill me, but it would take a larger incident to end the world. I still knew where the nearby targets were, and what mortality zone I was in.

Right now I live far enough away from the nearby military bases and major metropolitan areas that I am no longer in the same-day mortality zone. I'd be dead within the week from dehydration and radiation poisoning due to the fallout from the upwind major-metro and the hammering delivered to NORAD in the Rockies.

Fast forward to now, and a President Elect spouting off about how nukes are great, just great. Everybody says so.

I don't see nuclear holocaust.

There are two reasons for this:

1. The Useful Idiot saying nukes are great.
2. The Useful Idiot saying we (in effect) should rip up the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and join Russia in an outright nuclear cartel.

It's the second point that's important. That's the point that says, both of the superpowers with enough nukes to pave the world and cause the single largest same-day loss of human life ever seen in the history of our species are on the same side. We're not pointing them at each other, which was the big fear during the Cold War. We're pointing them at all the up-and-comers trying to join the nuclear cartel. Trump's statement takes the diplomatic off of what the US and USSR/Russian were really meaning with the NPT: we're not giving up our nukes, but all y'all are going to.

This is not the holocaust your Cold War trauma promised.

The holocaust we would get will come in this form. To explain, I give you a sequence of events.

1. North Korea finally develops a missile capable of hitting the US mainland.
2. Dear Leader decides to use the Mighty Fist of the Glorious Revolution to show the Imperialist Oppressor the Might of the Revolution, and Strike A Great Blow for Freedom.
3. Anchorage, AK and/or Seattle, WA have a nuclear event from a hostile foreign power.
4. The Useful Idiot, in cooperation with his patron in Moscow then pave North Korea into radioactive cinders as an example to the rest of the world of what happens when you strike the Nuclear Cartel.
   
   1. China will pitch a fucking fit over this, which is why the strike was done with SLBMs in the Yellow Sea; so the missile tracks would not overfly China. Happily for the Nuclear Cartel, both parties have nuke-subs.
   2. Japan will pitch a fucking fit over this, given that they're both downwind of the paving and already sensitive due to the Fukushima meltdown.
   3. None of that will matter since US and Russia both have veto in the UN Security Council. Also, the Useful Idiot has zero shame, and Putin will smile contentedly.
5. South Korea will wonder WTF just happened and will get token aid from both parties of the Nuclear Cartel to deal with their damage.
6. Meanwhile, upper winds bring nuclear fallout to Canada and the northern US. Not enough for massive radiation poisoning, but enough to increase cancer rates for a few generations.
7. The dust kicked up by this puts a halt on global warming for a few years, giving climate deniers more ammunition.

I don't have to worry about the nearby major metropolitan area dying in a hydrogen bomb nightmare. The nightmare is over what totalitarian nonsense the US will be plunged into after some upstart pops a nuke on our soil, or possession.