Mushroom Clouds Rarely Have A Silver Lining

When’s the last time you seriously worried about nuclear war?  If you happen to be a baby boomer like me, you might recall those nuclear bomb drills from grade school in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  They’d sound the siren and you’d dive under your desk and cover your head.  That’s because they figured even ten year-olds weren’t limber enough to bend over and kiss their asses goodbye.  It was the Cold War, and the US Strategic Air Command had B-52’s filled with hydrogen bombs  in the air 24/7, just as the Soviets had their ICBMs constantly on high alert, ready to launch at the turn of a key.  Nikita Kruschev vowed he would bury us and Dwight Eisenhower warned of the hegemony of the military-industrial complex.  There was a philosophy called MAD, “mutually assured destruction”, accepted as dogma by most of the generals and politicians of that era. The idea was that no one was crazy enough to use a nuke knowing that it would lead to the death of just about everyone on the planet, an extinction level event.  But we all knew things could go wrong.  An apprehensive nuclear cloud occupied the national zeitgeist on a daily basis, embodied in two brilliant films of that era, “Dr. Strangelove” and “Failsafe”.

It was in 1962 that it began to look like the nightmares might actually come true. The Soviets began placing nuclear armed missiles in Cuba, missiles that could be launched and hit US targets before our pilots would have time to pull their pants on.  There were plenty of generals and politicians and pundits who thought the only acceptable response was to nuke Cuba before the Soviets nuked us.  People were scared shitless.  It looked like a nuclear war might start at any moment. Fortunately, John F. Kennedy was president, and with his memories of World War II still fresh in his mind, he had no desire to see the planet in flames.  Rather than push the button, he blockaded Cuba and called the Soviet’s bluff.  Within a few weeks, the missiles were removed, and life returned to some semblance of normalcy.  Nuclear Armageddon was by no means off the table, but it moved back to the sub-basement of the national consciousness, where it has more or less remained for over fifty years.

Fast forward to 2017.  Donald J. Trump is president, and as Lloyd Bentsen might have said, “Mr. Trump, I knew Jack Kennedy.  You’re no Jack Kennedy”.  It turns out that Trump isn’t even George W. Bush.  Bush was no Rhodes scholar, but even when he was pushing fairy-tales about WMD’s and pouring untold billions into two pointless wars, no one, not even bleeding-heart liberals like me, thought he was dumb enough or crazy enough to toss a couple of nukes at Iraq or Afghanistan.  We all remained reasonably certain that we wouldn’t be awakened from sleep by a blinding flash, an ear-splitting boom,  and a mushroom cloud on the horizon.

That’s no longer true.  In the spirit of “just kill me now”, some of us might actually be hoping for the sweet relief of sudden death after nearly a hundred days of Trump. In 2017, MAD might more rightfully stand for Major Asshole Donald.  In just the last ten days, the man with the little hands, in an international pissing match, has lobbed a couple hundred million bucks worth of Tomahawk missiles at an empty airfield in Syria, dropped a MOAB, the Mother Of All Bombs, which might just as well be called a BDYES (biggest dick you’ve ever seen), on a couple dozen cave-dwelling ISIS schmucks in Afghanistan, and lost a whole fucking US aircraft carrier task force in the process of again waving his diminutive Donnie dingus at the North Koreans.  You’ve got Mike Pence, a guy who seriously sees the Book of Revelations not as a metaphor but as a blueprint, staring reproachfully across the Korean DMZ and saying that “the US sword stands ready”.  Rex Tillerson, our otherwise mute Secretary of State, warns that “nothing is off the table.”

We’ve never before had a president we believed could start a nuclear war in a fit of petulance and anger.  We’ve never before had a president who we believed didn’t have the intellectual depth to comprehend the grievous consequences of employing even one atomic bomb. We’ve never before had a president who had such a childish preoccupation with his weapons of war, or such a nonchalance about dealing death from a dinner table in South Florida. We do now.