Guest post: Once again on the brink
Originally a comment by Pliny the In Between on Special Alert.
My actual earliest childhood memory is of my parents whispering to each other when they thought my brother and I were asleep. Dad consoling my mother that being as we lived only a handful of miles from the US Navy’s primary ordinance depot that building a fallout shelter was probably a waste of time. That was during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I was staying at my grandma’s house the night that Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia.
I was in high school when Nixon set our strategic alert status to its highest level since the Cuban Missile Crisis in response to Soviet threats to intervene in the 1973 Arab Israeli War.
I scared the shit out of my civics teacher when my semester oral report was on the effects of a 5 megaton thermonuclear blast over our city center (it showed that our school was in the zone of ‘dead or to die later’).
From age 5 to 1991, I was quite sure that nuclear war was one of the three ways from which I was likely die.
Then the wall fell. Like millions I sighed with relief. Unlike most I lobbied my representatives to embrace a new Russia and do everything to find common ground and mutual advantage. The Cold War hadn’t been won – we’d just all survived it by the skin of our teeth.
Now we are right back where we (I) started – once again on the brink. Taken there by a handful of hateful old men. On the brink of the end because of one man’s greed and hatred. We must find a better way. We must find a way that prevents a handful from murdering us all. But all that hangs in the balance, it would seem, as to whether there is some senior Russian official or general who is as scared as the rest of us and says not on my watch.
I have to say I’m glad we live so close to the White House, because if it comes to nuclear war, I don’t want to live to see the aftermath.
Putin is likely to find out soon enough how lonely it can be at the top, particularly when so few Russians are prepared to die for whatever cause he happens to be pushing on any particular day. And it’s not Putin vs Biden. It’s Putin vs the rest of the world..
Yes, it’s unfortunate that we didn’t work out the issues of human governance before discovering, developing, and mass producing the means of near instantaneous, global destruction. Unless and until we can effectively insulate the access to such power from the machinations of sociopaths, madmen, and idiots, we are at continued risk of dying in fire, either on purpose, or by miscalculation and accident. This is an immediate danger. We must wrest the weapons from these potential murderers, and keep them away from them. Having to deal with this needless bullshit is a distraction from even bigger issues that we can ill afford. We can do without the extraneous plot complication.
Beyond the short term threat of imminent murder, we have to prevent our own suicide. We are still in the midst of consuming our biosphere past the point of no return, even if we solve the mid-range threat of anthropogenic climate change. Even if we were able to switch magically and instantly to carbon-neutral energy production, we would still be overshooting the carrying capacity of the planet at our current numbers and lifestyle. If we do not attend to this issue, it will attend to us. Managing this ourselves will likely be drastic and unpleasant, but much less so than if we do nothing and let Nature take its course, as Nature is a lot less forgiving and much more ruthless than we would be. (It would perhaps help a wee bit if we did not celebrate and valourize the beneficiaries of the grotesque levels of inequality enjoyed by a few, and instead recognized it for the symptom of lethal pathology it is. Just a suggestion, for starters.)
I grew up close to the North Dakota border. During the Cold War it was silo central. There were so many nuclear missiles in North Dakota that they once claimed that if it seceded from the Union it would be the 3rd nuclear superpower. Nearby was the Grand Forks Air Force Base, home of the B-52H bombers. So, it was Target One for the Soviets, and we knew that if the siren blew, we were goners.
I have yet to meet someone who grew up in the Cold War and didn’t have a story about how their community was on the list of Soviet targets. There was a weird sort of pride, like “I live in a place that’s important enough for the Soviets to nuke.”
I’m not saying that Pliny or Michael H or anyone else is incorrect in what they’re saying. Just because some people may have been saying that incorrectly doesn’t mean that everyone was. And the nuclear stockpiles were so large that I suspect the Soviets really did have targets on just about every population center, military facility, or infrastructure hub — and there aren’t many people who grew up in a place that doesn’t qualify as at least one of those.
This crisis, with its revived fears of a nuclear war, is a reminder of how good the end of the Cold War was. We’ve now got two generations of people who have never really had to worry about nuclear war before. But for decades it was a thing that just hung over society; even people who didn’t consciously stress about much (and I didn’t, really) still accepted it as a fact that yep, at any point human civilization could be nearly or completely destroyed, possibly even through an error.
I’m thinking there must have been some places in the Great Plains states that weren’t near any population center, military facility, or infrastructure hub, simply because those states are so thinly populated. That was a reason to put a lot of missile silos in them, of course, but still there are vastly more plains (aka deserts) than there were/are missile silos. But by the same token they don’t have many people to claim to have lived near a Soviet target, either!
There’s also a difference between people saying today what the Soviets were targeting back then, and people who were claiming it back in the day, because I assume there is more information available now — files that were declassified, former officers able and willing to talk about launch plans, etc.
But there was just no way that a fellow kid on the playground in the 1980s would have had any reliable information about Soviet war plans, and I’m sort of embarrassed that I didn’t call bullshit on those claims back then. But like I said, there was that thrill of “oh, we’re important, they would totally want to take out our city.”
Also, if the Soviets were anything like the U.S., there wasn’t one definitive list of targets. My understanding is that the “nuclear football” that travels with the U.S. president contains a selection of pre-set war plans for each likely hostile country, so there might be one code that authorizes launches on certain military targets, another that adds population centers, another that basically goes after everything, etc., as well as the ability to order a more tailor-made solution (the a la carte menu, as it were).
It’s not like I’m claiming I was at the game when Hank Aaron hit no 715. :) (I was for 722 and 723, though.)
There was a brief period in the late 80’s, early 90’s when we were talking about the “peace dividend” of the end of the Cold War. There would be a catchup on social spending for Education and the War on Poverty, even under Bush I. We would Do Great Things in Peacetime! Then people realized how much money the military bases and contracts contributed to local economies and didn’t want to give that up, and also the first Iraq war. We’ll probably never stop the ridicouls spending on military.
I grew up under the approach to Hanscom Air Force base. I don’t know if that would’ve been a target or not, but the low-flying aircraft over our house would scare the shit out of me at night–I was convinced that one day one of them would drop a bomb right in my room.
I can also remember being on the playground at school and thinking that if I were just a bit taller I’d be able to jump and touch one as it passed over.
None of that was realistic, but it was scary just the same. (And don’t get me started on the Thunderbirds. I never did understand the appeal.)
I grew up in a major city (New York) during the Cold War, and NYC actually was a terrorist target years later, but I don’t think I thought much about which places would or would not be targets at the time. I’ve lived in or near a few major cities, and those strike me as likely; I don’t live near one now, although I do live near an Air Force base. Who knows.
WaM, I used to live near Hanscom, and went to Lexington often. I’ve been to Hanscom a few times for events unrelated to the military, and I have to remind myself that it actually is a military base, with all that that entails. The one I live near now was my workplace for several years, so its military nature is extremely solid in my mind. (Rather than, say, the place where they have an air show, or where some civilians fly planes.)
The Thunderbirds you don’t wish to discuss I presume are the Air Force “demonstration squadron”, not the 1960s supermarionation television show. The second one was what initially came to mind, and I had no idea why that was a problem!
Sackbut,
Yeah, it’s the former. Hanscom isn’t much of an AFB these days, I don’t think, but back in the early ’70s there were a lot of military aircraft flying in.
These days we live about a mile south of the Pentagon, so I assume we’re a high-level target.
I lived 12 miles from Crane Navel Ammunition Depot. Crane was where virtually all of the Navy’s munitions were produced. Pretty sure that would have qualified as a primary target.
Plny,
Navel ammunition? Are they weaponizing lint now? (Apologies, couldn’t resist.)
Thanks for catching the typo
Pliny,
And of course in pointing out your typo, I make one of my own.