A Nuclear War Dilemma
Decisions, Decisions ...
If China and/or Russia could destroy most of America’s nuclear triad while *only* killing a few million Americans, would you respond as president by launching nuclear counterattacks that could then tip the world into nuclear winter, killing most life on the planet?
This unlikely scenario popped into my head as I read about Russia pulling out of the START treaty, China expanding its nuclear forces, and the United States planning to “modernize” its triad of nuclear forces to the tune of $2 trillion over the next 30 years.
Any kind of “general” nuclear exchange between major powers would likely result in nuclear winter and the death of most life on our planet. Yet the masterminds in control seem to think that more nuclear weapons are the answer. To what, exactly? Apparently, to our urge to destroy ourselves while taking most of the planet with us.
Meanwhile, Americans are fighting over gender pronouns even as the implications of genocidal nuclear weapons are ignored. It won’t matter if we’re called she, he, or they when we’re all dead.
To return to my question: If you’re the U.S. president, what do you do? Launch a retaliatory strike that risks tipping the world into nuclear winter, or refuse to do so? I know, the whole premise is ludicrous. Real Americans would launch the first strike.
Whether it's a preemptive strike or a retaliatory one, it only desecrates God's universe, making life unliveable and a condition worse than death. A mass suicide is indicative of a world sick unto death.
It's a sad statement about our current human civilization and governance that we must even contemplate such questions. It must appear to any extra-terrestrial observers- either of the present moment or one who conducts an archaeological history in the future- that humanity was led / governed by lunatics. They might have to investigate the foods, water, and air for clues as to what drove them all mad enough to create and use weapons that could effectively exterminate most of the life forms on the planet in one incident. I speak from that perspective because I can't fathom nor explain this lunacy myself.
You write, "Meanwhile, Americans are fighting over gender pronouns even as the implications of genocidal nuclear weapons are ignored. It won’t matter if we’re called she, he, or they when we’re all dead."
That's dead-straight on.
There are two primary extinction-level threats at present: the rapid destabilization of the climate control system, and the potential starting of global thermonuclear exchange; which is why, as we know, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have set the "Doomsday Clock" closer to midnight then at any other time since its conception. There are intersections, i.e. is a nexus, between these two threats, and one (war) is making the other less tractable with every passing day.
Yet those who've succumbed to the sirens of the never-ending Culture Wars are so distracted by one or more aspects of those that they are unable to even consider that all those concerns will likely very soon be moot unless they swiftly reconsider and revise their priorities- to put survival of humanity and our co-evolved species ahead of all other concerns.
But the aforementioned 'leaders' are only TOO HAPPY to continue to stoke the flames of the culture wars, so that the peons will keep enabling them, both with their silence and in their partisan loyalty, to keep Empire-expansion, war, defense spending and corporate profits generally, etc. at the top of the national Agenda.