Making Armageddon Great Again
A Mushroom Cloud, A Smoking Gun
Recently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists featured a fiction contest: “Write Before Midnight.” I sent in an entry, which, sad to say, didn’t win. (The winners can be found here.) But that’s OK: I enjoyed writing something other than my usual essays. My “losing” entry to the contest follows. (Re-reading it, it’s perhaps too much like a memoir rather than fiction.)
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Making Armageddon Great Again
And so the missiles are finally here. Long ago, I thought I’d put nuclear war in the rearview mirror. I never expected to see a mushroom cloud through my windshield, rising in the near distance.
I’d seen something like it before—Russian nuclear missiles flying over the North Pole on their way to America—but that was fifty years ago. I was a young lieutenant then, working in the Missile Warning Center deep inside Cheyenne Mountain. Those missile tracks weren’t real; they were part of a war game, fed into our computers on magnetic tape. The exercise ended with a simulated Armageddon, soundless, screamless.
Even so, when the tracks terminated at U.S. cities, we all went quiet. Sitting two thousand feet under granite, staring at monochrome monitors, we imagined those cities vaporized in an instant. Millions dead, incinerated in a heartbeat. The thought chilled us.
I was 24 then, serving my country against the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, near the tail end of the Cold War. The first Cold War, I should add—as opposed to the “new” one we’ve been trapped in for the past two decades. Well, it’s plenty hot now. Thermonuclear hot.
I was far enough from my city’s ground zero to survive the initial blast and heat. But at 74, I know these are my last days. Fallout will finish me—unless I take care of it myself first.
I now know for certain that, after an unimaginably destructive nuclear exchange (a nice euphemism, isn’t it?), the living will envy the dead. For now, I’m one of the living, caught in a land of the dead.
How did it come to this? We always ask that, don’t we? How did I let a 50-year-old nightmare scenario on magnetic tape become real? Couldn’t I have done something—anything—to stop it?
Even now, I like to think I could have. There was nothing inevitable about the “new” Cold War or its culmination in MAD—mutual assured destruction. I just wasn’t mad enough to resist it with the ferocity required. I gave my quiet consent to the warmongers, the death-wishers, the ones who talk tough about “big-boy pants,” the ones haunted by missile envy and mindless fear. The ones who blow hardest just before they decide to blow up the world.
I saw it coming. So did many others. I wrote against the “new” Cold War. I denounced so-called investments in new nuclear weapons. I warned about militarizing space, how our early warning satellites and sensors could be blinded. I cautioned that President Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile shield might make nuclear war more likely. None of it mattered. Money spoke louder than I ever could—talk of jobs and the promise of profits outweighed any argument I could muster.
And so here I am, facing darkness—smoke, ash, soot blotting out the sun. I’ve stocked enough supplies to last a couple of weeks, but what’s the point? I have no desire to navigate a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Once upon a time, I was an Air Force historian, a captain, teaching cadets about the making and use of the atomic bomb. That was 1992—45 years ago. Where does the time go? We even took the cadets to Los Alamos, the birthplace of the bomb, and then on to the Trinity test site.
Back then I was oddly optimistic. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Politicians were talking about peace dividends. Some even hinted that America might become a normal country in normal times. Normalcy! Imagine that today.
I remember a somewhat glum spokesman at Los Alamos talking about reinventing the lab—shifting to peaceful purposes, maybe consumer electronics like VCRs and CD players, competing with Japan. I was skeptical. Nuclear physicists designing camcorders and video games? A longshot—but better than cranking out new warheads and bombs.
At Trinity, what struck me most was the absence of the tower from which the “gadget” had been suspended. Vaporized instantly. Only twisted rebar remained at the base. And that had been a baby nuke—mere kilotons compared to the megatons in our arsenal. I tried to impress this on the cadets, some of whom might someday be ordered to launch such weapons. But who can really picture megatons of destruction, repeated again and again and again?
A sharp-eyed cadet found a sliver of trinitite. For some reason, I had to touch it, briefly, radioactivity be damned. This tiny fragment, this ghost of Trinity, made it all seem real. As a few atomic tourists walked around the scrub desert in masks, fearful still of breathing in radioactive particles, I thought of Oppenheimer’s god of death, the destroyer of worlds. That god has finally come for us—bringing mass death just as Oppie knew he would.
Now, back in the present, at least I’ve filled both bathtubs with water. A small reserve. At Cheyenne Mountain, there was a pond underground, a kind of giant bathtub, complete with a rowboat, so I was told. Maybe Charon did the rowing. We used to joke that boat and reservoir was the Navy’s presence in our Air Force-run bunker. I never saw that boat or pond. I wish I had.
There’s a lot I wish I’d seen. I thought there’d be more time. Next month, next year, next life.
Next life. That’s what I cling to now. I fought the good fight. I tried to argue for disarmament as the only sane option—for America, for humanity, for the entire living breathing beautiful planet of ours. But others thought differently. Some were simply making too much money, making Armageddon great again.
So don’t judge me for thinking about the unthinkable. I know suicide is a mortal sin for us Catholics. But my Ruger 9mm sits by my side. Twelve rounds in the magazine—but I’ll only need the one in the chamber.
Yes, I’ve seen the mushroom cloud. And soon, quite soon, there’ll be a smoking gun.
Copyright 2026 William J. Astore.
Thanks Bill. Good article.
i've made mention of Annie Jacobsen's "Nuclear War: A Scenario"; as she wrote - 72 minutes and it's all gone unless you live hundreds to thousands of miles from, and not downwind of, major metropolitan areas. Then you live the reality of Khrushchev's "the living will envy the dead".
And now we have "leaders" who again talk of actually using nuclear weapons and 'winning'. It's madness.
I have in front of me a document from July 26, 1963. It is a summary of a hearing that affirmed my stance as a conscientious objector. The year before I got my draft notice and I had informed the German draft authority that I claimed conscientious objector status. I was told that I had to appear before a “tribunal” to prove my position. I had been raised in a a family who belonged to a small German religious sect that refused military service. They came into existence during World War I and were outlawed by the NAZI regime in 1936. Many members of that sect died in the concentration camps. Some survivors I met in the fifties when they visited our home. My father had served four years during WW I in France and Russia. He had nothing but contempt for the military and joined this anti-war sect shortly after his return from the war. He had grown up in a devout Lutheran home. He had no respect for the clergy of the “big” Churches. He refused in 1939 to carry a gun when he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Because of his age he was discharged after a few months and survived barely the Nazi dictatorship. How that happened my mother learned after his death in 1969. He loved Germany, but never thought of it as being better than other countries. After the war he opposed NATO, he denounced the re-incorporation of former prominent Nazis in all departments of the “new” Germany (the details are just disgusting), the re-establishment under US pressure of the a new German Wehrmacht and its incorporation in NATO. I was taught by my father and the teaching of our sect that war is pure evil and that the Augustinian concept of JUST WAR was contrary to the teachings of Jesus. I made my case as a rather unsophisticated twenty year old and was granted conscientious objector status. Maybe that says more about my “defense” of Germany than anything else. I am telling this for two reasons. First, It is beyond me how the Christian West conducted some of the most violent wars in human history and how the Churches justified them to the present day and in the course of these wars invented the most horrific weapons conceivable. Second, I couldn’t ever understand and still can’t why supposedly Christian believers have no problem serving in the military. The problem is not nuclear weapons, it is the mentality that supports war as if it was normal human behavior. I haven’t been a “believer” for a very long time, but my foundation as a pacifist has never changed, though it has been undergirded by deeper study and philosophical contemplation. In the seventies I became acquainted with and was inspired by the Catholic peace movement - Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Dorothy Day and many others I admired their courage. I also read German Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, especially THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP. Berrigan and company poured blood on nuclear missiles and suffered in jail. Other Catholics as well as Protestants were serving the military Moloch, did it enthusiastically and are still doing it. I hope my reflections are not too far off the topic.