Day 202: Nuclear War

Did you ever think you’d be worried about nuclear war?  Who among you remembers the Cuban Missile Crisis?  I was ten years old.  My Mom was a church secretary.  There was a storage closet underneath a set of stairs.  She put two gallons of water, crackers and deviled ham in the closet.  We were told to go there if the balloons went up.  Looking back, it’s just comical for any of us to have thought we would survive.  We truly feared for our lives.  Then things got better, countries calmed down.

But now, in the twinkling of an eye we have a bellicose president, threatening “fire and fury” at an equally unstable leader of a nuclear armed nation.  Yes, we can over power what ever arms they have, but at what cost.  It will leave the Korean peninsula a smoking radioactive hole.  As the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons,  do we really want the honor of doing it again? 

So that was yesterday.  Today the White House is walking it back, saying he got off script and pay him no nevermind.  I’m not sure which is worse; that he would blurt something like that out on camera, or that staff would tell the world to ignore the words of the President of the United States, former leader of the free world.

There is an excellent essay on Medium, about survivor bias.  The author’s thesis is that because the US has survived threats to the democracy in the past, we believe we’ll survive them in the future.  I’m not so sure.  It’s not long, go here to read it.

This was taken in Greece.  I’m not sure where it came from, but it’s a lovely picture.