Six minutes to midnight…
I’m referring to the Doomsday Clock, of course. Last time I checked it read six minutes to midnight. The case of the hikers in Iran and that country’s constant saber rattling might change the clock. The instability in Pakistan and that country’s increasing animosity towards the West also might change the setting. Al Qaeda threats, especially those related to revenging the death of OBL, are also a factor. Add in then tensions between Pakistan and India and the posturing of North Korea, just to name a few hot spots in the world, and one can see that life was much better with the old U.S.S.R. and the Cold War, at least in some sense. The West had thousands of warheads pointed in its direction, but only one enemy. Now we’re not even sure who our enemies are!
The proliferation of nuclear arms is akin to a schoolyard of kids who each receive an automatic to play with. Too many countries and citizens of those countries treat nuclear arms lightly now, like schoolchildren with their video-games education. Even here in the U.S. (and we should know better), crazies that believe in Armageddon and Rapture have even infiltrated the U.S. Air Force, the very organization in charge of our atomic arsenal (see “The Theology of Armageddon” by Robert C. Koehler, 9/15/2011 CommonDreams.org). It turns out that in a Vandenberg Air Force Base course titled “Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare,” the organizers wanted to give officers in the first week of missile-launch training a religious indoctrination in “Just War Theory,” often called “Jesus Loves Nukes” by its detractors. Officers of numerous faiths complained and the course was canceled, one small victory for sanity.
Mind you, this was a course blessed by the U.S. Air Force. It reminds me of the Vietnam era when I went in to pay a parking ticket and overheard a campus cop tell a colleague that he’d better “pack heat” because the students were restless. That Santa-Claus-like donut boy was over-reacting and inflating his perceived importance to society. The believers in Rapture do the same. They claim they have no fear of Armageddon because they are among the ones that a warring Jesus Christ will take into heaven. It says so in Revelations, don’t you know? Of course, these nutniks have completely forgotten about the Loving God of the New Testament and focus all their attention on the angry, punishing God of Revelations and the Old Testament. It’s their way to get back at everything they deplore: progressive liberals, LGBT people, Catholics, intrusive government, you name it. The number in their list of sinners in the world is large and they’re going to suffer terrible punishment for their sins. Amen! Hallelujah!
Rabid and crazy fundamentalism and nukes have been linked ever since Joe McCarthy, Lewis Strauss, and J. Edgar Hoover went after Robert Oppenheimer. The latter had angered AEC commissioner Strauss and H-bomb inventor Edward Teller, who founded Lawrence Livermore to take the H-bomb development away from Los Alamos (Teller was mostly responsible for putting the nuclear arms under the control of the Air Force, not the Army). Fundamentalism? Yes, McCarthy’s communist witch hunts and Teller’s rabid Hungarian anti-communism was fundamentalism at its worst. These nuts, including Strauss and the man in the red dress, are classic paranoid fundamentalist thinkers. We often make fun of them, as in Dr. Strangelove, but I see the belief in Rapture as a religious consequence of political Armageddon equally paranoid, equally frightening, and equally fundamentalist with direct links to those 1950s nut cases.
Where do we stand on nuclear disarmament? Not on very solid ground, to say the least. Ever see the film version of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers? Hollywood has provided some of the strongest bellicose propaganda in downplaying the nuclear menace and supporting its use in modern warfare. Tactical nukes are still nukes. A terrorist attack with even small yield nuclear weapons in any U.S. or European city would be a disaster, much worse than even a dirty bomb, which is bad enough (a dirty bomb could render the area around Wall Street radioactive for many years—this is the threat contemplated in my sci-fi thriller The Midas Bomb). There is no “noble use” of an atomic bomb—not even against big daddy bugs that suck the brains out of futuristic infantry. There is no moral ambiguity here—such weapons need to be banned.
Use of nukes can just be considered Hollywood fiction, I suppose, but too many people relish blowing the hell out of someone. Koehler quotes justwartheory.com: “Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.” Like Koehler, the last line scares the hell out of me. Any terrorist can define Wall Street as a jihadist military target and thus justify killing a whole bunch of people. They did so for 9/11. Even worse, the Pentagon can use that argument to shake the blood and gore off their hands when the Air Force drops a bomb somewhere. Given that Dubya established the pre-emptive strike doctrine, any President, especially a GOP President that believes in the Rapture, can reset that Doomsday Clock to midnight.
Nuclear weapons are immoral—they should never, never be used again. I don’t give a rat’s ass about Armageddon or the Rapture or the “Just War Theory” aka “Jesus Loves Nukes”—there is absolutely no argument that will sway me to approve the use of these hellish weapons. We can debate all we want about the use of nuclear power (I generally believe it’s safe…or, rather, the danger is in direct proportion to the builders and operators’ incompetence—Japan showed that), but nukes are a no-no. Fundamentalists with the gleam of salvation in their eyes shouldn’t ever be allowed near nuclear arms. In fact, any believer of the Rapture should automatically be disqualified by the Air Force as a handler or deliverer of nuclear weapons. And no religious zealot President should be allowed with the nuclear codes. This includes Mr. Perry and Ms. Bachmann as it did Mr. Bush.
I trembled through the eight years of Dubya’s rule here in the U.S. In addition to being the worst President we’ve ever had (want someone to blame for the budget crisis?), Mr. Bush was a self-proclaimed born-again Christian that carried those codes around. Did he read Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins? I don’t know, but anyone who does and believes that drivel should not even be allowed to run for office, let alone be President. ‘Nough said.
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Bargain eBooks for your reading pleasure! Above I mentioned the sci-fi thriller, The Midas Bomb. Check out the young adult sci-fi thriller The Secret Lab and the second edition eBook, Full Medical. Coming soon: the eBook version of the serialized novel Enemy Agenda, the sequel to Full Medical, and the eBook version of Survivors of the Chaos.
