Friday, April 08, 2016

Political Science

Here's a quick quiz: Can you name the countries that have nuclear weapons? The ones on this planet, that is. There may be other galactic governments with their own WMD, but what we're looking for here are the ones that can push a button and send atomic bombs to their neighbor's door with a quick push of a button. Need a hint? There are nine of them. I'll give you a moment.
Okay. Got your list? You probably guessed the United States and Russia. They've been at this mutually assured destruction the longest, so it makes sense to put them at the top. China would be the next logical step, even if they were a little late to the game, they wanted to be in the nuclear threat business along with those other guys. It just makes sense. If your country has all those people, you want to protect them, and what better way to protect your people than by assuring them that if they get melted by a blast or the attendant radiation from one of those babies, that there would be commensurate retribution. The plutonium rule, don'tcha know.
Having trouble with the other six? You might not have guessed Great Britain, but since they've been in the world domination business since before the Crusades, it only makes sense that they get themselves a nuke or two to play along. And if you've been hanging around for a while you probably remember how tense things got between India and Pakistan because it wouldn't make sense if one of these countries had "the bomb" and the other one different. Mutual hate and mutually assured destruction is the kind of thing that exists in only a few spots on the globe. Whether or not Israel hates everybody or everybody hates them is probably the reason they get their own stockpile. This may explain the proliferation of mass destruction around the Middle East, since there are a dozen different reasons and attendant treaties that keep those promises of enriched uranium from coming true. North Korea, the real wild card in this deck, probably has nuclear weapons and missiles that can get them to where they want them to go, but it's hard to figure out exactly how much of their glorious leader's rhetoric to believe, since his spokespeople say he is a world class basketball player and has heat vision too.
Would it be better if those who are nearest to this not quite metaphorical powder keg had their own big bang to unleash just in case? Donald J. Trumpenhower believes that Japan and South Korea should join this exclusive club just to keep Kim Jong Un (Korean for "Trump") honest. This shows just how magically confounding the Trumpman can be. Japan was the first country we used an atomic bomb on, and right after the war we made sure that they wouldn't be in the market for their own nuclear weapon any time soon. You might notice that Germany is conspicuously missing from that list as well, since it turns out they didn't work and play well with others back in the first half of the twentieth century.
Oh, the times the are getting wackier and wackier.

1 comment:

Dan said...

Sooner or later, we're going to listen to Carl Sagan.