The Day Before

 Back in those giddy days of the late seventies, there was a phrase that was bandied about by those Me Generation types who were mining the humor of mankind's eventual destruction. "One nuclear weapon could ruin your whole day." This was a direct attempt to deflect the quiet certitude we all carried around in our heads that eventually the missiles would be launched and we would all hasten the directives of the Civil Defense films with which we had been inculcated in our youth. Duck and cover, thus providing us all better posture for kissing our collective posteriors goodbye. 

It wasn't until the events of September 11, 2001 that our heads were jerked viciously away from missile silos to airports across our country and the potential threat they served. Suddenly there was a mass casualty event on American soil that did not involve nuclear weapons. Security in those airports was ramped up to ensure that no one's shoes or underwear could ever pose a threat to us again.

Meanwhile, all those missiles with atomic bombs attached to them sat in their holes, awaiting launch codes carried in a briefcase just behind the president of that moment. Some of us wondered how comfortable we felt with some of the men who had access to the "Football" as it was nicknamed. But mostly we turned our eyes to the non-conventional war of terror. Part of that concern was focused on the potential of these radical splinter groups gaining access to the ways and means of generating "dirty bombs," and a number of lighthearted Hollywood romps included electromagnetic pulse devices as plot points. This was their response to a change in our fears. The teenage hacker teaching us all a lesson about the terrors of nuclear war by playing tic tac toe with a computer disappeared. In his place came wild-eyed fanatics bent on the destruction of our way of life, one block or passenger aircraft at a time.

And still those missiles sat, part of the highest stakes poker game ever imagined while we set up another game: One of economic sanctions and diplomatic shame. A welcome turn to be sure, but no one thought to tell all those guys sitting down in their silos or flying endless missions in bombers awaiting orders to stand down. Every so often a nuclear submarine from one of these superpowers runs into something and we are reminded of the true terror of the deep. 

Now we have started to have discussions of "the nuclear option" in a realm outside of firing a professional football team's entire coaching staff. The weapons that are currently targeted at Ukraine are not metaphors. The ones that dot satellite maps of our own Midwest are a reminder to the rest of the planet that would last about twenty minutes in the event of a full-on exchange between Russia and the United States. China might have something to say about that too, but that would be (if you'll pardon the expression) overkill. 

Everything old is new again.