What Goes Up Must Come Down

Have you ever seen "Dr. Strangelove"? If you haven't, please stop reading this blog at this very moment, go out and rent it, or borrow it from me. After you have watched it, come on back and finish up. The rest of us will wait here patiently while you take care of this radical oversight in your pop culture acumen.
May I continue? Good.
Today I found myself thinking of the scene in "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" where President Merkin Muffley calls Soviet Premier Kissoff to tell him about the "inadvertent" launching of a bomber wing attack on his country: "Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb... The *Bomb*, Dmitri... The *hydrogen* bomb!... Well now, what happened is... ahm... one of our base commanders, he had a sort of... well, he went a little funny in the head... you know... just a little... funny. And, ah... he went and did a silly thing... Well, I'll tell you what he did. He ordered his planes... to attack your country." This was a comedy, remember, a very black comedy, but a comedy. The country these planes were flying over was the former Soviet Union.
Imagine how funny that would be if the country they were flying over was the former and present United States of America. The Air Force said Friday it would punish seventy airmen involved in the accidental, cross-country flight of a nuclear-armed B-52 bomber. The "country" in question, by the way, is the United States of America. A couple of months ago, these knuckleheads inadvertently armed a B-52 with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and flew it from Minot in North Dakota to Barksdale in Louisiana. Funny? Hi-larious.