Ahead of schedule
Never mind. I have the morning off.
In Little Dumpling, the Meanies and the Ingrates have been squabbling over some shared land. The Meanies want the hedge to be cut down; the Ingrates want the loo to be demolished. After things get really bad, Mr Ingrate wires up the loo with explosives threatening to set them off if he hears the loo seat bang down. The blast would destroy the loo and much of the Meanies’ house. Mr Ingrate doesn’t want to inflict such destruction, of course.
Mr Meanie responds by wiring up the hedge so that if the Ingrates try to prune it, there will also be a calamitous explosion. Again, he doesn’t want something like that to happen. It’s a deterrent.
So peace reigns, but some of the other inhabitants of the village aren’t so sure about all this, especially if the balloon might go up by accident.
This is, of course, how things used to be during the Cold War. Since neither America nor the Soviet Union could hope to win a nuclear war (mutually assured destruction), the bomb was a deterrent. Nonetheless, I do remember reading a book called World War III, which was meant to be a future history. In it, the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe. There was a single nuclear exchange (Minsk for Birmingham, I believe) and the Soviet president was assassinated. How different things turned out. Even today, I look back at 1989 recalling that I didn’t believe Germany would ever be reunited in my lifetime or that Eastern Europe would ever be ruled by anything but Communist dictatorships; or Russia itself for that matter.
The book notes that the Americans began to think that they could win a nuclear war, a notion which seems truly mad (in the non-acronym sense) because the destruction would affect the entire planet not just the combatants. The thing is, though, that the Americans seem to have come closer to using atomic weapons again than the Soviet Union ever did – as far as I’m aware. I know they considered using them during the Korean War, but the likely consequences may have deterred them.
These days the concern is more with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, especially their development by regimes run by people who may not exactly be rational. It would only take a single crank, who thinks nothing of sacrificing millions of lives, to trigger a destructive regional conflict. MAD may not be made null and void by the mad idea that a nuclear war is winnable, but but the mad idea that there’s a sane reason to have one in the first place.
Mr Meanie responds by wiring up the hedge so that if the Ingrates try to prune it, there will also be a calamitous explosion. Again, he doesn’t want something like that to happen. It’s a deterrent.
So peace reigns, but some of the other inhabitants of the village aren’t so sure about all this, especially if the balloon might go up by accident.
This is, of course, how things used to be during the Cold War. Since neither America nor the Soviet Union could hope to win a nuclear war (mutually assured destruction), the bomb was a deterrent. Nonetheless, I do remember reading a book called World War III, which was meant to be a future history. In it, the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe. There was a single nuclear exchange (Minsk for Birmingham, I believe) and the Soviet president was assassinated. How different things turned out. Even today, I look back at 1989 recalling that I didn’t believe Germany would ever be reunited in my lifetime or that Eastern Europe would ever be ruled by anything but Communist dictatorships; or Russia itself for that matter.
The book notes that the Americans began to think that they could win a nuclear war, a notion which seems truly mad (in the non-acronym sense) because the destruction would affect the entire planet not just the combatants. The thing is, though, that the Americans seem to have come closer to using atomic weapons again than the Soviet Union ever did – as far as I’m aware. I know they considered using them during the Korean War, but the likely consequences may have deterred them.
These days the concern is more with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, especially their development by regimes run by people who may not exactly be rational. It would only take a single crank, who thinks nothing of sacrificing millions of lives, to trigger a destructive regional conflict. MAD may not be made null and void by the mad idea that a nuclear war is winnable, but but the mad idea that there’s a sane reason to have one in the first place.
Tomorrow, the pot calls the kettle black in a tale about terrorist training.
Comments