The Forgotten Fire

Today, newspapers reported that an authorized Air Force flight transported six active nuclear missiles in a B52 bomber across the Midwestern states from the north to the south. The journey covered hundreds of miles and reminded Americans, it seems, that we have a really large number of nuclear warheads still active and ready to launch in the United States. How many Americans remember the Cold War fears of being attacked by the Soviet Union? The threat of mutually assured destruction hung over everyone then. Is it still the same today? There haven’t been many movies, books or songs that brought to light the danger and death that a nuclear blast would bring. When I was 13, I saw The Day After and was completely frightened. That movie, as hokey as it was, was all too real. Instead of focusing on the drama of actually launching nuclear missiles, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, this movie solely focused on a Russian retaliatory strike on our silos outside Lawrence, Kansas. It terrorized people so much that ABC set up nation-wide psychological help for people suffering from nuclear psychosis after watching the film. After the many accidents that could have started a nuclear war, I would think that the US military would maintain their low profile on our nuclear arsenal, but apparently too many people found out about the recent B52 flight to cover it up. Our worst case scenario would be the terrorist acquisition of a nuclear weapon. With so many loose nukes in the world, it is definitely a possibility. We know that Al Qaeda has plans to either build or obtain nuclear weapons. That scenario can’t be allowed to happen. But the US also maintains the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. Look at countries like North Korea or Iran who have built and are trying to begin their own nuclear program. Having a nuke is a guarantee against being attacked. It’s also a big bargaining chip to getting other things, as North Korea has known, and as the Soviets and Cubans learned in the Cuban Missile Crisis – the closest the world has ever come to all out nuclear war. Who should have them and who shouldn’t? In one of my comic books, one of the main characters takes all of the world’s nuclear weapons and buries them two miles down in the Arctic Ocean. To prevent countries from building more, he leaves just one nuke in every single country, even the ones who didn’t have them before. If that country uses it, they lose their only weapon and face retaliation from the rest. It’s an impossible dream, but someday the world will have to come face-to-face with this monster. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, figured this out almost instantly after the bomb was used and then mass produced. He feared the total danger that would come with total power that nuclear weapons possessed. That fear still exists, whether the media chooses to report it, whether the military chooses to flaunt it and whether average people choose to acknowledge it.