These two systems still risk doomsday: both are still on hair-trigger alert that makes their joint existence unstable. They are susceptible to being triggered on a false alarm, a terrorist action, unauthorized launch, or a desperate decision to escalate. They would kill billions of humans, perhaps ending complex life on earth. This is true even though the Cold War that rationalized their existence and hair-trigger status—and their supposed necessity to national security—ended thirty years ago.
This book is an excellent example of ignorance being bliss. The less one knows about certain things in life, the happier they will be. For instance, the less you learn about the sloppy quality control that is pervasive throughout the airline industry, the more confident you will feel about stepping onto a plane. Reading this book about nuclear weaponry where an incredible series of lapses in the failsafe machinery has so remained the stuff of Dr. Strangelove is not designed to help one sleep better at night. More sensitive souls, in fact, may never get a full night’s sleep again as they wonder just how we have managed to so far keep Dr. Strangelove at bay in glorious black and white on the silver screen.
Whether rightly or wrongly, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction, firebombs, and atomic bombs—and believes that it was fully justified in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.
The most extraordinary irony of the 20 century is that the only country in the world that has ever used nuclear weapons in war is also the voice of conscience and authority telling other nations whether they can or cannot be allowed even to merely possess the technology to develop weaponry. When one consider this from a purely rational and logic position, it becomes absolutely mind-boggling. It is the equivalent of being the only person on the street who has ever broken into a neighbor’s home exerting the power to stop those neighbors from installing an alarm system. It is not really Dr. Strangelove that reveals the madness of nuclear war, it is America’s brash hubris in believing they have the right to tell any other country they can’t have them.
“If we have them, why can’t we use them?”
The nightmare scenario no longer even requires a collapse of the failsafe system. All it takes is a minority of American voters in the right states to vote for a madman not afraid of the consequences of launching nuclear weapons who does so simply because he can. Such a scenario for much of the existence of nuclear weapons seemed as remote as what takes place in Kubrick’s nuclear war comedy: what were the odds Americans would ever vote for such a madman in numbers that allowed the inexplicable Electoral College to move madness into the Oval Office. Thanks to history, now we know better.
