He helped stop a war.
So, the Sci-Fi channel is screening "The Day After", again. If you have never heard of or seen it, it is an early 1980s made for television movie that depicts a fictional nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. The special effects are substandard, there is a great deal of stock footage...
That does not matter in the least. It is a gripping story, and if you can handle a few hours of absolute "bummer", I sincerely suggest you check it out. Now, some of you reading this might wonder what a Reagan era TV movie has in it that would compel me to write about it. The simplest explanation is... a warning.
For the last Five thousand, nine hundred, and fifty years, before the modern era, human nations could conduct total war, that is, genocide and privation, without worry of eventual extinction of the species. Read the Old Testament sometime. Joshua was a real asshole. That all changed within the last fifty years.
We have the tools and the talent to kill each and every one of us. It's not something most people like to think about, but as a species, we are one REALLY bad day of perfect accidents, insane leaders, or a confluence of factors that I would rather not think too deeply on... away from extinction.
Hell, it isn't even a day, is it? It's more like 17 minutes.
Look, I don't know what your opinion is on nuclear energy, war as a catalyst for economic development, or whatever. However, I am pretty sure you don't want the paint sucked off of your house and your family being given a permanent orange afro.
Spend a couple of minutes writing to your favorite candidate, talk to a loved one about nuclear war, make a commitment to vote in the next elections... just do a little part to take this issue off of the back burner.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Jason Robards
Labels:
Television,
This American Life
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3 comments:
personally, i feel a little warm and fuzzy knowing that should some country attack us trying to level us, our last action would be leveling them as well. i like zero sum games. a lot of time, this is just enough to keep the crazies in check. see, in order to actually commit a nuclear attack on the US, it would have to be brought here clandestinely, and detonated in a high soft target environment. this would lead to doubt over which enemy nation actually commited said crime. in order for someone to commit a full scale attack of that nature, it would seem a daunting task to say the least. to get that number of warheads into the country, and then have the operatives to actually deploy them, without a single one ever being discovered before it happens, seems near impossible. so, they'd have to go with a full scale launch, which as i said is a zero sum game. well, actually, it's not. see, we have early warning missle defence, along with coughstarwarscough satellites (if you think they suspended that, you've never known someone who flies satellites for the air force who would quickly change the subject or just stop talking when you mentioned the program. he had clearance they make up in movies.) anyhow, while some may make it through, nothing that's heading for a major strategic target would. and we would be free to turn their country into a parking lot. sure, nuclear winter could be a bitch, and what affect would we have on the planet by irradiating the globe? who knows, maybe it's the next step in human evolution.
I watched a documentary on the Death Clock a little while ago, and it scared the pants off me. As does reading post-apocalyptic science fiction. It almost seems as if the people in this world WANT to blow each other into radioactive, glowing oblivion. And dudes, my hair is bad enough already without changing its half-life.
What scares me is when I see a headline like the one I saw recently:
Police in Slovakia and Hungary arrest 3 trying to sell radioactive material
And how easy they say it is to ship nuclear material in through ports... you could load up a shipping container with a nuclear bomb the size of...a size that would just barely fit in a shipping container...
I think I saw that death clock thing too - that was a magazine, right?
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