Living with a Monster
It is amazing how you can live with something so horrible and train yourself to ignore the terror contained in a hole within walking distance from your home.
The military was kind enough to pay for my medical school. When the time came to pay it back with active duty time, my wife and I packed our bags and went to our assignment in a quiet base, surrounded by quiet farm fields. I worked as a rural Internal Medicine physician on the base. We lived on the base. It was calm. When I left the hospital, I heard dogs barking and children playing. When we traveled off the base to the local Walmart, we passed cattle grazing next to little fenced-in squares of land.Those squares contained missiles capable of enough death to effectively end the world.
That was our base’s mission. Specially trained people went into a deep hole and waited for the order to end the world. Others kept the missiles functioning. My job was to support the base in maintaining this tool, which could end the planet within an hour. “Peace is Our Profession.” Yes, I understand the logic of that phrase. No one wants to end the world.
A terrifying television movie appeared in the early 1980’s. It featured my base and my town.In 1992, they turned the missiles off. We celebrated. This horrible threat was gone. Most of our missiles from those days have been removed.
But… not everywhere. The missiles have been updated and there are still enough sitting in the ground, ready to again destroy the world. The beautiful fields are referred to as a “nuclear sponge” to soak up Russian warheads.
“Nuclear Sponge.” What an odd term.
Now, we are back on a hair trigger. Those quaint farm fields were featured in a large Washington Post article. There is a paywall.
Terrifying indeed. In the 1980’s I flew aboard an aircraft from which I was trained to deploy a tactical nuclear weapon, and was fully prepared to follow that order, knowing it would be part of a chain of escalation that would lead back to your holes in the ground. I’m sorry those days have returned, and am horrified by how cavalierly this monster is being treated by those who want to virtue signal without thinking things through.