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U.S. Air Force Veteran Envisions How a Nuclear War Would Play Out
Wouldn’t you rather play a nice game of chess? Later. Let’s play Global Thermonuclear War.
It might surprise some, but many professional warfighters in the U.S. military have a distaste for nuclear weapons. After all, something that can kill so indiscriminately is patently offensive to the increasingly surgical capabilities found in modern U.S. military doctrine.
Even former Secretary of State Colin Powell stated, “The one thing that I convinced myself after all these years of exposure to the use of nuclear weapons is that they were useless.”
Or rather, as General Sline (portrayed by actor Steve Forrest) said in the 1985 Cold War comedy Spies Like Us, “A weapon unused… is a useless weapon.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the relative stability of the 1990s, most people moved on from the idea of nuclear war.
It’s over, the U.S. won! No more duck and cover drills!
By the early 2000s, counterterrorism was all the rage. While the U.S. military dedicated itself to the task of rooting out Al Qaeda insurgents, our nuclear arsenal quietly went through numerous upgrades and multi-million-dollar modernization programs — ghastly genies of death, patiently waiting for someone to rub the lamp.
