Are We Worrying Enough About Nuclear Weapons?
What if your meth-dealing cousins Keith had enough explosives to blow up the entire town?
Everyone is always worried about the world ending. That’s because we have just the one world. If humanity lived on lots of planets, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal.
“The world’s ending.”
“Which one? We have plenty.”
But as is, we’re pretty reliant on this world and need it to stick around. That’s why we don’t like things that threaten the world.
One thing that threatens the world is climate change. That could raise the temperature by one degree in fifty years. That’s scary… I guess. But when I was a kid, the world-ending thing we worried about was a nuclear holocaust. That could cause the temperature of the world to raise by 10,000 degrees in a second. So it’s like six times scarier than climate change. Maybe seven times.
At some point we stopped worrying about a nuclear holocaust, though. I guess that’s because the Soviet Union ended. Before, the Soviets were like, “We will destroy the U.S.A.!” and they had the nuclear warheads to do it. It’s just it wouldn’t have turned out very nice for them because we also had nuclear warheads.
Now, while the Soviet Union is gone, its nuclear warheads are not. Instead, Russia has them, and Russia’s attitude toward the U.S. is more like a shrug, “I guess they’ll probably collapse or something.” So while they’re not our friends, they’re not (very) actively trying to destroy us.
Still, it’s disconcerting. Russia is not a super stable country. Them having nuclear weapons is like if your white trash cousin Keith who is always getting arrested for dealing meth has enough explosives to blow up the entire town. He probably won’t blow up the entire town — that doesn’t help him sell meth — but he’s still not the guy you’d want with that power.
There are other countries with nuclear weapons, but some of them are like the U.K. and France. That’s like your neighbor Dave having a ton of explosives. He’s kind of a loser, but he works at the bank and seems fairly stable. Not really worried about him.
But then there is China. That’s Greg, this absolutely sociopathic scumbag who is probably involved in organized crime. Him having enough explosives to blow up the town is concerning, but you know he’s not going to do that because that’s where he makes all his money.
But there is also North Korea, and they have nuclear weapons now. That’s like Steve who lives nearby — a paranoid schizophrenic who is always biting people — having enough explosives to blow up the town. He makes meth dealer Keith look like a responsible citizen in comparison.
So, I know it’s not a slight warming over decades, but there is reason to be worried about nuclear weapons. So what do we do about it?
Some say we need an iron dome, but there are problems with that. For one, nuclear explosions melt iron. For another, it would be very dark under a iron dome.
Plus, the way to intercept ICBMs is in space since they have to pass through space to nuke people (if an ICBM stayed in atmosphere, it would be illegally crossing borders and the people who launched the ICBM would get in trouble). So we need to stop the nuclear missiles in space. So how do we do that? There’s one obvious solution:
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