I just saw a report and video on the Daily Mail’s website that Russian TV commentators laughed about nuking New York City. Am I missing something? Do those pundits have any idea that the place they call home isn’t a safe location in a nuclear war?
Is this how far we’ve come in folly and ignorance that supposedly educated people have no idea that nuclear bombs do not have a limited effect? Are those people so unaware that they suppose an invulnerability to radioactive fallout and a nuclear winter that might drop world temperatures below Siberian winter numbers, killing crops everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere?
There’s a simulation that the pundits and smirking Russian journalists need to see on YouTube. It’s not unrealistic. It shows the rapid demise of more than 60% of the Russian population in just days after its leaders start of a nuclear war and more people dying within weeks and months. All infrastructure would be decimated; crops that survived would be poisoned, and at -85 degrees Celsius, just about all the remaining Russians who didn’t die from radiation poisoning, would succumb to the relentless cold of the Nuclear Winter that Carl Sagan predicted long ago. And that nuclear winter would be hemisphere-wide, so every country in the Northern Hemisphere would suffer.
The snarky smirking Russian pundits apparently demonstrate that the Russian educational system is as broken as the American system. How some 75 years into the nuclear age and how after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl incidents anyone can be unaware of the dangers of unleashed radiation is quite a serious indictment of educators.
If there are, in fact, Russians who believe that a nuclear war goes in only one direction and that the United States, the UK, and France would not respond in kind and maybe to an even greater degree, then the Russian school system needs an overhauling. Sixty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis there are still people who have no concept of the lethality of such bombing.
That callous Russian “highbrows” laugh at the idea of vaporizing millions of people is a disheartening display of depravity. But I suppose that such compunctionless attitudes abound in every country. I think of those who fall under the influence of gangs. Drive-by shootings are not uncommon. Human life is, as many have said, “cheap here.” And it’s always been cheap for those without a belief in the inherent value of life. Assassinations have been the modus operandi since Cain and Abel.
If estimates by statisticians are correct, more than 100 billion humans have come and gone. In the past century alone more than 200,000,000 million have been killed in acts of violence, some impulsive and others, like the Holocaust, carefully planned. The question those Russian pundits need to ask is whether or not a “planned” bombing would engender an impulsive response. And once impulse is at the controls, there is no guarantee of moderation. No nuclear war can be “little.” As the super computer reasons in War Games, “The only way to win is not to play.”
I will put aside the argument from consequence because I find that threats have little effect on human depravity. The threat of jail, for example, doesn’t prevent criminal behavior. Even the threat of capital punishment seems to have no effect—there are more, not fewer, murders. That fact leads me to ask whether or not any generation can be educated about the value of life. Was the Holocaust not lesson enough? No, not if one considers the 2022 massacre in Bucha, Ukraine, or the bombing of Red Cross locations in that country during the Russian invasion.
So, the Russian pundits today and some other country’s pundits tomorrow will advocate for and laugh about killing on an unprecedented scale. And none of them will believe they will suffer for the actions they propose. Such people will plague every generation because they will be fundamentally stupid as well as uneducated in the fundamentals of human survival on a planet full of natural risks. And we can add to that the self-righteous. Iran, for example, claims it supports the Palestinians while at the same time seeking nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. Am I missing something? Don’t the Palestinians live in the very region that Iranian weapons would destroy?
The policy of mutually shared destruction that has kept the world free from a nuclear war cannot prevent those in this or in the next generation from ignoring self-imposed threats to their own existence. The Russian pundits are models of ignorance, human depravity, and folly.
Is this how far we’ve come in folly and ignorance that supposedly educated people have no idea that nuclear bombs do not have a limited effect? Are those people so unaware that they suppose an invulnerability to radioactive fallout and a nuclear winter that might drop world temperatures below Siberian winter numbers, killing crops everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere?
There’s a simulation that the pundits and smirking Russian journalists need to see on YouTube. It’s not unrealistic. It shows the rapid demise of more than 60% of the Russian population in just days after its leaders start of a nuclear war and more people dying within weeks and months. All infrastructure would be decimated; crops that survived would be poisoned, and at -85 degrees Celsius, just about all the remaining Russians who didn’t die from radiation poisoning, would succumb to the relentless cold of the Nuclear Winter that Carl Sagan predicted long ago. And that nuclear winter would be hemisphere-wide, so every country in the Northern Hemisphere would suffer.
The snarky smirking Russian pundits apparently demonstrate that the Russian educational system is as broken as the American system. How some 75 years into the nuclear age and how after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl incidents anyone can be unaware of the dangers of unleashed radiation is quite a serious indictment of educators.
If there are, in fact, Russians who believe that a nuclear war goes in only one direction and that the United States, the UK, and France would not respond in kind and maybe to an even greater degree, then the Russian school system needs an overhauling. Sixty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis there are still people who have no concept of the lethality of such bombing.
That callous Russian “highbrows” laugh at the idea of vaporizing millions of people is a disheartening display of depravity. But I suppose that such compunctionless attitudes abound in every country. I think of those who fall under the influence of gangs. Drive-by shootings are not uncommon. Human life is, as many have said, “cheap here.” And it’s always been cheap for those without a belief in the inherent value of life. Assassinations have been the modus operandi since Cain and Abel.
If estimates by statisticians are correct, more than 100 billion humans have come and gone. In the past century alone more than 200,000,000 million have been killed in acts of violence, some impulsive and others, like the Holocaust, carefully planned. The question those Russian pundits need to ask is whether or not a “planned” bombing would engender an impulsive response. And once impulse is at the controls, there is no guarantee of moderation. No nuclear war can be “little.” As the super computer reasons in War Games, “The only way to win is not to play.”
I will put aside the argument from consequence because I find that threats have little effect on human depravity. The threat of jail, for example, doesn’t prevent criminal behavior. Even the threat of capital punishment seems to have no effect—there are more, not fewer, murders. That fact leads me to ask whether or not any generation can be educated about the value of life. Was the Holocaust not lesson enough? No, not if one considers the 2022 massacre in Bucha, Ukraine, or the bombing of Red Cross locations in that country during the Russian invasion.
So, the Russian pundits today and some other country’s pundits tomorrow will advocate for and laugh about killing on an unprecedented scale. And none of them will believe they will suffer for the actions they propose. Such people will plague every generation because they will be fundamentally stupid as well as uneducated in the fundamentals of human survival on a planet full of natural risks. And we can add to that the self-righteous. Iran, for example, claims it supports the Palestinians while at the same time seeking nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. Am I missing something? Don’t the Palestinians live in the very region that Iranian weapons would destroy?
The policy of mutually shared destruction that has kept the world free from a nuclear war cannot prevent those in this or in the next generation from ignoring self-imposed threats to their own existence. The Russian pundits are models of ignorance, human depravity, and folly.
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