MY VIEW

Nuclear war is the real threat

BY DOUG ROGERS
Posted 8/16/22

There is a long list of incredibly serious issues that our society and its governmental instruments seem entirely incapable of addressing. Everyone likely has their own version, but I’d like to push one issue to the front of our consciousness, and that is the threat we face from the growing possibility of nuclear war.

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MY VIEW

Nuclear war is the real threat

Posted

There is a long list of incredibly serious issues that our society and its governmental instruments seem entirely incapable of addressing. Everyone likely has their own version, but I’d like to push one issue to the front of our consciousness, and that is the threat we face from the growing possibility of nuclear war.

We have lived with this threat since the 1940s, but the attitudes and awareness of it have gone through many transformations. From a naive belief in the 1950s that with enough shovels, America could survive and win a nuclear war, to the 1980s, when the absurdity of the mutually assured destruction pact brought hundreds of thousands of people around the world into the streets in protest, public consciousness has shaped government policy. 

There was a spate of films made in the early ‘80s that tried to show in graphic detail the actual effects such a war would have. “The Day After,” “Threads,” and “Testament” all provided a realistic depiction of the hollowness of believing there could be a post-war society. In every way, nuclear war would mean the worst possible outcome for humanity and the planet itself.

The public outcry at that time put pressure on leaders Gorbachev and Reagan to reach diplomatic agreements that lessened the tension between the two empires. With the collapse of the Soviet Union a few years later, there was a growing sense that we had reached a post-nuclear-threat era. And in the generations since, complacency has taken its toll, to the point where people have lost clear associations between the course our government takes in its foreign policies and the unspeakable catastrophe that awaits us.

Propaganda does its work on otherwise intelligent people by tapping into a deeper mythology, implanted early in life. The most fundamental mythology we are taught is that our side are the good guys, and the other side are the bad guys. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s menacing of Taiwan, many people feel certain that this formulation is absolutely correct, while forgetting that the United States has invaded and menaced its smaller neighbors for decades. 

We should be sobered by the knowledge that in Russia and China, people also believe that their side is justified, presumably convinced by the same method.

In a nuclear war there will be no distinction between good guys and bad guys. The civilization that allows this to happen will be the bad guys. Feel-good moral posturing has no place in our approach to this issue. The vast masses of people around the world would free themselves of the shadow of nuclear annihilation if they could, just as it should cross all partisan divides here at home. 

It’s time we take action commensurate with the direness of our situation, and ban nuclear weapons once and for all. If you’re not sure, just watch the movies.

Doug Rogers lives in Long Eddy, NY.

war, threat, nuclear warfare, international affairs

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