Which brings me back to Vladimir Putin. The strange thing about that other form of planetary suicide, atomic weaponry, is that, since at least the end of the Cold War, it's generally not been on the table (so to speak) or much in the news. Yes, in the Trump years, the president did implicitly threaten to rain nuclear hell on North Korea he called it "fire and fury" and, at one point, spoke of ending the Afghan War with just such a strike, but most of the time from 1990 to late last night, nuclear weapons (Iran, which didn't have them, aside) simply weren't part of the conversation.
Now, don't get me wrong. In those same decades, nuclear arsenals only spread and grew. Nine countries now possess such weaponry and the three great powers on the planet the U.S., China, and Russia have all been hard at work. Russia has been "modernizing" its vast arsenal and China moving rapidly to build up its own.
Since Barack Obama's presidency, the U.S. military-industrial complex has also been and, yes, this is indeed the term often used "modernizing" its already mind-boggling arsenal to the tune of $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion dollars over three decades. That includes, for instance, a new intercontinental ballistic missile known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent that, it's already estimated, will take at least 264 billion of our tax dollars over its lifetime (and that's before the cost overruns even begin!). Keep in mind that this country already had an unmodernized arsenal all too capable of destroying this planet many times over into the distant future. With our 1,357 deployed nuclear weapons (3,750, if you count the "inactive" ones), including land-based nuclear missiles, those transported by strategic bombers, and our nuclear subs wandering the world's waters with their own devastating nukes on board, global destruction would be a given.
With all that activity long underway to remarkably little attention, nuclear weapons and apocalyptic possibilities have once again hit the headlines thanks to Vladimir Putin. After all, as his troops headed into Ukraine, he suddenly and all too publicly issued a directive putting his nuclear forces on "high alert" and offered this gem to the world:
"Whoever tries to hinder us, and even more so, to create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia's response will be immediate. And it will lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history."
To make his point even clearer, he promptly oversaw the test launching of four nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. Since the U.S. still has plenty of tactical nuclear weapons based in Europe, consider us once again, as in the original Cold War, on edge and in a nuclear stand-off. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the Russians threaten to repeat, of all things, the Chernobyl disaster by taking the nuclear plants they once set up and serviced there in a wartime blaze of horror. One has already been captured under hair-raising circumstances.
Looking back, maybe the strangest thing of all is that most Americans, maybe most people on the planet, essentially forgot about nukes. In retrospect, you have to wonder how that was ever possible, especially if you're my age and remember ducking and covering at school in repeated nuclear test drills, while the media of that time focused on whether people should share their personal nuclear shelters with their friends and neighbors. And mind you, that was in the years when, in reality, Russian nuclear weapons couldn't yet reach this country (though the U.S. already had the ability to devastate the communist world).
Here, then, is a strange irony: in the years when we were most truly paying attention, they couldn't have done anything to us. Once they truly could, we essentially began forgetting those weapons. Now, however, the potential destruction of humanity is back on the table and this time around, brilliantly enough, in two different ways.
Green What?
Believe me, when you've been on this planet for 77 years, you feel like you've seen everything. And then, of course, it turns out that you haven't. Not by a long shot. Not faintly. At 14, my grandfather, a Jew, ran away from his home in the city of Lemberg when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Between World Wars I and II, it was called Lvov and belonged to Poland. During that second great war, the Jewish population there was slaughtered by the Nazis. Since the end of that nightmarish war, it's been known as Lviv and it's been part of Ukraine, or rather, if Vladimir Putin has his way, the place that until recently was known as Ukraine. As a result, Lviv is again in the news, big time.
I mean, invading Ukraine at this moment? How truly mad. It's still hard to take in what's happening, including the million-plus children who have already fled that country. Of course, ever more people are in motion on this planet today thanks both to war and climate change. Yet, in a sense, there's really nowhere left to go, is there?
As it turns out, our leaders have done all too good a job of providing options for ending the world. I mean, in a century when it should be hard not to know that, if the burning of fossil fuels isn't brought under control, life as we've known it will cease to exist, two great powers with preening, overweening leaders thought it made far more sense to order their militaries to invade other countries based on lies. Because of that, cities were destroyed and deaths made all too plentiful. Vladimir Putin's ongoing invasion and destruction of Ukraine has been denounced by much of the world led by Joe Biden's America. Russia is now experiencing potentially devastating sanctions, while from sports to entertainment to fast food, much of the planet has been turning its back on Russia.
But here's the odd thing: Russia invaded its neighbor, which once indeed had been part of the Soviet Union. The other great and invasive power I had in mind struck two countries thousands of miles away Iraq (based on the lie that its autocratic ruler was developing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction) and Afghanistan. And yes, as the present conflict will undoubtedly prove a catastrophe for Russia and the people of Ukraine, so those wars proved disasters for the United States but even more so for Afghans and Iraqis. Strangely enough, however, the world didn't condemn the U.S. for its acts. No sanctions were put in place. No weaponry was sent to Afghans or Iraqis to help them defend themselves against the occupying imperial power. And stranger yet, in retrospect, the present president of the United States, then a senator, voted to invade Iraq and subsequently even developed a plan to divide that U.S.-occupied country into three different states.
And so it goes on this endangered planet of ours, while the greenhouse gasses from unending fossil-fuel burning invade our atmosphere with devastating effect, yet create next to no headlines at all.
Armageddon-Makers
Today, 76 years after World War II ended (I was 1 at the time), the heartland of Europe is again embroiled in war, death, and destruction. And more than three decades after the Cold War ended, the new tsar of Russia, now a rickety petro-state with an economy smaller than Italy's, is responsible.
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