"Just nuke the bastards." That's the reflexive response millions of people have given for dealing with Iran, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, North Korea. In years past, they said the same for Cuba, North Vietnam and Russia. It's Top down nuclear bomb masturbatory fantasy.

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"Just nuke the bastards."

That's the reflexive response millions of people have given for dealing with Iran, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, North Korea. In years past, they said the same for Cuba, North Vietnam and Russia.

It's Top down nuclear bomb masturbatory fantasy.

I call it masturbatory because it's about power and potency, or, more accurately, impotence. When it comes to war/violence, nuclear weapons are the ultimate porn.

I call it fantasy because nuclear weapons don't work and they never have... in terms of winning anything. Ward Wilson argues this very persuasively. He says that the US defeated Japan using carpet bombing of dozens of cities, that the nuclear bombs used on Nagasaki and Hiroshima did not win the war, just gave the emperor and Japanese generals a face-saving excuse.

I say it's top down because nuclear weapons are the ultimate hard power solution. Hard power is based on threat, force or money. Authoritarians love hard power-- forcing domination on people to make them compliant. The opposite of hard power is soft power, which is Bottom up. Joseph Nye, the author of book, Soft Power, told me that soft power is about attraction. Creating inspiring movies, music, stories, building schools, hospitals bridges-- those are soft power strategies which attract the people. Former State Department policy advisor Anne Marie Slaughter described to me how the future of diplomacy involves building bridges by creating relationships and deepening connections between people with similar interests-- say librarians in Africa and Albuquerque.

But there are millions of people who go with the "nuke the bastards" reflex. Why?

Some people have an investment in nuclear weapons-- Air Force generals, who deliver the bombs, for example. Industries that build components for the bombs or the missiles. Armed services that manage and "protect" the nuclear bombs, bombers, silos.

But then there are millions more who not only do not benefit, but they are hurt by them. After all, Nuclear weapons are among the worst parasites upon humanity and the earth's resources.

These millions are authoritarians, meaning, they are people who need to be dominated and told what to do by dominating authoritarian people. They embrace simple, Top Down solutions, and nuclear bombs are the absolute simplest. Stupid, but simple.

And of course, authoritarian dominators love the nuclear fantasy too. Donald Trump used this similar phrase, "Bomb the sh*t out of them" in his campaign gruntings. I'd wager that for Trump, thinking about nukes gives him some kind of sexual pleasure, or, at the least, makes him feel more manly.

The "nuke the bastards" and "bomb the hell out of them" reflexes are deeply programmed into millions of people, maybe even billions. They have been presented as the ultimate simple solution. But Occams razor would be wrongly applied here. There is no nuclear solution. There is a a nuclear annihilation, nuclear destruction, fast or slow, of the planet. But no nuclear weapons solutions. Those are fantasies that are totally devoid of the smallest amount of reality.

There are no winners when it comes to nuclear weapons in this day and age. The world should do all it can to prevent nuke porn fools like Donald Trump AND Kim Jong Un from having their hands on nuclear triggers.

But ideally we need to get this idea that nuclear weapons are the solution to anything out of people's heads, let alone reflexes. We need to educate people, to the extent that they see soft power as the best answer. And that would include funding diplomacy and new, creative approaches to building soft power, as well as better than we fund the military-- to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

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His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

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