Edging Closer to a Nuclear Nightmare

When I think of a nuclear nightmare I think of the ghost towns of Chernobyl. 

Twenty-five years after the reactor exploded...

I think of the deformed children, the cancers, and the poisoned earth.

Or I think about the continuing horror of Fukushima.

Where the hell fires still burn.

But now I see that I also have to worry about a new report. 

United Nations nuclear inspectors have concluded that Iran has acquired the technical means to design a nuclear weapon and would require about six months to enrich uranium to the quality needed for a bomb if it decided to do so, according to officials familiar with the evidence.

And whether the hawks in Israel will use it as an excuse to attack Iran. Which would almost certainly bring down the fragile global economy, and lead us into a new age of nuclear terrorism, and dirty bombs.

And if that wasn't scary enough, now there's a report that the Pakistani military is so afraid of the United States, it's moving its nukes around in ordinary delivery vans.

The nukes travel “in civilian-style vehicles without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic,” according to a blockbuster story on the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in The Atlantic. Marc Ambinder and Jeffrey Goldberg write that tactical nuclear weapons travel down the streets in “vans with a modest security profile.” Somewhere on a highway around, say, Karachi, is the world’s most dangerous 1-800-FLOWERS truck.

The Navy SEAL raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden has made important Pakistani generals think that the U.S. military’s next target is Pakistani nukes. So off the vans go, along what Ambinder and Goldberg term “congested and dangerous roads,” trying to throw off the scent of the U.S., with little more than hope to protect them from an adventurous highwayman.

Or little more than a prayer to protect them from the Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or their handlers and supporters in the Pakistani military.

Great eh? So much for The Great War on Terror.

I suppose for those old enough to have survived the Cold War it must be a great distraction. Why worry about a piddly global economic meltdown, when you can worry about a nuclear nightmare?

But what are we going to tell the new generation? That we are going to torch the planet, and seed it with radiation for good measure?

Wait. Let me tell them.

Hey kiddies !!! I've got great news.

We're going back to the 1950s. 

To meet Burt the Turtle !!!!!

Won't that be EXCITING?




You know when I say Occupy the World, I also mean Save the World.

Save us from the warmongers and the nuclear maniacs.

Before they destroy us all...