Essays in Idleness

As Stalin used to say, “Nuclear weapons are only a problem for people with bad nerves.”

There are people whose nerves are almost too good, and Stalin comes to mind as an example. But if it is not apocryphal, and even if it is, I think this one of his better lines. I rank it with, “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my Browning,” long misattributed to Himmler, Goebbels, or Göring. (Stephen Hawking spoke it of Schrödinger’s cat.) Socrates, too, must have said things like that, for he was often politically incorrect. And I, for my part, am with the late Herman Kahn, or was it Lewis Mumford, who said, “Nothing is unthinkable.”

I mention it today — do not fret about nuclear weapons, gentle reader — because, quietly in the background while the pinhead media and the seventeen-headed “intelligence” community of those Natted States are busy eating their President, Iran and North Korea are testing his nerves with “illegal” missile launches, and Beijing just added a line of its own. North Korea certainly has, and Iran probably has nuclear weapons, to go with their fairly long-range delivery systems. I know the latter fact can be denied, but not plausibly: the mullahs have had every opportunity and all the means, plus friends in Pyongyang. Moreover, we might extend our last proposition by adding that, in the life of unstable nations, “Nothing is illegal.”

That is why progressives dream of a single world government: to put all the power in a single set of hands which, with the help of the latest technology, could universally outlaw any peep of dissent from their excruciating nostrums. Frankly, I’d rather nuke them.

Yes, Trump is being tested, but it is hard to get his attention while he is tweeting against his domestic foes; and they are teasing him like crazy. Mad Dog Matthis is, I will suppose, making the decisions to move U.S. fleets around, in case the nonsense becomes intolerable. We trust that Ayatollah Khamenei, and Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, are at least as sane as Stalin. I am not offering odds, however.

Nineteen sixty-two was perhaps the last time nuclear weapons were in the news, appropriately. Since, we have had plenty of peacenik botheration when they were no immediate threat, and indifference when they were one. This is a testimony to the world’s media: that they have managed to miss the point, bigly and consistently, for at least fifty-five years.

Still, panic is not indicated. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but I’m not so sure about nuclear fallout. As one correspondent noted, in response to yesterday’s Idlepost, there were 1,021 nuclear explosions (including multiples) at the Nevada Test Site, going back to the ’fifties. This was an hour northwest of the city of Las Vegas, and not one of its residents has two heads.

Another reminds, that it is important to wash your hands after handling irradiated meat. Why? Because we can’t even trust the stuff to wipe out bacteria.

(Compare anthropogenic global warming, which is the most effeminate threat to the survival of our species I have yet heard. The truth, however regrettable, is that there is no chance the seas will rise fast enough to drown Los Angeles.)

No reason to stay tuned. If nuclear missiles are headed your way, there might be some notification. But it doesn’t really matter: the things move fast, and either you’re in the blam range or you’re not. The same could be said every day of reckless drivers. They will hit you or miss you: what is there to add? And since we’re all going to die anyway, we might direct our prayers to more certain things.