Time to rewatch 'Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'

I have to admit to some surprise that the U.S. military is now shooting down objects that stray (or are intentionally sent) into our airspace. First it was the rogue balloon that may or may not have been gathering military intelligence for the Chinese... but probably was. Today a second "object" was shot down off the coast of Alaska.

This second object was not a gigantic balloon, but was "only" 40,000 feet up and our rationale for shooting it down was that it might cause a safety threat to civilian aircraft. After all, there are so many planes flying that high at that latitude (ha!). 

I would guess that President Biden was uninterested in taking more heat from the Angry White People Party by allowing another object to "threaten" our sovereign airspace. The Chinese balloon passed across the entire width of the country a few days ago, before we shot it down so the debris would land in the ocean. 

So there was little hesitation before the order to fire.

I read today that North Korea may have enough ICBM missiles to overwhelm our west coast air defenses, should they choose to fire them all at once, and should they actually have built missiles that can survive reentry into the atmosphere. That is scary, and we know so little about North Korean leaders and their motivation that even the threat of complete annihilation of their country in retaliation may not be enough to deter them.

It seems more scary to South Koreans and Japanese governments and citizens, I assume, since they are so much closer. 

On a more positive note, the threat of Putin and the Russian military using tactical nukes, or any other kind of nuclear weapons, seems to have faded a bit. After all, it's been almost a year since the disastrous (for all) Russian invasion of Ukraine and an unrelenting series of embarrassments for the Russian military... but the nukes were never launched.

Russia appears to be going for the old-fashioned "throw half a million troops at the enemy" approach, though their renewed offensive has not yet begun, and maybe won't ever. But would you bet on Putin backing down? 

I am old enough to remember (dimly) having atomic attack drills at Roosevelt Elementary in Iowa City. It is often a joke these days, but we really were instructed to sit under our second-grade desks for five minutes during those drills. We had to be quiet, probably to attract less attention from the bombs as they would fall all around us. The theory, I guess, was that if we could just avoid being hit by the fallout itself as it fell to the ground, we would be fine. 

Ah, those were the good old days.

Nuclear Armageddon might be closer than ever, or at least since the Cuban missile crisis, but what's a guy supposed to do? In the end, aren't we all betting that opposing militaries will not make the fatal misstep and that our military has defensive weapons we can count on? We don't know, of course, but we need to believe those things.

There are much more immediate threats all around us to worry about. Last week, the feds arrested a couple rabid right wingers who had serious plans to bring total chaos to Baltimore by taking out electrical substations with various "legal" weapons. Evidently, this is not only possible but smart money would have to be on these sorts of attacks coming to an electrical substation near you and me soon. 

If you need me, I'll be in my bunker.