Bombs in your backyard

If you have followed this blog for a while now, you no doubt know of my fascination with/deep fear of nuclear war.

It all started for me at the tender age of eight.  It was summertime and I watched an NBC News special hosted by John Chancellor that broke down step by step what would happen during a full-tilt nuclear exchange between the two superpowers at the time.  Scared the daylights out of me.  So much so, I could not stop reading everything that I could get my hands on regarding the subject.

Fast forward to today.  We don't live with that Cold War, nuclear ax hanging over our heads anymore.  Or do we?  The President of Russia just announced that it would target nuclear weapons at U.S. anti-missile sites in Europe.  When Putin was in office, he ordered the Russian Air Force to resume bomber patrols just as they used to during the Cold War.  Yet our leadership tells us that we're on the way to disarmament...all while spending more than ever before on nuclear weapons and retaining a stockpile of 5,113 warheads.

All this comes from Mother Jones and their self-composed map of remaining nuclear weapons sites and power plants in the U.S.  It's a nifty map, just like the kind I used to study and imagine where the first strike targets would be during nuclear war.  After reading the comments section at the bottom of the page, I know that several readers found numerous errors in the location of power plants.  That may be and I don't even know why the authors included power plants in the map as they have little to nothing to do with weapons.  The locations of missile silos and bomber bases are accurate.  Just check it out with a Google search or on Global Security.org.  Amazingly enough, the Department of Defense does nothing to keep these locations a secret.  Trust me, I've looked at them all on Google Earth for years now.

So check it out.  See how near a target you are.  The one bit of good news I can find about today's nuclear scenarios is that a full exchanged is now deemed unlikely.  Utterly destroying another nation leaves you with no one who can surrender and nothing useful to conquer.  The new tactic is to disable by hitting key installations, especially if they border on population centers, such as Long Beach, California, Jacksonville, Florida, or Norfolk, Virginia.  

Living here in Chicago, there's very little of military value in the new scheme of things.  So I've got that going for me.  Which is nice.



Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets