Commentary
Americans, like the planet’s other 7.5 billion people, are not prone to talk or think much about nuclear weapons.
Of course, some of us are old enough to remember how “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD, was supposed to ensure the general peace.
Some recall the eerie Cold War-era nuclear bomb movies like “Dr. Strangelove” or “Fail Safe” or the more recent post-nuclear Armageddon films like “The Book of Eli.”
Millions have grown up referring to the scary “doomsday clock” of atomic scientists that usually ticks closer to a midnight nuclear holocaust in times of crisis.
So the planet is not naïve about the dangers of its 13,000 to 15,000 nuclear weapons. In 1961, the Soviet Union terrified the world when it exploded history’s greatest nuke—the 50-megaton “Tsar Bomba.”
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