Tongue In Cheek?

A report in the news that scientists are seriously discussing amelioratives for global warming. Since we can't seem to win our Leader's attention to the problem and no one can think of a way to cut back on China's growth, some thought is now being given to learning to live with the problem. Umbrellas in space, "tinkering" with the clouds, "trick" the ocean. I realize we can't expect people to give up their SUVs or their air conditioning. And perhaps these "reformists" are right. We can't eliminate illegal drugs so we learn to live with a carousel of injustice: we keep the jails full, only the bodies change. Hey, that even provides employment. As with burglars and terrorists, just what would these beer-bellied rednecks do for a living if they couldn't become security guards? But I think the proposals for study -- these are ideas from academics so, of course, they need study -- are far too timid. My proposal has already been studied and it has welcome side effects: Nuclear Winter.

Nuclear Winter is guaranteed to lower the temperature, much like an ice age. We even have records and journals that tell us about the year without a summer:1816. The United States survived, and look where we are today. Just think what massive, vaporizing explosions, heavy cloud cover with dust and soot blocking that sunlight along with toxic gases and radiation, just think of the problems that might solve. Now I realize that some might worry about what would happen to us here in our own homeland, where one day perhaps the grass itself will grow red, white and blue from teratogenic changes. The nice thing about thermonuclear war today is that no enemy can challenge us. We are IT! Check out this and for the religious folks, one of the authors teaches at a religious university! Our land has a fine history of figuring out solutions to problems. Centuries ago we were considered a nation of tinkerers, or engineers. Give us a problem and we can solve it.

Over 40 years ago, Herman Kahn, a physicist at the Rand Corporation, wrote On Thermonuclear War, that laid out the details of using the H-bomb and surviving. His ideas molded our nuclear strategy and they still do. A contemporaneous reviewer of that book, James Newman, wrote: "This is a moral tract on mass murder: how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it." We are killing people left and right in Iraq, thinking about it with regard to Iran and North Korea, and, as I suspect and have written, have it in the playbook for Russia. With our "full-spectrum dominance" we really can get away with it. It would do wonders for overpopulation, oil depletion, global warming. I think it's way overdue for us, a nation of doers, to dump our squeamishness, our lip service to morality, and get down to business, the business of saving the world. As a US general put it during Viet Nam: We had to destroy the village to save it. Or as Randy Newman sang in Political Science: "They all hate us anyhow so let's drop the big one now."