"Nobody Wins a Nuclear War" But "Success" is Possible (fwd)

[Bill Stewart]

At 10:59 PM 2/18/2011, J.A. Terranson wrote:
>On Sat, 19 Feb 2011, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> > Hysterical. I'm glad that particular madness is mostly over.
>
>Me too.  Practicing "Duck and Cover!" at school always left you with a
>particularly grim schoolday.

Yeah.  Al-Qaeda and their ilk were really wimpy terrorists compared to 
forty years of "we can blow up the world N times over and we've got the 
crazy generals to do it!" nuclear terrorism.  I was a kid during the Cuban 
Missile Crisis, and one of my neighbors had dug up their back yard to put 
in a bomb shelter.

It was really freaky the first time I heard the Emergency Broadcast System 
come on the radio in the ?early 90s? and say "this is not a test" - they 
were using it for flood warnings during a storm, which is a sensible thing 
to do, but before that it had always been "this is a test of the 'let you 
know that the Russians and Americans are trying to blow up the world' alarm 
system", whether it was EBS or CONELRAD or whatever, so by the time they 
got to the "flooding" part, I'd already mentally been through the "WTF? The 
politicians haven't been saber-rattling at each other, is this some 
surprise attack?  How fast can I get home to my wife?" panic 
attack.  They'd probably been using it that way for several years, just not 
at times I'd been driving with the car radio on.