vice | Are you scared of getting nuked? If you asked me that now, I'd say,
“Not hugely.” But if you had asked me that when I was around ten, I
would have been sobbing before you even finished the question.
I don't know what kids are afraid of these days—if it's just kidnappers
and internet pedophiles or they still think Al-Qaeda is going to blow
up a middle school in Evansville for some reason. When I was a tyke in
the early-90s, though, the big three were killer bees (hand at knee),
drive-by shootings (hand at collarbone), and nuclear annihilation (hand way the fuck up here).
Didn't matter that the Cold War was effectively over and all those
hydrogen bombs, which had been trained at my head since birth, were
still out there and possibly in less reputable hands than even the
Russians. Besides, I had an entire back catalog of prime
nuclear-proliferation cinema to learn my fate from. As soon as the NORAD
computer would freeze up during chess and mutually assure the
destruction of Omaha,
my friends and I would see a flash brighter than a thousand suns, and
those of us who weren't turned into disintegrating skeletons would swell
up like Akira monsters and slosh like chili across
the windshield of the first car that hit us. That's how we were going
to go out. Provided, of course, we hadn't already died from AIDS.
It didn't help learning that the actual results of a for-real nuclear
explosion are way worse than Hollywood has the special effects to
depict. A lot of mainstream accounts of Japan's bombings, like those in
John Hersey's Hiroshima, sort of soft-pedal the body horror
that acute radiation poisoning causes, but they are nevertheless full of
preteen nightmare fodder. Melty-faced Jason Robards doesn't hold a
candle to trying to guess what it feels like turning into a shadow, a permanent shadow, tattooed on the side of a building.
Once you dig a little deeper, you realize the human shadows were the lucky ones.
7 comments:
From the comments at Vice:Now take a step back for a minute and
try to see the whole picture. Lets look at ukraine for example, if your
smart enough, you should have known from the get go ukraines people will
never truly be free. This goes for any country, any group of anti
government protesters, observe who you are really fighting, no matter
what, you will never break the chains, and if you do, say ukraine really
gets true freedom, or say any country takes down its :"system", They
will be bombed or whatever weapon is used. The worlds true leaders are
itching for the chance to make an example to those who fight against the
system, be wise, play along, work your way into the system, and just
stay alive. sooner or later those in power will die of age, the baton
will be passed, just have to make it to that point.http://www.vice.com/read/how-effed-are-nukes?fb_comment_id=fbc_1412125412395623_1412138832394281_1412138832394281
You'd think the March of Dimes would ringing the alarum bells over Kazahkstan (or children and grandchildren of Hiroshima survivors), and yet Singapore has a higher incidence of birth defects per capita. Who fucking bombed Singapore? The weird thing about radiation exposure is how inconsistent the biological response is compared to pretty much every other known carcinogen. People in space, after a day or so, have had every single cell hit at least once with a cosmic ray (a near-light-speed nucleus that shreds DNA like machine gun fire), and yet their little eggies and spermies pretty much shrug it off. The first official guy to die from blue flash poisoning (the Chief Armorer of the United States of America, Lois Slotin, needlessly fucking around with the Demon Core) was with seven other people in the same room. They should have all died in agony soon after as Slotin did, but no. And them Mormon Downwinders? Are they keeping the freaks in the attic? It's much, much, much more complicated (billion year old Promethean nano-technolgy versus ionizing radiation), and our little attention-craving media jelly above, sobbing and squirting out a stain over nuclear annihilation, should perhaps have his soft, wattery buttocks patted and jollied with womanish hands until he calms down. Or send him down to the basement, where, irony, the cinder blocks will irradiate him more than a visit to Semipalatinsk will.
lol..., that.rant.was.legendary.John. Accept no substitutes...,
To the commenter:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/upriser.prod.files/assets/post_files/4161/original.jpg?1399424213
I thought hiding under the desk was fun. Then I read lots of nuke and post apocalyptic SF and realized I didn't have a clue. But then I just Yawned about The Day After in 1980 when Americans were freaking out and I thought, "Didn't you all know about this? What did you think nuclear weapons actually did?"
Now they can delude themselves about global warming, what the hell?
It was always a point of pride knowing we (the steel mills near us) were targeted with at least a 40 megaton bomb, and probably several. It meant those scary Soviets were scare shitless of us, and I always figured I'd just a be a long southeasterly pointing shadow on the playground, right next to the evaporated monkey bars...
So far it looks like everyone is getting what they wanted. Putin's gonna get the arms industry and ports, and the State Department has no problem with an unstable Ukraine being put out of play, a future non-backwards Chechnya for Russia to worry about. Win/win! (Maybe the 21st century fashion is: division lines East/West instead of North/South).
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