...And Love the Bomb

We watched a program on the History Channel last night about the Doomsday Clock. Perhaps I'm just ignorant of such things, but I'd never heard of this before. (I'll bet Alan Moore had though.) I objected a little that this was on the program "Modern Marvels". While it was an interesting look at nuclear brinkmanship over the last sixty years, I don't consider a think-tank of scientists arbitrarily setting a clock's hands to reflect how much of the brown stuff we're in to be a "Marvel". (I wanted to see Aircraft Carriers or Hoover Dam.)

The thing that struck me, watching this program, was what the last sixty years would have been like without The Bomb. The U.S.S.R. was ready, willing, and able to invade large swaths of the world (and was occasionally doing so). They were not so much held in check by conventional weapons. And if they had been it would have been by their use, not just by their existence (as with The Bomb). If you want to take the flip-side of "the U.S.A. is just another Empire" then fine, it kept us in place too.

Another piece of info that got skipped was while they were talking about the Genie in the Bottle. That once it was seen that such a weapon could be invented, it was only a matter of time before it was replicated. To the best of my knowledge (and from another History Channel show) the nuclear weapon has only been invented ONCE. At tremendous cost with astonishing resources. All of the other atomic nations have gotten their intel from the U.S. by various means. (But hey, espionage is no big deal and it's all a bunch of witch hunts.)

So while a nuclear exchange was (is) clearly unwinnable, it probably kept some more "winnable" propositions off the table.