a fool's bargain

Since we are on the subject of Dr. Sagan and right-wing fear mongering, i wanted to share an excerpt from another chapter in Billions and Billions. This is a speech that Sagan gave at the 125 anniversary re-dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. it apparently is re-dedicated every 25 years. This is a several page read, but well worth it. Most of you are younger than i am and did not grow up during the cold war with its fear of nuclear war and regular civil defense drills in elementary school. The horror that Dr. Sagan is addressing, as we are see in Jesus and John Wayne, is a direct result of the militarism and fear mongering that the evangelical right made into our culture. We can thank the evangelicals, at least in part, for the horror described in this speech. Again, you are too young to have lived through it on a daily basis, not that what we live through now is any less horrid. I was wondering however, as Sagan describes the nuclear arsenal, where are all these nukes now, and in whose control?

the book chapter has the complete speech:
http://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=file&item=422436

emphasis below is mine

"In 1945, at the close of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union were virtually invulnerable. The United States bounded east and west by vast and impassable oceans, north and south by weak and friendly neighbors-had the most effective armed forces, and the most powerful economy on the planet. We had nothing to fear. So we built nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. We initiated and vigorously pumped up an arms race with the Soviet Union. When we were done, all the citizens of the United States had handed their lives over to the leaders of the Soviet Union. Even today, post-Cold War, post-Soviet Union, if Moscow decides we should die, twenty minutes later we're dead. In nearly perfect symmetry, the Soviet Union had the largest standing army in the world in 1945, and no significant military threats to worry about. It joined the United States in the nuclear arms race so that today every one in Russia has handed their lives over to the leaders of the United States. If Washington decides they should die, twenty minutes later they're dead. The lives of every American and every Russian citizen are now in the hands of a foreign power. I say we have made a fool's bargain. We - we Americans, we Russians - have spent 43 years and vast national treasure in making ourselves exquisitely vulnerable to instant annihilation. We have done it in the name of patriotism and "national security," so no one is supposed to question it."

Dr. Carl Sagan
THOUGHTS ON THE 125TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG
13-SEP-1988

it occurred to me that in more recent times, our school children are still experiencing this horror - traumatized by a deadly threat from current generations - active shooter drills and shelter in place protocols. In this context, the threat is not missiles directed at us, 20 minutes away, but rather our bat-shit crazy neighbor with the arsenal in the back of his pickup truck, perhaps also 20 minutes away, but no less a horror to those precious children in their classrooms.