Slightly skeery

 - James

In today's paper's opinion section I noticed that one of the cover articles was by a man who goes to our church. My curiosity was piqued and I started reading. Basically, the article was a summary of twenty-five years of action for and against the continued production of nuclear weapons; specifically, it was about the twenty-five year history of a local anti-bomb group called World Citizens for Peace.
I've always had kind of mixed feelings about nukes; on the one hand, they're a valuable asset when it comes to bluffing your way out of a war. On the other hand, they can wipe out civilization as we know it. Hmmmm...overall, I think I'm inclined against their use, but I'm not terribly educated in the matter.
In any case, I learned some, well, scary stuff from this article that I wasn't aware of before. For one thing, I didn't know that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock from seven minutes to midnight to five minutes to midnight. Creepy.
Granted, I'm assuming all those fine people on the Bulletin aren't endowed with clairvoyant powers, but between this and the few other instances I've heard about them and the Clock, I've gotten the impression that they're fairly reliable sources on the subject of nuclear science.
Some other food for thought could be found in a paragraph in the article:

Today, there are still more than 25,000 nuclear warheads in existence--12,000 of them are deployed and 3,500 are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be launched in a matter of minutes. Today's thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs) make the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs seem puny. It takes only one to destroy a city. And 1 percent of the world's nuclear arsenals could destroy human civilization itself.