Crazy talk: threats to use nuclear weapons coming from both Russian and U.S. politicians and officials. From James Carden at responsiblestatecraft.org:
There’s an epidemic of loose talk about the use of weapons that could lay waste to the world as we know it
In 1946 reporter John Hersey published a harrowing report from Hiroshima that followed the travails of a number of survivors of the Bomb, including those of Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a Jesuit missionary from Germany.
On a search for water for some of the wounded, Kleinsorge came across a group of survivors
“…about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eye-sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel) Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot.”
Passages such as these revealed the horrors Japanese survivors endured in the aftermath of the American nuclear attack. Hersey’s Hiroshima became, in the view of essayist Roger Angell, “part of our ceaseless thinking about world wars and nuclear holocaust.”And throughout the Cold War, the idea of fighting a nuclear war was anathema to the respective leaders of the American and Soviet superpowers — a revulsion that found its ultimate expression in the pledge made by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan that “a nuclear cannot be won and should never be fought.”
Yet little by little, as the Cold War has receded into memory, American and Russian leaders have torn up a series of arms control measures beginning with the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty (2002), the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty (2019), and the Open Skies treaty (2020). For its part, in 2023 Russia unilaterally withdrew from both the Convention Armed Forces in Europe treaty and suspended participation in the landmark New START treaty.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 