Don't Forget The Nukes

Back when I was considering rescuing hiphop from itself, I wrote a poem in the mode of Public Enemy's 'Don't Believe the Hype'. It started like this and went downhill from there:

 don't forget the nukes

blast!

caught you livin in the fast lane

well here it is again, another birth pain

just another trillion or three under the deep sea

comin up with a mirv to fricasee me

some deny it defy it try to forget it

but their taxes buy it on credit

but can i grab the mic and say it clearly

there's my forty acres, we paid dearly

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I never forget the nukes completely, but sometimes I need to be reminded. This morning, waiting for a doctor's care I watched the following video. 

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It rather hit me like a ton of bricks that the possibility for a massive explosion was possible and covered up. It reminded me of the salient phrase from last week which will get into Cobb's Rules. Don't plan for the small emergency, plan for the Black Swan emergency. When all of your emergency plans rule out the unthinkable, it means you haven't done enough thinking. And the inevitable result is that you cover your ass, lie and fudge. That creates risk by definition, and when you hide that risk you don't get to choose whose life it affects. That's where my head is at these days - the consequences of not thinking of the biggest big picture - of not considering your own mortality in it all. So it does not surprise me that the Party official who covered up the scope of the disasters committed suicide.

I think all of us have, or should have after watching this documentary instead of something dumb and funny on television, a deep sense that we should be getting rid of nuclear weapons. It is a political consensus that is awaiting some common sense talk. When you recognize that 600,000 Soviets fought in the war against Chernobyl we shouldn't have any problem or fear making similar efforts in containing proliferation.