By Mickey Friedman
November 2, 2017
One man told us the meeting was great; the other was so concerned by what happened he called him a moron.
Which isn’t so unusual considering how many of us are morons, and how many meetings are a waste of time. But what makes these men and this particular meeting so special is that we’re talking about the President of the United States and our Secretary of State.
And thanks to NBC News we know more about the “moron” remark.
Much of what POTUS has said these many months has provoked a similar response from me, but I wondered what prompted the former head of ExxonMobil to lose his cool about the Leader of the Free World.
Now we know why.
Born in the Age of the Atom, I routinely practiced being burnt to a crisp by the Rooskies. In New York City, we’d often pretend that Nikita Khrushchev had lost his mind and sent Soviet missiles raining down on us. We never quite knew why that was, but the air raid sirens would blare and our teachers would pretend that it made sense to crouch beneath our desks. We wore dog tags just in case some parents who lived but a few blocks away survived and wanted to see if their kids had made it.
Someone with a sense of humor gave me a card with some sage advice: “In the event of nuclear war, bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
Having read “Hiroshima,” I knew more than most about what was at stake, and so I marched many times to the United Nations and demonstrated for peace. Chanting “Ban The Bomb!”
Miraculously, given the massive numbers of nuclear weapons and the stupidity of some of those in charge, we have managed not to blow ourselves up. More so today with The Trumpster, it’s worth remembering that we are THE ONLY nation to have used nuclear weapons. Not the Iranians. The North Koreans. Talk about terror. Of the 255,000 people living in Hiroshima, 66,000 died and 69,000 were injured by our uranium bomb. Over the next five years the death toll increased to 200,000.
Of the 195,000 inhabitants of Nagasaki who suffered our plutonium bomb 40% more powerful, 39,000 died and 25,000 were injured. Over the next five years the death toll reached 140,000. Luckily, Nagasaki had evacuated their schoolchildren. Today’s bombs are anywhere from 7 to 100 times more powerful.
So back to July 20. 2017 when the Joint Chiefs, the Secretaries of Defense and State gave the President and Vice-President a detailed briefing on our military preparedness and the various threats we face.
A slide they prepared showed the gradual reduction of our and Russia’s nuclear weapons from the Cold War days to the present. Three officials who were present told NBC that the President said “he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.” That “Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.”
This prompted the military leaders to offer the President a short history about efforts to prevent nuclear annihilation. Maybe they mentioned the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970. Which was signed by 191 different states and parties prompted by a hard-earned and shared understanding:
“Considering the devastation that would be visited upon all mankind by a nuclear war and the consequent need to make every effort to avert the danger of such a war and to take measures to safeguard the security of peoples … [and] Believing that the proliferation of nuclear weapons would seriously enhance the danger of nuclear war …”
They pledged “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
I assume someone told the President about the New START Treaty of 2011 between us and the Russians which limits the numbers to 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments while providing for strict verification measures. Limiting both nations to 1,550 nuclear warheads on these weapons and 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments.
Numbers still large enough to guarantee the destruction of human life on this planet many times over while providing a pathway for succession for the roaches, who look forward to the chance to finally run things.
Yet President Trump made it known that when it comes to annihilation, enough is not enough.
Please be scared. Please consider taking to the streets. To march to ban his bombs. My dear and in-love friends Sam and Stasia just got married. I’d like them to make it to eighty.
And if we fail, we can always bend over.
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“Bend Over” was first published in the October 12, 2017 issue of The Berkshire Record.
THE TREATY ON THE NON-PROLIFERATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
http://www.un.org/en/conf/npt/2005/npttreaty.html
New START
https://www.state.gov/t/avc/newstart/index.htm
Mickey Friedman’s Berkshire-based I Ching mysteries, “Danger” and “Folly”, as well as his non-fiction “A Red Family” are available on Amazon.com. His films can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/user/bluehillfilms