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Vin LoPresti's avatar

"there don't seem to be any adults behind the wheel." Oh they're 21+ all right, but they're dispositionally inclined inclined to want to witness a big boom. As someone who worked for a few years as a science writer for two of the three nuclear weapons (NNSA) national labs, my conversations with nuclear physicists and engineers led me to the conclusion that their supercomputer modeling efforts in behalf of "stockpile stewardship" left them frustrated. Why? Because they were banned from actual testing of their adorable weapons, leaving some doubts that they'd perform to their intended homicidal level. At this and other levels of the nuclear weapons establishment, the sociopaths exert enormous pressure to sustain this madness of refurbishing plutonium triggers and other dastardly pursuits. This represents yet another huge danger to having an unelected "deep state" driving policy decisions in this arena of ongoing madness. Don't ever be deluded into thinking that sane folks are driving this policy. You don't demur from the standard nukes-are-wonderful-deterrents propaganda if you like your quite well-paying gig in that jungle.

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Riff McClavin's avatar

If the placement of troops is what determines a nation's threat level, then the world should be terrified by the United States indeed. Again, why is detente missing from our current conversations?

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