Unfinished Thoughts

I've long believed that in my lifetime, the world will witness the detonation of a nuclear weapon. Depending on the year, my opinion has varied on whether this will take the form of an accident or intentional use. This opinion goes back at least to post-9/11 when the Daisy Cutter & MOAB bombs were being dropped in attempt to smoke out insurgents in caves and bunkers. They were enormous weapons and for a brief time there were stories and chatter (via early internet comment sections) about how these were "mini nukes" which betrays a staggering ignorance of math and history that shocked me at the time. What I took from that moment was just how profound the loss of generational knowledge about how truly horrific and powerful nuclear weapons really are. The Baby Boomers grew up in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis. Their children (Gen X, mostly) grew up in the later Cold War era with grandparents who had b...