My generation grew up with the specter of nuclear war, the threat of the entire world being snuffed out in one giant fireball. We called in Mutually Assured Destruction, or M.A.D. for short, for only a madman would threaten nuclear war.
Surely no sane person would ever threaten to start a nuclear conflict:
"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen... he has been very threatening beyond a normal state. They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before," President Trump said.
More than three decades ago, I was stationed on the East/West German border. I lived with the thought that had war broken out, my life expectancy was nine minutes. It was unlikely, due to the proximity to the border, that my squad would complete even one of our assigned missions. I was trained on tactics and weapons that would never be used, as we likely would have been vaporized in the opening salvos of the war by Soviet tactical nuclear weapons clearing the Fulda Gap for for their advancing armies.
The idea of nuclear conflict was probably a bit more real to me and my fellow soldiers. When the Soviet Union fell peacefully, I thought it would be the end of the madness—the end of M.A.D. Only 11 years after I left the Army, my son was born into a world where the idea of global nuclear warfare was rapidly fading into history books.
Then 9/11 happened and the world changed—not for the better.
We have been fighting the endless “War on Terror” ever since that day. Instead of M.A.D., now we feared that some madman would set off a dirty bomb, or worse, get their hands on a nuclear warhead from the former Soviet Union. The idea of a nation-state nuking another nation-state was still fading away into history, but now there were rumors of Iran, Libya, and Iraq building nuclear weapons.
Iraq gaining access to a nuclear weapon turned out to be a lie, Libyan leader Gaddafi gave up his quest for nuclear weapons in 2003, and Iran ended their pursuit of being a nuclear power in 2015, under increasing diplomatic pressure.
But North Korea, often considered a joke by many Americans, would make agreement after agreement to end their nuclear program only to renege on deal after deal. Invading North Korea to end their nuclear program was always out of the question, as they have enough conventional artillery aimed at Seoul to cause millions of casualties within minutes of any conflict breaking out.
So here we are in 2017, 23 years after President Clinton and President Yeltsin agreed to stop pointing nuclear weapons at each other. Our current White House resident is threatening nuclear war against North Korea, and North Korea is threatening to attack U.S. targets.
As a child, I learned that one should never provoke an animal that is backed into a corner. North Korea is a pariah in the international community. They are a country where the cult of personality surrounding their leader sees no problem with starving the North Korean people in pursuit of what they see as the only means to preserve their iron grip on power. Their leadership is like a wild animal trapped in a corner. They see no way out, and the last thing our leadership should do is poke them with a stick.
This statement:
"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen... he has been very threatening beyond a normal state. They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before," President Trump said.
That is the definition of poking them with a stick, and no good can come from it. Hillary Clinton said it best during the presidential debates:
Hopefully cooler heads in the GOP will prevail and remove the mistake currently sitting in the White House before it’s too late. My generation lived through the threat of a nuclear holocaust.
I do not want another generation to live through that.