"it is not a birthright"

Drinkers for Disarmament,

I've noted the rumours that are rife within military intelligence circles at the minute that them damned Ruskies are working on developing a nuclear torpedo.
What a jolly jape that would be!
You can understand My Mate Vlad's response to DJ Trump!'s promise on the campaign trail that, while he really would prefer a world without nukes, but seeing the USA has got them, he's going to build the Biggest, Best and most Beewdiful thermonuclear weapons there are.
Putin has probably already got the biggest muthafukka, so why not get a sneaky one going too?
If you just want to blow up a random port city or some naval installation, then why not let a Big One go underwater from a submarine, and see what happens.
It'd make a right mess of whatever they were after, but it's likely they're heading down a dead-end street.
The only comparable thing I can think of is the one and only nuclear artillery shot.
That's right, shoot The Bomb out of a gun.
Great idea.
It was Upshot–Knothole Grable [the boffins must've thought that one up over a long pissy lunch].
It happened at the Nevada Test Site back in '53.
They managed to lob the artillery shell - which weighed about a third a tonne - only about ten kilometres away before it went up...bahoompha!
It had an yield of about 15kt, roughly the same as Little Boy at Hiroshima and it was of the same type of atom bomb, but it wasn't very successful.
Far too close to the very heavy artillery to be of any use to an advancing army, and it only knocked over a few jeeps and armoured personnel carriers due an unforeseen shock pressure wave anomaly it created due to it's detonation height and weird physics I don't pretend to understand.
Nah, not worth it, the Yanks concluded, and they never did it again, despite a fairly impressive mushroom cloud.

16mm film courtesy US Dept. of Energy.

But The Donald reckons he's gonna get one up on Putin, who's been accused of violating the 30-year-old Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty [INF - remember that one? The Reagan & Gorbachev rapprochement], which effectively bans the use or development of any nuclear missile that travels between 500 and 5,500 kilometres.
The US and the then Soviet Union dismantled more than two and a half thousand nukes because of it.
The idea originally was to protect Europe from tactical nuclear warfare.
Never mind the nuclear torpedo fantasy, the Pentagon says straight up to anyone who'll listen that the Putinites have also been secretly working on a rapidly deployable cruise missile system for that exact range, which may or may not be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
No, no, no.
So what does the Trumpotus do?
He orders Defence to start work on their own submarine based missile, with a live warhead, to do the exact same thing.
Voila!
After many decades of disarmament from the insanity and stupendous cost of the enormous nuclear stockpiles held during the Cold War - don't you worry about Fat Boy Kim - the real serious nuclear arms race is now back on.
Have no doubt about it.
The level of mistrust between the superpowers is like a smouldering volcano hanging out for an eruption, constantly simmering; it never stops once it really gets going.
That's dangerous.
With The Donald in the White House and the mid-terms this year and Putes struggling to get out the vote in a one-party election while he's still busy being in the meddling caper, it's only going to get worse.
This week's edition of Time magazine has a couple of excellent yarns on The Bomb for the layman, and in there is a grim warning to the generations coming on in a quote from Air Force General Paul Selva, Vice-Chairman, US Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicating that the phenomena of a world without nuclear warfare for 72 years is just plain lucky:
"Strategic stability in the world between our nuclear competitors and our nuclear peers has been assumed. It is not a birthright".
And not only has the President of the United States made it clear he also wants to violate the INF himself in some tit-for-tat, even scarier is the fact that he's apparantly ordered the Nevada Test Site [which has been very effectively mothballed for yonks - they even do monthly visits for nuclear tourists] to be put back on enough of a footing so they can test a nuclear weapon there within six months if required [bugger the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty], according to Time.
Nothing sinister of course, just to make sure the damnable things still work, as he's planning to spend about $US1.2 TRILLION on 'modernising' and maintaining the entire US nuclear stockpile of at least six and a half thousand weapons in various states of repair and readiness, and build more, and he doesn't want to waste that kind of cash.
The sheer scale of the greenbacks required would go a long way to reconstructing America's rotting civil infrastructure and build many, many Big Beautiful Walls, if you want, but not only does Eisenhower's all-powerful military/industrial complex have a friendly ear in the Oval Office, they've got a complicit Commander-in-Chief, and aren't they going for it?
There is a shitload of money to be made in mass destruction, as always.
I know, I know, you've guessed it, I've got a bee in my bonnet about The Bomb...again.
Of course I'm simply farkin' outraged by all of this, but why doesn't any of it surprise?
This is not sabre rattling or even international posturing anymore, it's spoiling for a fight.
Five-star generals and their military strategists who have this fanciful notion that "tactical" nuclear warfare is actually possible are fools to themselves and are a very heavy burden on the planet, because in this caper, it's all or nothing, baby.
The Trumpotus, of course, is enamoured by the concept that you can selectively annihilate your enemies for all time in a "limited" way, at the push of the Big Beautiful Nuclear Button.
Along the lines of the most hated Senator in Washington, Ted Cruz, who openly says he wouldn't mind if he could see if "sand glows in the dark".
Little wonder the "Doomsday Clock" has shifted forward by 30 seconds.
Two minutes to midnight...and counting.
If Armageddon don't get ya, climate change will.
What a wonderful world...