Watching the end of the world on YouTube

[polaris93]

My lucid nightmares continue, as always. The videos linked below, all on YouTube, show things that I have seen in my lucid nightmares decades before I ever saw these videos, or watched Trinity and Beyond. But I got dosed with a nice hefty chunk of fallout in 1954, when I was 9, and somehow I can draw something out of these videos to restore the

Comments

[thormonger]

It's mind-boggling to think that such destructive capacity was created and still exists.

[polaris93]

Yes. We'd never have done it if we hadn't been so terrified of what the Soviet Union might do to us and our allies otherwise. Mining power-metals such as uranium and turning them into nuclear and thermonuclear weapons is just too dangerous, otherwise, certainly in the quantities we used then. The Cold War was a horribly weird time, and what it did to the psyches of all of us, especially those born at its beginning or during it, is still playing itself out. Historians and social psychologists have guaranteed job security if they delve into those years to determine their impact on the world. I don't blame my country for it -- it was that or have a world dominated by the Soviet Union, and it wouldn't have been a world worth living in. But we're still recovering from the environmental and psychological effects of it. And now, with Iran, North Korea, and other tinpot dictators racing to make their own nuclear bombs, we may have to go through it again.