Nuclear weapons are CRAZY. Nuclear war is NOT winnable. Here are two short examples from the Reagan era.

Since the 1940s the U.S. government has been telling us that nuclear weapons protect us.

Actually, the OPPOSITE is true!

Two examples from President Reagan’s 1980s illustrate the absolute boneheaded thinking that has been endangering us:

 

In the early 1980s when President Reagan was escalating the nuclear arms race and pretending that nuclear war would be OK, one of his top experts said that a nuclear war might kill 50 million Americans, but that this would be a victory for the U.S. if we killed MORE THAN 50 million people in the Soviet Union. Decent Americans opposed that madness.

T.K. Jones was President Reagan’s Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces. This top expert in Reagan’s Pentagon said that if a nuclear war became imminent, each person should: “Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top…. It’s the dirt that does it…. [i]f there enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.” The plan was utterly preposterous for so many, many reasons!

About GlenAnderson 1498 Articles
Since the late 1960s Glen Anderson has devoted his life to working as a volunteer for peace, nonviolence, social justice, and progressive political issues. He has worked through many existing organizations and started several. Over the years he has worked especially for such wide-ranging goals as making peace with Vietnam, eliminating nuclear weapons, converting from a military economy to a peacetime economy, abolishing the death penalty, promoting nonviolence at all levels throughout society, and helping people organize and strategize for grassroots movements to solve many kinds of problems. He writes, speaks, and conducts training workshops on a wide variety of topics. Since 1987 he has produced and hosted a one-hour cable TV interview program on many kinds of issues. Since 2017 he has blogged at https://parallaxperspectives.org He lives in Lacey near Olympia WA. You can reach him at (360) 491-9093 glen@parallaxperspectives.org