The present era believes itself to be suffering. Corona virus quarantine, Global Warming world regime, we feel the stress and panic. But we survived a confrontation, one that should have been fatal. The Cold War was a contest to the death. War by proxy, brinksmanship, and Mutual Assured Destruction led global society to madness. As both sides grew more powerful in weapons, civilization drowned in despair.
While Democracy and Capitalism won the contest, for a brief time the darkness endured. And it could well have been worse. It is little known that the Soviet side had a final act in store. Should they have been attacked and the end result of failure guaranteed, algorithms were established to launch all final nuclear warheads in a Dead Hand Response. We are all fortunate that that never happened. Don't think for a moment that something as irrational and deadly wasn't in the arsenal of the West.
The end of the world by our own hand came so close, we have to acknowledge, the times of the present offer no close comparison. What we do, what we can do, is not pre-ordained, we can change our world. But we never will if we linger in the morass of self pity of feeling the problems are legion and unstoppable. This isn't true. We can change the world.
“In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on and uninhabited planet.” William L. Shirer
“You have theoreticians who say, "The U.S. must stop the process of nuclear armament. We have enough already. Today America has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other half of the world. Why should we need more than that?" Let the American nuclear specialists reason this way if they want, but for some reason the nuclear specialists of the Soviet Union—and the leaders of the Soviet Union—think differently.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
All images taken from public domain sources, mostly Pixabay.com and the site Wikipedia, utilizing public domain license free use.
