Our Navy is currently on duty in the South China Sea, along with the U.K. HMS Queen Elizabeth. Our present DEVCON position is at 4. We should be at 5.
If you're a country without nuclear weapons you are at the mercy of those who do have them.
The U.S. has ready to launch about 7000 nuclear warheads. Keeping these weapons ready and on line while in the bullpen should concern every American. If a nuclear weapon should strike your neighborhood, everyone in it and their property will bi incinerated in about 2.0 seconds. If you should see a flash of light, just wait a second. You will virtually feel zero pain.
I was just a teen, but i remember that clearly. It was SO CLOSE! JFK was President. Security was something our generation did not take for granted!
I was just a kid back then but it was clear from the adults around me that something serious was afoot. We were raised in the bomb-shelter years so even we kids had at least a rough idea what a nuclear bomb was. And we knew what war was, at least as much as a kid could know. I lived in a small city in California with an air-force base so we probably would have been hit too, after the bigger, juicier US targets had been taken out. Furthermore, even after the Cuban Missile Crisis had passed the threat of nuclear war had not. But just to make sure we all understood that, director Stanley Kubrick made this iconic movie just two years later, in 1964:
Not quite all of us. The radius of effect from new weapons isn't what you see in old films, and neither is "the cloud". A nuclear war won't kill the planet and everyone on it, but it would be devastating.
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