Dyin’ Ain’t Much of a Living
JUL 08, 2026
Mark Twain was right when he said history may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Consider America’s approach to nuclear weapons. Under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, America’s strategic nuclear triad was modernized at immense cost. One hundred B-1 bombers were built. The stealthy B-2 bomber followed. MX “Peacekeeper” ICBMs were deployed. New Ohio-class nuclear subs armed with Trident missiles were launched. Pershing II and GLCMs (ground-launched cruise missiles) were fielded in Europe. And Reagan presented his idea of a missile defense shield, known as the strategic defense initiative (SDI) or informally as “Star Wars.” All this cost enormous sums of money.
Fortunately, the Pershing IIs and GLCMs were retired under talks that eliminated intermediate-range nuclear missiles. The Peacekeeper missiles are already gone. The B-1s are due to be retired over the next decade and no longer fly nuclear missions. And the Ohio-class submarine force, the most survivable leg of the nuclear triad, remains on station, with just one submarine capable of destroying much of the world.
The U.S. today possesses an enormous nuclear overkill capacity. The arsenal consists of roughly 5000 nuclear bombs and warheads. Again, just one submarine carries up to 20 Trident II D5 missiles with multiple nuclear warheads, each warhead being far more powerful than the bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. To borrow a line from Daniel Ellsberg, each submarine is capable of 100 Holocausts. They are genocidal weapons to a degree that is unimaginable. By the way, the U.S. has fourteen Ohio-class “boomer” submarines.
Here is where history rhymes. Under yet another tough-talking Republican president, the U.S. today is yet again “modernizing” its nuclear triad while imagining a missile defense shield (now known as “Golden Dome”). The Air Force wants a new nuclear bomber (the B-21 Raider) and ICBM (the Sentinel), and the Navy wants a new ballistic-missile-firing submarine, the Columbia-class.
None of this is really necessary. ICBMs are obsolete; they are static targets and destabilizing ones at that. Bombers are superfluous and besides, the Air Force still has B-52s and B-2s for nuclear missions. Missile shields like “Golden Dome” are easy to conceptualize but impossible to build. They can be fooled by decoys and overwhelmed by an enemy with sufficient warheads (Russia).
But logic doesn’t matter here. Nor does morality. What matters is money, power, jobs, and the military-industrial-Congressional complex. That’s why history is rhyming here. The MICC will always fight for more ICBMs, more bombers, more submarines because that is its health, its wealth, its reason for being. To the MICC, the nuclear triad really is the holy trinity. It is something to be worshipped and preserved irrespective of cost and logic.
The U.S. should lead the world in reducing the deployment of nuclear weapons. Instead, the U.S. leads in nuclear escalation. And it does so always in the stated cause of “deterrence” when the real reason is the health and wealth of the MICC.
No one really knows how much nuclear triad modernization and the “Golden Dome” will cost; estimates for both reach $3 trillion over the next thirty years. But it’s not just the cost in dollars that matters — it’s the cost to our collective existence. These weapons systems are making the U.S. and the world less safe, less stable, rather than more so. They are possibly the very worst examples of human folly, and that’s truly saying something.
I very much doubt the average American wants more nuclear bombs and missiles, but what we want doesn’t seem to matter. The MICC wants — and it gets what it wants. It does so by scaring us about Russia or China or Iran while selling these genocidal weapons as job-creators. It’s a living, they might say. But as the Outlaw Josey Wales once said, “Dyin’ ain’t much of a living,” especially when you’re talking about murdering most of humanity in a genocidal nuclear war.
We must put a stop to this madness while we still can.
Bracing Views 
“We must put a stop to this madness while we still can.”
Miscellaneous thoughts.
Long, long ago, unfortunately in this galaxy (this planet, actually) and not one far, far away, I came across the statistic that the world had, at that time, something like 1500 or so nuclear weapons, enough to wipe out civilization so many times over. The obvious question I asked was, what’s the point? Of course there is no satisfactory, sensible, rational answer. The only succor I could get was in noting the sarcastic, cut-to-the-core comment ascribed variously over the years by James Reston to Churchill, “Winston Churchill, as usual, had the right phrase for the problem. Once both sides had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the human race, he thought this was about enough. Why add more, he asked, ‘Why make the rubble bounce?’”
I was in the 5th grade in October 1962. I remember Kennedy addressing the nation on t.v., announcing the quarantine around Cuba, and other actions being taken. For the first time in my life I was both deeply frightened, yet also childishly naïve enough to think, this can’t possibly be true, I’m too young to die! Somehow I went to bed that night but with the sense something could happen overnight. It didn’t. But on the walk to school, I kept looking up at the sky to see if the contrails of jets and missiles could be seen, prior to flashes in the sky. They didn’t.
A day or two later, or whenever it was, the end of the world averted.
But since then, I have similarly wondered as I did with the overkill number of nuclear weapons, why do we insist on building more and more of these things, with staggeringly expensive means with which to deliver them, when we came within mere dumb luck happenstance on a number of occasions during the Cuban Missile Crisis of being radioactive to this day? Who, why are the nuts behind this? Is the irony of the most intelligent species on earth ending all life on it – save the cockroaches – the inevitable conclusion to this insanity?
Thus back at the beginning.
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Could this be why, despite much effort; we have never been able to locate advanced LIFE on other planets within our solar system.
Do you think that ADVANCED SOCIETIES such as ours ALL eventually end up on the same path; destroying themselves and poisoning their planet hungering for more POWER and GREED? We seem to be rushing headlong into such a fate and I am wondering if it has not all happened before – many times.
A SHAME!
Jerry King
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As shown repeatedly in fiction and satire, seeking ever more bombs in the nuclear era is flatly insane. Renaming and restarting Reagan’s Star Wars initiative as the Golden Dome and creating Space Force are just the insane sorts of things to be expected of a society nearly run off the rails. But so long as that gravy train is rolling, lots will want to jump on.
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