Why would someone tweet "Keep in mind that we can destroy the world" as a New Year's greeting?
That's a question a lot of us were asking yesterday. Here are some thoughts, not quite what @AthertonKD was asking for.
That's a question a lot of us were asking yesterday. Here are some thoughts, not quite what @AthertonKD was asking for.
People need to feel good about what they are doing with their lives. The military necessarily includes killing other people. They have to come to terms with that as a good thing. A lot of evidence suggests that killing other humans is psychologically hard for most of us. 1/
A lot of military basic training deals with the inhibitions against killing other humans. And sometimes killing other humans is indeed justified. 2/
To be responsible for sending off the nuclear weapons that can destroy the life we know is another step. Further training is needed to desensitize the people in those positions. 3/
Those people are part of @US_Stratcom, the part of the military service that is responsible for delivering nuclear weapons by air. That's the organization that produced that tweet yesterday. 4/
As they talk to each other, they forget how frightening nuclear weapons are to ordinary people. They can even make jokes about them. I know - I have experienced some of that desensitization. 5/
But it's weird. Nuke wonks have a major conference coming up in March, at which we will use the hashtag #nukefest2019. Inevitably, someone will ask us how we can be so cheerful about such things. The answer is that we are seeing old friends. 6/
The person who wrote that tweet was cheerfully doing his job. He forgot about the weird part. 7/
One former missileer felt that the criticism of the tweet was "pearl-clutching." He urged STRATCOM to "stiffen up" and retweet the deleted tweet.
See what he did there? 8/
See what he did there? 8/
That person is now an advisor to Tom Cotton, perhaps the most mindlessly militaristic senator in Congress.
We can't afford to have men in the decision-making chain who feel that nuclear weapons support their masculinity. 9/
We can't afford to have men in the decision-making chain who feel that nuclear weapons support their masculinity. 9/
There's probably a lot more to say, but I think I'll stop here. 10/10
