You know what would be really great?... A 60th birthday party and nation-wide viewing of the film classic, Dr. Strangelove.

For those who’ve missed it, the film is a sobering/hilarious satire of a paranoid general who launches an unauthorized preemptive strike on the Soviet Union’s “Doomsday Machine.”

(SPOILER ALERT: It ends with B-52 pilot Maj. “King” Kong astride a nuclear bomb waving his cowboy hat and hollering WAHOO! as the bomb descends on its Russian target, followed by footage of nuclear explosions with the ironic soundtrack, “We’ll Meet Again”).

For those who viewed the film in 1964 or subsequent years, it’s the sub-title that may have the most lasting import: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

I recall that when the film was released in 1964 we hadn’t yet learned to stop worrying about The Bomb, let alone love it. Two years earlier the world had narrowly escaped nuclear war as Russia and the US faced off over Russia’s installation of nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba—missiles capable of striking Washington, D.C. within minutes.

High-stakes brinksmanship brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war before an agreement was reached to withdraw the missiles. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought to every doorstep the horrific prospect of nuclear annihilation, and for several decades we were very much awake and aware. In 1982, for instance, more than a million people demonstrated in New York City's Central Park against nuclear weapons, and during that era a host of resistance groups like PeaceWorks KC were birthed.

But then the Cold War “ended” with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the collective sigh of relief that ensued, it’s as though the world largely forgot about the Bomb. In the three decades since, some nations have apparently even grown to love it.

This cult of the Bomb has certain beliefs, held religiously:

• A belief that once the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, it can’t be returned.
• A belief that in a nuclear-armed world a nation’s best security is having their own nukes.
• A belief that adequate safeguards are in place to prevent accidental use of nuclear weapons.
• A belief that since nukes haven’t been used for 79 years, they won’t be used again.

Unfortunately, all these beliefs are dubious, at best:

• We built the nukes; we could eliminate them, in the name of humanity and Earth itself.
• By mutual targeting, nuclear nations are actually the most vulnerable, not the safest.
• Schlosser’s book, Command and Control, documents many close calls with nuclear annihilation, avoided by sheer luck. Yet nuclear nations remain at the gambling table and keep raising the ante, while the rest of the world is held hostage to their addiction.
• With some 12,000 nuclear weapons of omnicide now in the world’s arsenals, its way too soon to assume they won’t be used again, either by accident, miscalculation, or design.

Our own nation’s love of the Bomb is evidenced by Kansas City’s so-called National Security Campus (aka Global Insecurity Factory). 7,000 employees with a billion-dollar annual budget are busily “modernizing” (read, “making ever-more lethal”) our nuclear arsenal. And it’s a rapidly-growing enterprise. The kcnsc.doe.gov website documents that some 4,600 new employees have been added in the past decade, and two million additional square feet of office and manufacturing space are under construction “to ensure the safety, security, and military effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.”

Never mind that the key Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who once crafted our nuclear policy (statesmen Kissinger, Schultz, Perry, and Nunn) recanted, more than two decades ago advocating for the total elimination of nukes, saying deterrence is a failed policy when individual terrorists or rogue nations can acquire nuclear material.

So are we going to ride the Bomb to the very end, defiantly hollering WAHOO!?

Is this where the love of nation has led us?

Strange love, indeed!

Jim Hannah

• The documentary film, Nuclear Tipping Point, highlights the hazards of nuclear weapons and offers a path toward a nuclear weapons-free world. See also the non-profit Nuclear Threat Initiative.