Word: mushroom
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...makes this configuration: nuclear bombs preside, in a dark, speculative way, over the human imagination of war. Nuclear is to conventional war what the monotheism of the avenging God was to the old amiably human and relatively harmless idolatries of polytheism. The wrath of God becomes the dread mushroom and megadeath and firestorm-totality, cessation. It is not relative, like the old wars, but absolute, the utter blank of extinction. Nuclear war sits in the mind like the lurid medieval vision of hell: horrible-and yet, well, hypothetical...
...home and saw the fireballs in their dreams. When the Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles on Cuba in 1962, instead of hiding under their desks, children filed into school chapels and prayed that John F. Kennedy would be vindicated in his decision to face down Nikita Khrushchev. Again, giant mushroom clouds grew only in dreams...
...thousands are dying. Survivors crawl from wrecked homes to see a more ordinary terror beginning. The only illumination is from house fires; the power is out. Ruptured gas lines explode, setting new blazes, and the flames spread unchecked. Rising overhead now is the catastrophe's explanation: a dark mushroom cloud, already eight miles high...
...this school. What idiocy The people united in Poland got their united ass kicked: the people united in EI Salvador, and 13,000 a year get shot separately Even it a lot more people in a lot more places unite, the chances are not so good. Original sin, mushroom cloud, freezing in the dark when the oil runs out--name your poison...
...necessary. With precisely that goal in mind, a succession of American Administrations, going back to the '50s, has asserted that in extremis, the U.S. would be prepared to fight a nuclear war with the Soviet Union; moreover, the U.S. has reserved the right to detonate the first mushroom cloud if that is what it takes to halt Soviet aggression...