Word: thermonuclear
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...world without a future. It was Herman Kahn, a graduate of the Rand Institute, the Ur-think tank, who gave the nascent profession credibility with such groundbreaking books as Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962), which used sound scientific principles to predict with great specificity the likely effects of a thermonuclear...
...that the superpower rivalry has ended and the danger of thermonuclear war has abated, the theory could be put into practice. International legal scholars even began toying with new approaches to intervention, suggesting that the world might have a right to take action against a government that was committing atrocities or genocide against its own people. But experiments in collective security so far have simply proved the old rule: the U.S. will act when it sees that its vital interests are at stake--as in the gulf--but feels no compulsion to send in the Marines without a very good...
...exceptional election when Americans are not lamenting "How did we come to this?" In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was a drawling Texas mess we inherited after ex-playboy J.F.K. was martyred into his golden nimbus. Johnson's opponent Barry Goldwater was a thermonuclear psychotic. So thought everyone to the left of Mayor Daley...
...world confronts the U.S. with nothing remotely like Vietnam. There is no global struggle with communism to drag America into every brush-fire conflict from Yemen to Angola. U.S. Presidents have the freedom to pick their wars and fight them as they choose, without worrying about setting off a thermonuclear war. The U.S. could go into Somalia and Haiti knowing it would never involve 500,000 troops for years, because the final outcome in those countries is not vital to America's national interests--we do not believe we are in a long twilight struggle with Somali warlords...
Imagine, then, if President Clinton came out with a new policy ordering Coast Guard cutters to machine gun all refugees attempting to enter by boat. Or Perot advocated a limited thermonuclear reprisal against Japan in order to curb the trade deficit? Certainly some Americans would whistle, catcall and respond with a hearty "Hell, yeah!" Most would simply laugh. Statements like those above would indelibly brand someone a lunatic not worth a second look in the American political scene...