Our Atomic Pickle
The other day Vladimir Putin's cronies said that they would consider starting World War 3 if they felt that Russia was under an "existential threat". While that might just be the usual chest thumping insanity of a nuclear-armed nation, I started to wonder what would really happen in the event that one nation or another decided to solve their military problems with the power of the atom.
Of course, this isn't the first time that we have been on the edge of global destruction (if you have dug into my new book The Vortex, already, you will remember how the Soviet and American fleets almost vaporized one another in 1972 during the liberation war for Bangladesh).
It turns out that there has been a fair amount of academic modeling about what would happen in the aftermath of both small and large nuclear exchanges. While you might worry about the millions that would die in the explosions themselves, and the radioactive fallout, the real threat is the immense amount of dust that nuclear weapons will launch into the atmosphere—causing nuclear winter. Suffice it to say, once the nukes start going off, it's pretty certain that we will all starve in short order afterwards.
So, we all get it: nukes are bad. But what's even worse is how easy it is for one insane leader or another to start launching them. If we don't find a new system for deploying nuclear weapons, we are really just playing dice with humanity's future. Eventually the dice are going to stop coming up in our favor.
Putin is pretty scary and unstable--but he's not the first global leader with an itchy trigger finger. And this led me to an idea for how we could change the way that America secures the proverbial-button that I think could save the world. In this week's YouTube video I outline an easy political change up that won't require complete disarmament (which is almost impossible to implement) but will protect us from an insane president who thinks nuclear weapons will solve his or her political problems. I'd love to you give it a watch and let me know what you think.
So . . . how's the book launch going?
In other news: The Vortex isn't the out of the box New York Times bestseller that every writer hopes their new book will be on launch week, but we have had really great reviews and a lot more press coverage coming up soon. I'm sure I'll mention it in a future email, but word on the street is that The Washington Post will have something out this week. There's no news over at the NYT itself, but if you want to pester all your friends in those esteemed offices for me please do!
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