The different branches of the US military act as though they are in a war with eachother. Which, in a sense, they are – over budget. “Over budget” is an unfortunate phrase to deploy in any posting about the armed services, but let’s roll with it.
The Korean nuclear program was carried out secretly, and they acquired the components and capability to build a bomb but did not proceed to enrichment or to producing the firing circuits and weaponizing a deliverable warhead.
My policy toward drug use is pretty open: do what you want, carefully, and accept the consequences if you screw up.
The US talks a lot about non-proliferation, and regularly joins with the world community to levy sanctions on nations that are not complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran and North Korea being prime examples of countries that have had a great deal of pressure (in the case of North Korea, the population has been starved) against their nuclear ambitions.
There’s a fellow on Twitter who somehow came across my path, claiming that the Japanese are playing victim regarding the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima. This moves me to want to offer a refuter for those who encounter such idiocy. It’s probably not complete – feel free to tell me what to add.
The US has been working on a series of “upgrades” to its existing nuclear arsenal; it’s a process that was started during the Obama administration, but the research must have been going on for years prior to that.
If you tend to curl up in terror when confronted by the evil that is militarism and nationalism, you may want to skip this post. See also: [stderr]
The UN Charter has a bunch of stuff in it about how the UN’s purpose is to help nations resolve disagreements without warfare.
72 years ago, the US advanced the state of the art in war atrocities by detonating a 20 kiloton nuclear weapon in the air over the city of Hiroshima.
My dad once told me (I was complaining about ageing) that it’s normal to experience a culture-shift as the people who lived through a time with you start to die off, and things that were facts of your life are now unusual and alien to them. For example, I grew up when there were still Horn and Hardart automats: places you could buy food from big slot machines, sort of a primordial form of fast food.