While the rest of this city concerns itself with more trivial matters, I, for one, am wondering how long it will be until we get nuked.  If you haven’t been paying attention to world affairs lately, South Korea has claimed that North Korea torpedoed one of its warships back in March, and now North Korea has cut off all ties with South Korea as the rest of the world, possibly even China, is backing the South Koreans.  This isn’t the first time tension has flared between the Koreas, of course, but it is the first time things have gotten this bad since North Korea developed nuclear missiles.  How funny for this to be happening while the rest of Toledo is distracted by That Show That I Will Not Name, considering the last real celebrity we popped out (I typed “pooped” the first time and almost kept it), Jamie Farr, got his greatest fame from his role on the television version of M*A*S*H.  I thought Katie Holmes might bring some respect to the region, but then she had to go and marry Tom Cruise and threw all of that right out of the window.

It surprises me just how little people know about nuclear weaponry.  I was in grade school in the early 1980s when there was the last great flare-up in tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, and yet I was never taught anything about what to do in the event of a nuclear strike.  The two old school buildings in my part of town that were renovated into arts centres still have their “Fallout Shelter” signs on their exteriors, as did the Health and Human Services building at the University of Toledo when I first went there.  My first full-time term there I had three classes (all of my Monday/Wednesday/Friday classes) in that building, and one of my classes was in the room that led down to the shelter itself.  Alas, the building was renovated while I was student there, and now no longer has the shelter facility.  (Fun fact: Toledo, because of its ties with the auto industry, was actually considered a high-priority target by the Soviets.)

Given how the last administration was like a broken record in its attempts to scare the American public into believing we would all die unless we did exactly what they said and kept electing that “permanent Republican majority” Karl Rove waxed so poetically about, you’d think they would have reinitiated some kind of programme to educate the younger generations, who didn’t grow up in fear of a Soviet nuclear strike, on how nuclear weapons work and, most importantly, what to do in the case of a nuclear strike.  You’d have thought they’d have at least reinstated the fallout shelters after Clinton cut them, one of the most short-sighted decisions Clinton made in a presidency full of them.

I doubt North Korea will launch nuclear weapons at the continental United States (even if they aimed one towards Hawaii recently), but the idea that we are somehow safe from a nuclear strike is ridiculous.  Ignoring the various countries that either have nuclear weapons, or would like to get nuclear weapons to use against us, if the spread of terrorism after the end of the Cold War taught us anything, it is that rogue agents and small organizations that fly under our radar can get their hands on pretty much anything they want.  There is no doubt in my mind that a terrorist will explode a bomb with nuclear capability in the United States in my lifetime, probably within the next ten years or even sooner.  I doubt Toledo would be a prime target, but Chicago would be, and if Chicago gets hit then Toledo would likely be hit by fallout.

This being the age of YouTube, of course, what to do in the event of a disaster takes on entirely new meaning thanks to all the old videos now available.  I think my fascination with this kind of stuff started a few years ago when I had an urge to check out the local Weather Channel forecasts before Hurricane Katrina hit, for the sheer surreality of the computerized announcer calmly saying things like, “Wind gusts could reach 150 miles per hour.”  In addition to having things like “Duck and Cover” and the attack sequence from The Day After, YouTube also has things like the BBC’s Threads, CBS’s A Day Called X, and actual sound recordings that would have been played in the event of a strike, both in the United States and England.  Some people even do their own recreations of these warnings, so I know I can’t be the only person fascinated by them.  (My favourites are the Protect and Survive videos Margaret Thatcher had made in the 1980s to scare Britons.  Now there was a woman who knew how to scare people, and not just by showing her face to them.)

I realize there’s a fine line to walk between giving people the information they need to know in the event of a nuclear attack, and using such information to scare people out of their wits.  That being said, we have at least one whole generation of people who, thanks largely to South Park, think that “Duck and Cover” was supposed to protect you if you were in the fireball of a nuclear bomb, and don’t know that even a simple newspaper over your head could protect you from getting radiation sickness from fallout.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I highly encourage you to either read up on this stuff, or view some of the older civil defence videos I linked to above.  The Cold War may be over, but the need for Americans to know what to do in the event of a nuclear attack is still very much real.  If a loose nuke were to go off in the United States tomorrow, most people would be unprepared, and the blame would fall, rightly, on the government for not making sure everyone knows this crucial information.  For everyone’s sake, we can’t let that happen.