RANT: COLD WAR
. . return to rants menu . . . . .
--- rant editing began at 2:13am on 2007.08.25
Some of my earliest memories are sitting out back at my grandpa's house just outside of town in a rich neighborhood being told by my mother about the fact we live next to strategic air command. It was in the mid 80s and the cold war was still going on. Here is a site concerning the base we live next to. The official website is also online and has more information than I care about knowing. My mother would explain to me that Bellevue was one of the first few targets that would be hit if we got nuked. But she explained to me that since we're just 10 miles away we wouldn't feel anything with the nukes they have now. She taught me the signs I would see and so on. So all my life starting from as young as I could remember I would dream about nuclear war.
It didn't help that I watched various movies where there were nuclear wars. As I got older I saw Terminator and that made me feel better because I was able to start thinking that maybe it's all bullshit, since Terminator was obviously science fiction.
Then in the early 90s we got to sit out in front of one of my Mother's friend's houses who lived on a path the trucks took. What trucks? The dirt trucks. Truck after truck filled with dirt would be leaving every couple minutes and empty trucks would be coming. Trucks were coming and going almost nonstop for many many weeks. They were building something new at Offut. We had heard some comments that they were going to be changing the makeup of Offut Air Force Base but they weren't saying anything.
Then the news came out that Strategic Air Command was no more and it was upgrade to Strategic Command. Various stories were in the news about what it was and all were just slightly different and all we knew was it was hugely important. Bigger than Norad, we were told. Then as the years went on we learned from people who had been down there for various reasons ranging from cases in the FBI and people who had worked there that the place was like a massive underground city.
Now in the midle of the first decade of the new century, I live about 90 seconds away from the base fence. Well, the fence of the top layer of the base. I don't know exactly how far out the underground part goes. There are strange air vent structures in places a ways away from the base I don't have the balls to explain on my band website. But I know it expands outward from the base fence, underground anyway. I know because one day we were walking outside of our neighborhood and we heard some sort of engine or generator or whatever it was kick on somewhere under us. under us. under us. under us, on public property. so we didn't walk back out that way again.
So the last 10 or 15 years has been generally quiet as far as arms races go. As in, it sounded like pretty much just the U.S. was developing and developing like assholes when nobody else was developing on the scale that we were openly developing on. So now the Russians are back and they are up to speed and developing their own. And something that hasn't happened in a long time is back in swing. Nuclear Bomber patrols.
In studying the story behind the cold war I learned that it was really going on for a long time previous to what I knew about. And I really don't know who I should feel more sorry for -- my generation and the generation directly after me who is going to have to live through this new prick waving experience or the people who have to live through it all over again once more. And humanity seems, from history, to be at least twice as fucking stupid as it was before. So that begs the question, will we survive another round of this?
--- rant editing ended at 4:16pm on 2007.08.25