Cold War Redux ...

I remember, one hot August day in 1985, standing on the alert pad on Carswell AFB, just taking in the scene of 10 B-52 bombers, all loaded with multiple warhead nuclear cruise missiles, and their attendant KC-135 tanker support, baking in the Texas sun. The reason I remember the time so well; it was when it finally dawned on me how much firepower this group of 15 aging aircraft represented. Here, before me, their crews sequestered in the alert bunker waiting for the order to nuke the Soviet Union, in all it's destructive glory, was the nuclear kilotonnage with the capability to obliterate most of Russia. This pre-Armageddon menagerie was duplicated on 10 or 15 other bases in the U.S. and worldwide. I remember it so well because the realization made me feel more insignificant than I ever did in my life (a big thing for, with an ego like mine, insignificance generally isn't in the vocabulary).

Another milestone in my life was when the Soviet Union began its fall, the obvious fall, not the one that began with the death of Leonid Brezhnev. It was the day the Berlin Wall came down. There is a piece of it sitting in my China cabinet. It was the day my people began the trip down the road to reunification (if you don't know, I'm a first-generation American of German descent). It was also the day I knew the B-52s on the alert pad would begin to have their nuclear cargo offloaded in favor of conventional weaponry. It was the day I believed the 'necessity' of having nuclear weapons had passed. I thought the B-52s (and the Soviet Tu-95s) would be retired shortly, the need for the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction a thing of the past.

With these thoughts in mind, one would think it's time to send the B-52s back to the depot base for another in a long line of refits as its mission will change once again. Cernig notes the Bush administration is doing its best to provoke the Russians into another arms race:

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it all started because Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty so he could build his missile shield. Of course the Russians are worried about this. For one thing, Russian Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov is correct when he says that this expansion of the US missile defense system from American territory to northeast Asia and to European nations close to Russia's borders looks very like an attempt to encircle Russia and reduce it's own deterrent ability. It doesn't look good that influential neocon think-tanks are pushing for the Bush administration to overturn treaties against weaponry in space either.

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2009 can't come too soon.