When I was a little tad back in northeast Iowa, the Cold War was still an ongoing thing. We did “duck and cover” drills at school, in which we practiced the essential tasks of crawling under our desks, putting our heads between our legs, and kissing our butts goodbye. About 80 miles from where I grew up was the massive John Deere Waterloo Tractor Works, and as a major industrial site, we were told it was on the Soviet Union’s first-strike nuke target list. We all knew the Soviets had those lists — and we knew we had them, too.
On Tuesday, in one of the biggest leaks since Captain Edward John Smith looked at the hole an iceberg had just punched into the RMS Titanic and said, “Oh, bother,” we read now that President Biden has supposedly approved a new United States nuclear strategy, one that takes into account not only Russia but also China’s growing arsenal — and North Korea.
