{"id":57166,"date":"2026-01-17T10:13:51","date_gmt":"2026-01-17T18:13:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=57166"},"modified":"2026-01-17T10:13:51","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T18:13:51","slug":"making-armageddon-great-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/17\/making-armageddon-great-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Armageddon Great Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views<\/a> with the author\u2019s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n

Recently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/em> featured a fiction contest: \u201cWrite Before Midnight.\u201d I sent in an entry, which, sad to say, didn\u2019t win. (The winners can be found here<\/a>.) But that\u2019s OK: I enjoyed writing something other than my usual essays. My \u201closing\u201d entry to the contest follows. (Re-reading it, it\u2019s perhaps too much like a memoir rather than fiction.)<\/p>\n

\n

Making Armageddon Great Again<\/strong><\/p>\n

And so the missiles are finally here. Long ago, I thought I\u2019d put nuclear war in the rearview mirror. I never expected to see a mushroom cloud through my windshield, rising in the near distance.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d seen something like it before \u2013 Russian nuclear missiles flying over the North Pole on their way to America\u2014but that was fifty years ago. I was a young lieutenant then, working in the Missile Warning Center deep inside Cheyenne Mountain. Those missile tracks weren\u2019t real; they were part of a war game, fed into our computers on magnetic tape. The exercise ended with a simulated Armageddon, soundless, screamless.<\/p>\n

Even so, when the tracks terminated at U.S. cities, we all went quiet. Sitting two thousand feet under granite, staring at monochrome monitors, we imagined those cities vaporized in an instant. Millions dead, incinerated in a heartbeat. The thought chilled us.<\/p>\n

I was 24 then, serving my country against the \u201cevil empire\u201d of the Soviet Union, near the tail end of the Cold War. The first Cold War, I should add \u2013 as opposed to the \u201cnew\u201d one we\u2019ve been trapped in for the past two decades. Well, it\u2019s plenty hot now. Thermonuclear hot.<\/p>\n

I was far enough from my city\u2019s ground zero to survive the initial blast and heat. But at 74, I know these are my last days. Fallout will finish me \u2013 unless I take care of it myself first.<\/p>\n

I now know for certain that, after an unimaginably destructive nuclear exchange (a nice euphemism, isn\u2019t it?), the living will envy the dead. For now, I\u2019m one of the living, caught in a land of the dead.<\/p>\n

How did it come to this? We always ask that, don\u2019t we? How did I let a 50-year-old nightmare scenario on magnetic tape become real? Couldn\u2019t I have done something \u2013 anything \u2013 to stop it?<\/p>\n

Even now, I like to think I could have. There was nothing inevitable about the \u201cnew\u201d Cold War or its culmination in MAD \u2013 mutual assured destruction. I just wasn\u2019t mad enough to resist it with the ferocity required. I gave my quiet consent to the warmongers, the death-wishers, the ones who talk tough about \u201cbig-boy pants,\u201d the ones haunted by missile envy and mindless fear. The ones who blow hardest just before they decide to blow up the world.<\/p>\n

I saw it coming. So did many others. I wrote against the \u201cnew\u201d Cold War. I denounced so-called investments in new nuclear weapons. I warned about militarizing space, how our early warning satellites and sensors could be blinded. I cautioned that President Trump\u2019s \u201cGolden Dome\u201d missile shield might make nuclear war more likely. None of it mattered. Money spoke louder than I ever could \u2013 talk of jobs and the promise of profits outweighed any argument I could muster.<\/p>\n

And so here I am, facing darkness \u2013 smoke, ash, soot blotting out the sun. I\u2019ve stocked enough supplies to last a couple of weeks, but what\u2019s the point? I have no desire to navigate a post-apocalyptic hellscape.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, I was an Air Force historian, a captain, teaching cadets about the making and use of the atomic bomb. That was 1992 \u2013 45 years ago. Where does the time go? We even took the cadets to Los Alamos, the birthplace of the bomb, and then on to the Trinity test site.<\/p>\n

Back then I was oddly optimistic. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Politicians were talking about peace dividends. Some even hinted that America might become a normal country in normal times. Normalcy! Imagine that today.<\/p>\n

I remember a somewhat glum spokesman at Los Alamos talking about reinventing the lab \u2013 shifting to peaceful purposes, maybe consumer electronics like VCRs and CD players, competing with Japan. I was skeptical. Nuclear physicists designing camcorders and video games? A longshot \u2013 but better than cranking out new warheads and bombs.<\/p>\n

At Trinity, what struck me most was the absence of the tower from which the \u201cgadget\u201d had been suspended. Vaporized instantly. Only twisted rebar remained at the base. And that had been a baby nuke \u2013 mere kilotons compared to the megatons in our arsenal. I tried to impress this on the cadets, some of whom might someday be ordered to launch such weapons. But who can really picture megatons of destruction, repeated again and again and again?<\/p>\n

A sharp-eyed cadet found a sliver of trinitite. For some reason, I had to touch it, briefly, radioactivity be damned. This tiny fragment, this ghost of Trinity, made it all seem real. As a few atomic tourists walked around the scrub desert in masks, fearful still of breathing in radioactive particles, I thought of Oppenheimer\u2019s god of death, the destroyer of worlds. That god has finally come for us \u2013 bringing mass death just as Oppie knew he would.<\/p>\n

Now, back in the present, at least I\u2019ve filled both bathtubs with water. A small reserve. At Cheyenne Mountain, there was a pond underground, a kind of giant bathtub, complete with a rowboat, so I was told. Maybe Charon did the rowing. We used to joke that boat and reservoir was the Navy\u2019s presence in our Air Force-run bunker. I never saw that boat or pond. I wish I had.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot I wish I\u2019d seen. I thought there\u2019d be more time. Next month, next year, next life.<\/p>\n

Next life. That\u2019s what I cling to now. I fought the good fight. I tried to argue for disarmament as the only sane option \u2013 for America, for humanity, for the entire living breathing beautiful planet of ours. But others thought differently. Some were simply making too much money, making Armageddon great again.<\/p>\n

So don\u2019t judge me for thinking about the unthinkable. I know suicide is a mortal sin for us Catholics. But my Ruger 9mm sits by my side. Twelve rounds in the magazine \u2013 but I\u2019ll only need the one in the chamber.<\/p>\n

Yes, I\u2019ve seen the mushroom cloud. And soon, quite soon, there\u2019ll be a smoking gun.<\/p>\n

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Copyright 2026 William J. Astore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author\u2019s permission. Recently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists featured a fiction contest: \u201cWrite Before Midnight.\u201d I sent in an entry, which, sad to say, didn\u2019t win. (The winners can be found here.) But that\u2019s OK: I enjoyed writing something other than my usual essays. My \u201closing\u201d entry to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[758],"class_list":["post-57166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"A Mushroom Cloud, A Smoking Gun"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57166"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57171,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57166\/revisions\/57171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57166"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=57166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}