Tag Archives: nuclear age

International news

‘Power like the world has never seen’?

Donald J. Trump has issued the sternest of statements to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. It’s full of bluster and a bit of bravado.

It’s also frightening in the extreme — to our side as well as to the North Koreans!

The communist regime reportedly now is able to place a nuclear weapon aboard an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach the United States. That’s a line that the president cannot tolerate.

So, while vacationing in New Jersey, Trump issued a direct threat to North Korea, saying that the United States is prepared to unleash “fire and fury” and a “power like the world has never seen.”

Let’s hold on. The United States once did unleash “fire and fury” on an enemy combatant state. It occurred on Aug. 6 and again on Aug. 9, 1945. We dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. World War II was drawing to a conclusion and President Truman decided he needed to deploy those weapons to persuade the Japanese that continued fighting would be futile.

Truman learned of the Hiroshima bombing while returning from the Potsdam Conference.

The strategy worked. Japan surrendered just days after Nagasaki was incinerated.

If Donald J. Trump is proposing measures that would eclipse those twin events in August 1945, then we are truly embarking down the most dangerous path anyone ever imagined.

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Queen prepared doomsday speech

Queen Elizabeth II once wrote a speech that, thank God in heaven, she never had to deliver.

It was a speech noting the outbreak of World War III, to have been delivered in 1983.

http://engineeringevil.com/2013/07/31/queens-world-war-3-speech-found-in-the-archives-the-dress-rehearsal-for-disaster/

It was a dress rehearsal for disaster, as the link here notes.

Here is a portion of what Her Majesty the Queen wrote:

“Now this madness of war is once more  spreading through the world and our brave country must again prepare itself to  survive against great odds.

“I have never forgotten the sorrow and pride I  felt as my sister and I huddled around the nursery wireless set listening to my  father’s inspiring words on that fateful day in 1939. Not for a single moment  did I imagine that this solemn and awful duty would one day fall to  me.”

She was noting, of course, the outbreak of World War II, when Adolf Hitler’s forces invaded Poland and sent the world plunging into its bloodiest conflict. Elizabeth hadn’t yet ascended to the throne.

These are the kinds of documents that are worth preserving for all time, if only to remind us that foresight does exist in the highest places.

Still, when I read those remarks I couldn’t help but think of another great individual’s remarks about the consequence of a world war in the nuclear age.

They came from Albert Einstein, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb.

He said: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”