War Is Not My Thing

But This One Against Iran... Oh It Makes Me Wonder

I am extremely anti-war. So much so that I’d make a horrible world leader. “Go ahead,” I would say, “take as many Sudetenlands as you like. Even if were the leader of the Sudetenland. I was one of the few Americans against invading Afghanistan. Or Iraq. Or Home Depot parking lots.

The war I am most anti is nuclear war. It is, by far, my least favorite of the wars. In fact, here’s how I’d rank them:

•                   The Streaming Wars¹

•                   Star Wars²

•                   Thermostat War

•                   Cyberwar

•                   Naval War

•                   Aerial War 

•                   Land War

•                   Land War in Asia

•                   Chemical War

•                   Nuclear War

I’ve been worried about a nuclear winter since I was 10 and read On The Beach, which was so upsetting that I chased it with this book:

No, I did not have a lot of friends. Though I did get my sixth-grade gifted-and-talented program to agree to make a role-playing game about Australia after a nuclear war, which I probably should have optioned to someone during the streaming wars.

Without diminishing the horrors of global warming, pandemics, fascism, and women loving cats more than babies, none of these pose the threat to living creatures that a nuclear winter does. Yes, we’ve had a nice run since we last exploded a nuclear bomb, but that run is only one Donald Trump long. The odds of it being many more don’t seem great.

The idea of Iran having nuclear weapons scares me. Democrats and Republicans are united in trying to stop this. Iran has scared every American since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. When I was a kid people wore this T-shirt in public:

Their cars were adorned with bumper stickers that read, “Nuke Iran.” And they played a parody song on the radio to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann that went, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” Sure, it mostly made me want to devote my life to repealing the seventeenth amendment³, but it also reminded me that Iran was a scary, extreme theocracy that shouldn’t have a nuclear weapon a tiny bit more than every country shouldn’t have a nuclear weapon.