Missing the Point!

What really frustrates me is "talk radio."  Way too too frequently the call-ins ask a question  and the answer misses the point.  First of all, the caller has to waste precious time saying how much they enjoy the program...blah, blah..., then they come to their question.  The person responding will take one silly aspect of the question and ONLY answer that detail and ignore the rest of the important stuff.

First I want to tell you how much I love your program.....my mother, father, children, aunt, etc., always listen and say how much they love you....

Finally they ask, "Nuclear weapons are deadly.  They are a threat to lives everywhere.  Yet the media's attention has been on Iran wanting the capability to posses nuclear weapons.  Why aren't we focusing on Russia, China, N. Korea, etc, who have vast arsenals and are very capable of using their nuclear weapons"

Don't you think the question is "Why is the media focusing on Iran and not the big guns?"

Then, please, please tell my why the response is focused on the country of Iran.

People in regular conversation do this frequently.  In fact, I've had facilitators take me to task for "putting them on the spot," just for trying to bring the topic back to the discussion.

Ugh!  ....If only I were queen!










Finally, they ask,

hington politics. Most Americans know little or nothing about their activities and the media seldom bother to report on them or their profits, even though the work they do is in the service of an apocalyptic future almost beyond imagining.

Add to the strangeness of all that another improbability. Nuclear weapons have been in the headlines for years now and yet all attention in this period has been focused like a spotlight on a country that does not possess a single nuclear weapon and, as far as the American intelligence community can tell, has shown no signs of actually trying to build one. We’re speaking, of course, of Iran. Almost never in the news, on the other hand, are the perfectly real arsenals that could actually wreak havoc on the planet, especially our own vast arsenal and that of our former superpower enemy, Russia.

In the recent debate over whether President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran will prevent that country from ever developing such weaponry, you could search high and low for any real discussion of the US nuclear arsenal, even though the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimates that it contains about 4,700 active warheads. That includes a range of bombs and land-based and submarine-based missiles. If, for instance, a single Ohio Class nuclear submarine—and the Navy has 14 of them equipped with nuclear missiles—were to launch its 24 Trident missiles, each with 12 independently targetable megaton warheads, the major cities of any targeted country in the world could be obliterated and millions of people would die.

Indeed, the detonations and ensuing fires would send up so much smoke and particulates into the atmosphere that the result would be a nuclear winter, leading to worldwide famine and the possible deaths of hundreds of millions, including Americans (no matter where the missiles went off). Yet, as if in a classic Dr. Seuss book, one would have to add: that is not all, oh, no, that is not all. At the moment, the Obama administration is planning for the spending of up to a trillion dollars over the next 30 years to modernize and upgrade America’s nuclear forces.

Given that the current US arsenal represents extraordinary overkill capacity—it could destroy many Earth-sized planets—none of those extra taxpayer dollars will gain Americans the slightest additional “deterrence” or safety. For the nation’s security, it hardly matters whether, in the decades to come, the targeting accuracy of missiles whose warheads would completely destroy every living creature within a multi-mile radius was reduced from 500 meters to 300 meters. If such “modernization” has no obvious military significance, why the push for further spending on nuclear weapons?