Unrelated but...

This morning I read this:

"Obama's new budget plan includes a little-noted sea change in U.S. nuclear policy, and a step towards his vision of a denuclearized world. It provides no funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, created to design a new generation of long-lasting nuclear weapons that don't need to be tested. (The military is worried that a nuclear test moratorium in effect since 1992 might endanger the reliability of an aging US arsenal.) But this spring Obama issued a bold call for a world free of nuclear weapons, and part of that vision entails leading by example. That means halting programs that expand the American nuclear stockpile. For the past two budget years the Democratic Congress has refused to fund the Bush-era program. But Obama's budget kills the National Nuclear Security Administration program once and for all.

"My colleagues just stared at that line," says Joe Cirincione, a longtime nonproliferation expert and president of the Ploughshares Fund. "They had never seen anything like that." Killing the program, he said, was "the first programmatic impact of the new [zero nukes] policy. People have said they want to see more than words, this is the very first action."

In the eighties two issues were of primary concern to me and my politically inclined friends, stopping Reagan's secret wars in Central America and getting rid of nuclear weapons. Mutually Assured Destruction was the "official" doctrine of strategic defense for both the Soviets and the U.S. We thought that was completely nuts.

These days, few people under 35 have any idea what living under that spectre was like. It is a distinguishing mark of a certain age cohort. Now that the inhabitants of the 24 hour news cycle are perpetually histrionic over even minor worries, I wonder if the under 35 set can even relate.

Nevertheless, despite quasi-pandemics, global warming, the ocean being fished out, and so on, nuclear weapons are a very real, very human problem. It amazes me to see it being addressed in such a substantive, but low key, manner.

It was, back then, considered to be a crucial step towards a better world. It still is.