A little over forty years ago, while preparing for a weekly radio address, President Ronald Reagan famously cracked wise about the possibility of attacking the Soviet Union. “I have signed legislation that outlaws Russia forever,” he said. “We begin bombing in five minutes.”
Reagan had not realized that the studio microphone was recording his joke and that technical personnel preparing for the broadcast in stations across the country were already listening. His facetious remarks were leaked. The public reaction was immediate, strong, and negative. Democratic candidate Walter Mondale admonished his election opponent for ill-considered humor, and Reagan’s polling numbers took a temporary hit.
For many, the possibility of thermonuclear annihilation was no joking matter.
Within a few short years, history veered in a much more positive direction, and concerns about either superpower pressing “the button” by accident or by design began to recede. A reelected Reagan and his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev launched a set of historic accords that greatly reduced the risk of superpower war. The Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War ended, and the USSR dissolved. For many Americans, the threat of nuclear conflict faded into distant memory.
Today, we encounter those Cold War fears primarily through history books. Fewer and fewer people recall nail-biting over the Cuban Missile Crisis or sheltering under desks in elementary schools. Many have not heard about the controversy over Reagan’s radio gaffe. Millennials and Generation Z wonder why their parents and grandparents worried about a nuclear Armageddon that never, in fact, materialized.
There may be no better illustration of our much-relaxed contemporary attitudes than the public reaction to Ukraine’s surprise attacks last week on dozens of Russian strategic bombers located at bases thousands of kilometers from Ukraine. On June 1, Ukraine used swarms of drones hidden in trucks smuggled across Russia’s border to attack one leg of its nuclear triad of missiles, submarines, and aircraft.
This time, the bombing was no joke. But the Western reaction hardly took the prospect of nuclear escalation seriously.
The operation was “a brilliant technical performance” that showed “why Ukraine will win this war,” according to French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy writing in the Wall Street Journal. Rebecca Grant, vice president of the Lexington Institute, posted on the Fox News site that Americans should “savor Ukraine’s brilliant strike on Putin’s terror bombers. Too bad Ukraine can’t do it again. Or can they?”
The Washington Post editorialized that the operation showed that Ukrainians are “tough, determined – and right. Theirs is a fight the United States should be proud to support.” Legions of online armchair warriors praised Ukraine’s “bad-ass operation” that will “go down in history” and be “studied for years to come.”
Such reactions largely ignored the impact that such attacks might have on nuclear stability between the United States and Russia, which together hold more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.
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