NOT JUST A MUSHROOM CLOUD

For the rest of my life, every time I see a report like this in the paper or on TV, about our willingness to use nukes (no matter what the context), I'm always going to think of The War Game:



It's a must-see movie, an Academy Award-winning documentary from 1966 (originally planned for a 1965 release but BBC banned it). All the consequences of nuclear war that you don't immediately think of when you see "The Sum of All Fears", "The Peacemaker", "True Lies", "Crimson Tide", "Matinee", "Terminator 2", "Independence Day", or even "Austin Powers"... are here in this movie. So many unforgettable images. And every statistic in the movie is not only dilligently-researched, but just about all of them are still strikingly relevant and correct to this day.

I think of every idiot around my age that I know who says things like "we should nuke Saddam", or that we should've nuked Vietnam. Do they even know what they're saying?

To them, I submit two things:

John Hersey's Hiroshima

and The War Game