I wrote a short book about my years in the U.S. Air Force during the 1960s and gave copies to my children to pass to my grandchildren.

I was assigned as a launch team member on a nuclear missile on Okinawa and later assigned as a maintenance team member on the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. In the book’s epilogue, I wrote the following:

“Hopefully, if humanity is lucky enough, there will come a day when future generations will have evolved to the point where they can look back at this Cold War strategy called Mutually Assured Destruction (commonly referred to as MAD) as an insane relic of the past.”

Obviously we are far from evolving 60 years later, when Vladimir Putin can invade Ukraine with no justification and circumvent the MAD strategy by using a form of nuclear blackmail.

The proliferation of nuclear weapons, controlled by unpredictable autocratic tyrants and religious fanatics who feel no moral obligation except to their own lust for power, has put the world at risk! True peace and civilized moral behavior among world societies will only come as a gradual evolutionary and democratic process over time – not from religious edicts or autocratic rule.

This “survival of the fittest,” as Darwin described it, has been a part of human evolution since time began, and until it evolves into a more positive and peaceful process for survival, any hope of its changing soon enough to prevent a nuclear catastrophe is slim.

Kent Washburn
Windham

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