Bobby Akart - Desolation

The Chinese Communist government touted the country’s “urgent” goal to expand its arsenal of long-range nuclear missiles in anticipation of an “intense showdown” with the US.

“As the US strategic containment of China has increasingly intensified, I would like to remind again that we have plenty of urgent tasks, but among the most important ones is to rapidly increase the number of commissioned nuclear warheads, and the DF-41s, the strategic missiles that are capable to strike long-range and have high-survivability, in the Chinese arsenal.”

If two warring nations waged an all-out nuclear war, much of the land in the Northern Hemisphere would be below freezing in the summertime, with the growing season slashed by nearly 90 percent in some areas, according to a Rutgers-led study.

Such a war could send 150 million tons of black smoke from fires in cities and industrial areas into the lower and upper atmosphere, where it could linger for months to years and block sunlight.

A nuclear winter occurs as soot (black carbon) in the upper atmosphere blocks sunlight and causes global average surface temperatures to plummet by more than 15 degrees Fahrenheit.

Because a major nuclear war could erupt by accident or as a result of hacking, computer failure or an unstable world leader, the only safe action that the world can take is to eliminate nuclear weapons.

Newly leaked documents show that US officials in 1958 cavalierly planned a nuclear strike on China over Taiwan.

When Communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the United States rushed to back up its ally with military force — including drawing up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China, according to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous that crisis was.

American military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die, dozens of pages from a classified 1966 study of the confrontation show.

Drawing parallels to today’s tensions — when China’s own conventional military power has grown far beyond its 1958 ability, and when it has its own nuclear weapons — analysts warn of the dangers of the current escalating confrontation over Taiwan.

A team of Australian researchers asked people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia about how probable a global catastrophe in the near term might be. They found that a majority (54 percent) rated the risk of our way of life ending within the next 100 years at 50 percent or greater, and a quarter rated the risk of humans being wiped out at 50 percent or greater.

The fact is that many scholars who study existential threats agree that the probability of doom is higher today than ever before in humanity’s three-hundred-thousand-year history.

From nuclear weapons to killer drones to designer pathogens, humanity is acquiring much more efficient methods of bringing down civilization or causing our extinction than in the past.

Lord Martin Rees, a world-renowned cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, estimates that human civilization has a 50/50 chance of making it through this century intact.

Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse .

Father Mulcahy: How do you figure, Hawkeye ?

Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me. Who goes to Hell ?

Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe .

Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them—little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody is an innocent bystander .

The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest of souls.

The most massive characters are seared with scars.

Americans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.

Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

Great leaders don’t set out to be a leader. They set out to make a difference.

It’s never about the role. It’s always about the goal.

One Week Prior

Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center

Northern Virginia

Once upon a time, when you got fired from your job, the boss would simply say, “You’re fired!” The words stung, but there was no doubt about their meaning.

When Secretary of Agriculture Erin Bergmann was awakened at six o’clock that morning by Secret Service personnel announcing she’d been summoned to a meeting with the president and his chief of staff, she was certain to hear those dreaded words.

Not that she would’ve been surprised. President Carter Helton had grown weary of her contrarian’s point of view. He was under tremendous pressure throughout the crisis to the point of being confined for a brief time to his presidential suite on advice of the White House physician.

When Erin was called upon in cabinet meetings, she gave her learned opinion on the topics related to the mitigation of the effects of nuclear winter. Oftentimes, her suggestions and recommendations ran contrary to what the president wanted to hear. She was not a polished politician like the other members of the Helton administration. As a result, she hadn’t quite learned how to play the game.