As I stated in the preface to Book I in 1945 only one man, President Truman could push the button or make the decision to use nuclear weapons in combat. Now that decision rests with thousands of individuals worldwide and is growing. Here is a passage from the preface to Book I:"In retrospect, many questions have been asked but not answered. Many wonder why leaders—even those with many flaws—would allow such a choice to be entertained in their universe of thought. In 1945, at the end of World War II and on the brink of the Cold War, the decision portal through which people traveled in order to have the godlike ability to decide whether hundreds of thousands (or even hundreds of millions) lived or died was extremely narrow. While the decision by one man--President Harry S. Truman—near the end of WWII was arguably justified, in the years that followed, the nuclear weapons system floodgates opened wide at an uncontrolled rate. In the early years of the Cold War—loosely the period from 1947 through the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963—the determination to unleash massive tactical nuclear weapons rested in the hands of field commanders on both sides who held an ingrained hatred of the opposition. Their antagonism was based solely on fidelity to their respective economic systems, which generated and distributed wealth differently. Fanatical hardliners on both sides pushed their intelligence and scientific communities for information and advantages designed to find an edge for a decisive, preemptive first strike—an advantage that existed more often than not for the United States for many reasons. "The situation is much more complex now" The Escalating Nuclear Landscape: Submarines, Warheads, and Geopolitical TensionsWith over fifty nuclear submarines travelling the world's oceans armed with over a thousand warheads the nuclear genie is out of the bottle. Add into that the tens of thousands of tactical nuclear weapons, gravity nuclear bombs carried by planes such as the B-2 and the recent escalation in the Black Sea and we are climbing the escalation ladder rapidly. All of this is complicated by proliferation that will leave Iran facing a nuclear armed Israel that is unwilling to see Iran explode a nuclear weapon. See the damaged propeller below. It is also apparent that Russia is claiming all of the Black Sea off limits for US drones.
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