Whose finger is on the button now?

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Originally uploaded by Michael Heilemann.

There has been a lot of news coverage lately talking about nuclear testing and bomb making and who is a threat to whom and all that malarkey. I have also just finished Bill Bryson's memoirs, and there is an entire chapter devoted to the nuclear capacity of the US and Russia in the 1950s, not to mention the Cuban missile crisis. So it has been tense few days for my subsconscious. And as a result, last night's dream was enough to wake me up in a cold sweat at 3am.

I dreamed that I was working in Chicago (no stretch there) but I caught a plane to Australia and ended up meeting up with my parents en route, in a airport transit terminal in Asia. While I was on the plane for those 11 hours, the US had detonated a nuclear bomb in Kuala Lumpur which, in my dream, was the capital of North Korea and actually more closely resembled a Thai beach setting rather than the urban metropolis it truly is. But dreams can do that, right? The point is, there was total annihilation of KL.

Anyway someone told me this awful news when I got off the plane. As my fellow passengers and me digested this nugget of info, we also became acutely aware that we were not only at risk of being overcome by the nuclear fall-out ourselves, but that the US could pretty much expect a retaliatory strike any time soon. And of course, the targets would be America's biggest cities - Chicago being one of those, naturally.

I was inconsolable for much of the dream, alternating between periods of stunned silence and raging anger. My new friends, my apartment, and my way of life was indirectly threatened and could end in a second, all at the whim of some lunatic with his finger on the button.

The airport was a mix of nationalities, all of us struggling to understand how the world got to this point. What could possibly be gained from nuking one another into a billion bits, and ruining the world's ecosystems for years to come? I understand the principle of building empires and the concept of occupation, where you take a nation by force, stick a flag in the ground, and claim it in the name of your homeland. It's brutal, but I get it. It's old-fashioned warfare that we're all used to and we know won't ever go away. But what I don't understand, and what my dream only further highlighted, was the futility of nuclear war and germ warfare and the literal total destruction that comes from it. It's sneaky and it's cowardly and it's just so very final. What's the point of being King of the world, when the world is uninhabitable?

It was a horrible, ghostly dream from which I woke up with such a start, that I was really quite distressed. So in future, I only want to be woken at 3am by benign disruptions such as a garbage truck or a barking dog. Threats of nuclear warfare are just too much to take without strong coffee.