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Right now, we are at a place of polarization, yet all of our art sucks (my opinion obviously but it seems to be shared). If you look back at the last time our country was this divided in the 1960's, we saw some of the greatest output of music and literature we have ever seen. We had incredible artists like the Beatles among others. Then of course that was probably the peak of black culture with incredible artistic output that they will probably never reach again. This was probably the last time you saw many black musicians and guitarists be better than their white counterparts. If you take it back to the French Revolution, you saw some of the best political philosophy ever created such as with Rousseau. Political discord creates art and philosophy that has usually never been seen before, but today we don't see any of that. Even Monty Python is more subversive than anything we see today. Clockwork Orange was more subversive than anything we see today. Why aren't we seeing a peak in art again like the time should predict?
You know, I just realized that the second era of great music corresponds almost exactly to Thatcher's time as the UK PM. That can't be a coincidence.
I've noticed a similar thing to your observation when it comes to approaching doom. Back in the day the cold war and threat of nuclear annihilation inspired a whole bunch of great songs. Today the doom is climate change and we get... nothing.
We have had ample proof of nuclear weapons' destructive capacity.
Meanwhile, the actual impact of climate change can, by one so willing, be ignored entirely with little ill effect, and the catastrophe scenarios spun up about it come from people with the air of the stereotypical madman claiming that "the end is nigh".
Nah, Nuclear Armageddon was a psyop. Yes, it would suck to have nuke dropped on your head, but not much more so than an artillery shell, or a conventional bomb or missile. It was probably even more exaggerated than the impact of climate change.
This doesn't matter at all. The aggregate effect of nukes dropped on every major city (which, factually, is what would happen) would be the total collapse of the modern agricultural-industrial machine, which would mean mass death in the 80%+ range. This counts as a nuclear apocalypse by any definition.
What you are forgetting about is the effects of 800 or so 380 kiloton ground bursts hitting the missile fields in Montana and North Dakota, and the ensuing massive fallout cloud likely blowing southward right into the breadbasket of the country (breadbasket of the world—those crops feed like 1.2 billion people)
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No lawsuits from Montsanto if we irradiate the lawyers first! <taps head>
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I'm going to press doubt on that one. If you're maximizing spite, rather than military advantage, you can drop nukes on major cities, and rack up the body count, you can drop them on essential infrastrructure and increase it even more, but I don't think the entire arsenal of the USSR could collapse American industry and agriculture.
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