Kaiju, Destroyer of Worlds.

“You’re not fooling anybody when you say that what happened was a natural disaster…It was not an earthquake, it wasn’t a typhoon…God help us all.” Bryan Cranston seems more than a mite panicky in the new trailer for Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, also with Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Juliette Binoche, and David Strathairn. As I said last time around, I like that they’ve returned to the “what-have-we-wrought” nuclear horror of the 1954 original. I’m in.

Hello?…Uh…Hello Dmitri?

“With great reluctance, Eisenhower agreed to let American officers use their nuclear weapons, in an emergency, if there were no time or no means to contact the President…Aware that his decision might create public unease about who really controlled America’s nuclear arsenal, Eisenhower insisted that his delegation of Presidential authority be kept secret. At a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he confessed to being ‘very fearful of having written papers on this matter.'”

Following up on the recent revelations that, for decades, the nuclear launch code was actually 000000: In the New Yorker and fifty years after the film’s release, Eric Schlosser discovers that pretty much everything in Dr. Strangelove was correct, right down to the secret Doomsday device. “Fifty years later…’Strangelove’ seems all the more brilliant, bleak, and terrifyingly on the mark.”

Keep Calm and…Oh, Never Mind.

“We all know that the dangers facing us today are greater by far than at any time in our long history. The enemy is not the soldier with his rifle nor even the airman prowling the skies above our cities and towns but the deadly power of abused technology. But whatever terrors lie in wait for us, all the qualities that have helped to keep our freedom intact twice already during this sad century will once more be our strength.”

Along the lines of Richard Nixon’s paean to the fallen Apollo 11 astronauts, a draft, circa 1983, is unearthed of Queen Elizabeth’s potential remarks on the start of World War III. “The moving words were written by an imaginative speech writer taking part in a disaster planning exercise.”

The Nuclear Option: Ignorance.

“If there were any doubts that Sarah Palin is a total idiot, she settled them with that single statement….Tip to Sarah Palin: Obama may have some vulnerabilities, and you may have some strengths, but command of the issues doesn’t fall in either category.” As the up traffic here in DC, Slate‘s Fred Kaplan beats back some of the dumber GOP attacks on Obama’s nuclear policy, while Joe Conason tries to explain what Ronald Reagan really thought about nukes.

Sigh…Pick any issue these days, and for far too many of the GOP opposition, the question seems to come down to whether they’re out-and-out venal or just incompetent. Sadly, the answer seems to be yes.

A Matter of Minutes.

“According to the board, the looming dangers included: the perils of 27,000 nuclear weapons, 2,000 of them ready to launch within minutes; and the destruction of human habitats from climate change.” Paging Dr. Manhattan: Tomorrow at 3pm, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists will move the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock, currently set (since 2007) at five minutes to midnight. (The official site is here.)

No word yet on which way we’re headed, but I presume they wouldn’t be going to all this media-event trouble if the news is good. Update: I stand corrected. We’re at six minutes to midnight now. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

Last of the Kon-Tiki. | The Man Twice-Bombed.

“Twice he was captured and escaped, once by back-flipping over a snow bank and running off into the woods before his guards could use their weapons. A third time, surrounded by the Gestapo at a maternity hospital in Oslo where he had set up a transmitter in a chimney, he shot his way to freedom with a pistol.” Via a friend, Knut Haugland, WWII resistance fighter and last surviving member of the Kon-Tiki expedition, 1917-2010.

We may “play” Call of Duty nowadays, but this guy lived it. “He particularly objected to the word ‘heroes’ in the title. ‘I never use that word about myself or my friends,’ he told BBC4 Radio in 2003. “We just did a job.” Referring to the glider crashes and the killing of the survivors, he added: ‘Forty-one men were killed, and it could have been avoided. Because of the loss of life, you shouldn’t glorify the story.’“Update, and via several Twitterers: Also passing very recently, another unbelievable survivor of WWII: Tsutomu Yamaguchi, 1916-2010. “On August 6, 1945, he was about to leave the city of Hiroshima, where he had been working, when the first bomb exploded, killing 140,000 people. Injured and reeling from the horrors around him, he fled to his home — Nagasaki, 180 miles to the west.“

Crazy. He’s like a real-life Pariah for the Atomic Age. “‘I think it is a miracle,’ he told The Times on the 60th anniversary of the bombings in 2005. ‘But having been granted this miracle it is my responsibility to pass on the truth to the people of the world. For the past 60 years survivors have declared the horror of the atomic bomb, but I can see hardly any improvement in the situation.’“

North Korea: Now Not-so-Evil.

“This can be a moment of opportunity for North Korea. If North Korea continues to make the right choices, it can repair its relationship with the international community — much as Libya has done over the past few years. If North Korea makes the wrong choices, the United States and our partners in the six-party talks will respond accordingly.” In a Rose Garden statement yesterday, Dubya announces the lifting of trading sanctions against North Korea, on account of Pyongyang seemingly agreeing to nuclear disarmament as outlined in recent multilateral talks. But don’t get the wrong idea, folks: Talking to our enemies is still an act of horrible, dirty appeasement. Update: Slate‘s Fred Kaplan surveys the deal.

Dubya’s Iran Plans, NIE-capped.

“Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005.” Uh, y’know that whole Iran is the new face of evil, imminent-WWIII thing we’ve been hearing about? Well, never mind. It’s time to update those lyrics, Senator McCain: A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report — which, it seems, Cheney may have held up for a year — finds that Iran actually stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. “Even if Iran were to restart its program now, the country probably could not produce enough highly enriched uranium for a single weapon before the middle of the next decade, the assessment stated. It also expressed doubt about whether Iran ‘currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.‘”

This happy piece of information obviously puts our Saber-Rattler in Chief in a bit of a bind — In a news conference this morning, he was reduced to spluttering, “‘What’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?‘” What indeed…perhaps we should bomb them anyway, is that your point? Well, probably not. Says Slate‘s Fred Kaplan of the NIE: “If there was ever a possibility that President George W. Bush would drop bombs on Iran, the chances have now shrunk to nearly zero….Skeptics of war have rarely been so legitimized. Vice President Cheney has never been so isolated.” Still, just to keep the timeline in perspective, Dubya made that dubious WWIII comment months after being apprised of this information. So, in effect, he was lying to us yet again.

As for the 2008 contenders, the campaigns are all taking the news pretty much in stride, although Chris Dodd got off a pretty good zinger on Clinton: “It’s easy to say ‘fool me once, shame on George Bush,’ but when she’s been fooled twice, shame on her.“

The Atlantic Sesquicentennial.

“In The Atlantic’s very first issue, in 1857, the magazine’s founders — an illustrious group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell — declared that they would dedicate their new publication to monitoring the development, and advancing the cause, of what they called ‘the American idea.’ And for the last century and a half, the magazine has been preoccupied with the fundamental subjects of the American experience: war and peace, science and religion, the conundrum of race, the role of women, the plight of the cities, the struggle to preserve the environment, the strengths and failings of our politics, and especially, America’s proper place in the world.” To commemorate the magazine’s 150th anniversary, The Atlantic Monthly publishes The American Idea, an anthology of articles which includes republished writings by TR, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, John Muir, Helen Keller, and Vannevar Bush. (Alas, only ten of the included articles are online.)

Condition’s normal and you’re coming home.

Pilot of the Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets, 1915-2007. “He never apologized for unleashing the devastating explosive force and insidious nuclear radiation that leveled more than two-thirds of the buildings in Hiroshima and killed at least 80,000 people, and perhaps as many as 127,000…’I never lost a night’s sleep over it,’ Tibbets said…He said he wasn’t proud of all the death and destruction and Hiroshima, but he was proud that he did his job well. ‘I didn’t start the war,’ he said. ‘I didn’t do anything except what I was told to do; what I had sworn to do, years before, which is “Fight for the defense of this country.”‘“