For much of my young life I feared nuclear war. The Houston ISD was still practicing Duck and Cover when I entered school, and there was talk of bomb shelters, though I didn’t know anyone who had one. I didn’t mull it over a lot, but it was a pervasive undercurrent, as I realized when the fear was lifted. I felt more light-hearted somehow. The sun seemed friendlier. All those sci-fi books in which aliens pitied or despised humans, the species that destroyed its home and itself, were fiction, not prediction. We were smarter than that.

Or not. Though I hadn’t thought of nuclear holocaust for decades, I should have been keeping up, because the nuclear club has been growing. I was prompted to write today by an article discussing the likelihood of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. It would be brief, decimate both countries, and bring nuclear winter to the globe. I remember nuclear winter. Unlike the horrors of a nuclear strike, which I decided not to enumerate, nuclear winter was always easy to imagine. It’s cold and dusky. The air is sooty. The protective ozone layer is breached or even dissipated. It’s hard to grow food. The nuclear winter can last for years or decades, depending on the size of the strike.

Recent events in North Korea, and in the US in reaction to North Korea, are putting nuclear war back in the news now, with me in prime target country. Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were tiny, hand-crafted weapons that had to be delivered in person, yet they were horribly destructive. Nuclear weapons today are many times stronger, and fly to their destinations at supersonic speeds from land, sea, or air. Maybe there would be time to send a goodbye text.

I dreamed about nuclear winter last night. The living nightmare is Trump, one guy with impulse-control issues and a red button.