It’s Quickly Becoming Non-Ironic

While I was in Germany, my girlfriend was hanging out in Northern Minnesota (long story). One night, she ironically attended a monster truck rally where she ironically purchased this camouflage hat for me. We’ve been camping in the Badlands of South Dakota, and between the hat and the scraggly beard, I’m starting to feel like I fit right in. This might become a new non-ironic look for me!

Apparently rattlesnakes are rather common in this area:

We haven’t seen any rattlers, but we did see a baby rabbit. Emily thought it was adorable, so I insisted on demonstrating what it would look like if a rattlesnake unhinged its jaw and swallowed the rabbit whole:

Sorry, no pictures of rabbit or girlfriend.

Yesterday, we took a tour of a decommissioned Minuteman Missile launch control facility. The park newspaper proudly proclaimed that Kennedy called these missiles, “America’s Ace in the Hole.” I believe it’s just for show now, but there’s a sign there explaining that guards are authorized to use deadly force against trespassers. Two separate really classic looking “vacation dads” had their pictures taken next to the sign while pointing to at it. Emily managed to snap a picture of this guy. Our favorite part is how earnest he looks; as you can see he’s even removed his hat:

So later I took an ironic picture of my own:

The literature at the launch facility was pretty interesting. I wish I had gotten some quotes, but it basically presented it as fact that America’s nuclear arms build-up and policy of Mutually Assured Destruction had made America safer and prevented nuclear war. I can’t say that that’s definitively false, but I don’t think it’s definitively true either.

I find it funny how MAD and nuclear deterrence are presented as the ultimate example of game theory played out on the stage of international diplomacy between rational actors, and how now there is this fear that because “irrational” leaders like Kim Jong Il of North Korea have access to nuclear weapons, deterrence no longer works and the world is consequently less safe.

It sure seems like Kim Jong Il is legitimately unstable, but for what it’s worth, convincing the world that he’s irrationally willing to use nuclear weapons would actually be quite a rational strategy on his part. It’s like convincing your opponents in a poker tournament that you’re willing to make an irrational call with like A2 if they re-steal against you, even if you would actually fold.

Likewise, I think it would have required some level of irrationality on the part of either the US or the USSR to actually launch a counter attack if they believed the other side had launched its nuclear missiles. As much as I’d want to convince my “opponent” that I was going to fire back, the truth is that I’m not sure I’d give that order even if I knew an overwhelming number of missiles were headed for my country. There’s nothing intrinsically rational about taking the other side down with you when you know you are about to become a smoking crater. I guess now that I’ve said that I can never become commander-in-chief….