At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter looks into what at first seemed like a less-than-brilliant headline from The Babylon Bee, but is actually a much more serious concern:
Nuclear security is, I’m sure you do not need to be convinced, a deeply serious matter. Ever since we cracked the atom over Hiroshima our civilization has been walking a tightrope over an abyss. A single misstep could mean annihilation – hundreds of millions dead within minutes, billions within days. Doubtless there would be some survivors, but it’s doubtful that industrial civilization would survive. We’ve come within a hair’s breadth of this a few times, not only in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but on other occasions, when radar mulfunctions or computer glitches left launch officers in the USA and the former USSR unsure whether or not to press the big red buttons they were entrusted with. Fortunately for everyone, they didn’t. If they had, none of us would be here.
Nuclear power plants can be almost equally dangerous. We saw the consequences of mismanagement in the 80s, with Chernobyl. Political officers who had no idea what they were doing covered up one screw-up after another. The results horrified a continent and poisoned the good name of the nuclear energy to this day.
Nuclear security, of civilian infrastructure and especially of the strategic weapons reserve, is the kind of thing that you want deeply serious men in charge of. The kinds of guys who wear impeccable grey suits, didn’t laugh because they don’t think your joke is funny, and have multiple degrees in military history and nuclear physics.
[…]
And now, here we are again. The Department of Energy’s new Special Assistant for National Nuclear Security Administration, one Sneha Nair, is also the author of an article titled Queering nuclear weapons: How LGBTQ+ inclusion strengthens security and reshapes disarmament.
The National Nuclear Security Administration is a semi-autonomous alphabet agency responsible, as its name implies, for maintaining the security and efficacy of the USA’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Its remit also includes preventing the proliferation of WMDs, overseeing the provision of nuclear propulsion for the US Navy, and responding to radiological emergencies.
These are not small things to be responsible for, and one of their newly appointed senior administrators is apparently obsessed with painting rainbows on the warheads.
Let’s have a look at her.
Unlike Brinton, Nair doesn’t obviously look like a spiteful mutant. No aposematic hair colouring, no facial piercings, no obvious tattoos, nor any other obvious signs of mental illness. Her Xitter account doesn’t even proclaim her pronouns.
So unlike Brinton, there’s no obvious evidence that she’s a sexual deviant. By all appearances, she’s merely another overly earnest head girl, looking to burnish her virtue via demonstrative allyship.
Most of the media coverage was just lol’ing at the woke absurdity of the title of Nair’s article – what could adult diapers, dildos, bugchasing, and Monkeypox possibly have to do with preventing the fiery nuclear annihilation of the human species? Aside, that is, from keeping the observably mentally ill as far from the big red button as possible? What fresh madness is this? But we’re all inured to the regime’s infinite absurdity, these days, so after having a sensibly cynical chuckle we all moved on. I shrugged and moved on myself, until a few days ago when Stelios Panagiotou of Podcast of the Lotus Eaters took the time to actually read Nair’s work. What he found wasn’t lolcow fodder. It was deeply sinister.
