>>127203
My interpretation is that it is likely to take as long to fuel up a missile as it is to assemble the warhead anyway. It would probably be necessary to assemble a warhead prior to firing anyway, due to the limited number you can keep "hot 'n' ready" because of the maintenance required.
It seems like powerful people want to keep the public terrified of impossible, irrelevant things. This has been going on for a while now. Before the Internet, network TV was constantly shouting in everyone's ear about The Nucular Threat, both overtly, on the nightly news, and more subtly, in a hundred made-for-TV movies about Our Troubled Yoots, in which the camera would zoom in on some long-haired child actor obsessively drawing skull-shaped mushroom clouds in his school notebook, then throwing it at his alarmed parents and yelling NUTHIN MATTERS 'COS WE'RE ALL GONNA DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE with his eyes bugging out and his earrings a-clattering and a-jangling side to side from the sheer impossible force of how hard he was emoting. And once the Cold War came to an end, and they needed a new boogeyman with which to frighten the public and gas up the idiots, imaginary existential threats to humanity were manufactured one after another, each seamlessly discarded and replaced once it had served its purpose: "global warming," the "hole" in the ozone layer, "terrorism," one after another, without end. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
And this pernicious nonsense was very useful to certain powerful people. It mobilized persons of a certain sensibility, by which I mean, unstable morons, to carry out acts of political violence that they found useful. It gave politicians of a certain stripe a perfect segue to say LET'S STOP BULLYING THE POOR MISUNDERSTOOD RUSSIANS, GIVE THEM WHATEVER THEY WANT, IF WE TRY TO RESIST WE'RE ALL GONNA DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. And while people were talking about this artificial crisis, of course, they weren't talking about the junkie who got out of jail this morning and shoved Grandma onto the subway tracks ten minutes later.
They have been manipulating you with nonsense for a very long time now. And I do not, strictly speaking, mean ((( THEM ))), either. Being a powerful spiteful asshole with a grudge against civilization and a burning desire to immiserate the peasantry doesn't automatically come with a big nose and a little hat. If only it were so simple.
The older I get, the more I admire Mencken. Do you suppose Averi has read any of his work?