Memorial Day is a federal holiday that honors and mourns American military personnel who died while performing their duties in service to the United States Armed Forces.
The USA has been in 79 wars since 1776. Click on that to see the details, but in every one of them, military life was lost. Total casualties (deaths and wounded) of the major ones:
- American Revolutionary 50,000
- 1812 20,000
- Mexican-American 17,435
- Civil 1,129,418
- WWI 320,518
- WWII 1,076,245
- Korean 128,650
- Vietnam 211,454
- Afghanistan 22,266
- Iraq 36,710
It is estimated that approximately 2.4% of military combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq were female. For all of the 79 wars, 1,354,664 were killed and 1,498,240 wounded. As a percent of deaths relative to the national population, the Civil War was the worst with 2% killed, the Revolutionary War at 1%, World War II 0.3% and World War I 0.1%. Thus, the price of liberty and freedom was terminally paid for by fewer than 1% of our citizens. We honor them on Memorial Day.
World War II started 80 years ago and the more recent terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 was 20 years ago. Thankfully, it's been 30 years since the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. How many would have died in an all-out nuclear war? Here is one estimate. The potential for human extinction has to some degree been diminished with disarmament. Yet, there remain 13,000 nuclear weapons, said to be sufficient to cause this hypothetical nuclear winter.
What has long troubled me are the prospects of future biological warfare. Half a century ago there was the fictional Andromeda Strain of Michael Chrichton. This came from space and was neither a virus or bacterium. It was hexagonal. He graduated with a medical degree from Harvard in 1969, and published that book the same year. Never practiced medicine, and wrote Jurassic Park in 1990.
More recently, something more than a mere conspiracy theory has pointed to COVID-19 possibly being created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a bioweapon. One would think that a country fixated on this means to control the world would first have developed a vaccine to protect themselves. Apparently the "escape" of this virus was done in error, for China did not yet have any kind of certain cure.
The country has denied any kind of organized effort, but they don't exactly willingly share this kind of information. Yet, they clamped down on this outbreak so severely that you wonder if there indeed was some truth to these rumors.
The USA has not exactly been pious about this option, for 80 years ago at the time of Pearl Harbor, Secretary of War (yes, that was what it was called then--War, not Defense) Henry Stimson started our biological warfare program. This became the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick in Maryland, located 51 miles from Washington, D.C. Supposedly, President Richard Nixon dismantled this effort in 1969 and all BW agents were destroyed in May of 1972. However, we retain a so-called "defensive" capability.
There is no confirmed certainty about what Russia is doing, although the Soviet Union had an active program and supplied products during the Vietnam War causing Yellow Rain. This was a biological toxin derived from fungi. Russia has indicated it is following the Geneva Protocol and Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1992. Surely you believe everything Putin says.
So if nuclear and bio warfare dangers are now in a semblance of control, one would think that Humanity is heading in the right direction towards World Peace. Not so, for we are now faced with a totally different kind of threat. Walt Kelly of Pogo created an anti-pollution Earth Day poster in 1970, and used it again in his comic strip for Earth Day 1971. While pollution and environmental concerns were the targets then, half a century later it is Global Warming. And yes, we are the problem.
The Doomsday Clock remains at 100 seconds to midnight. Global climate warming is now the growing concern. Nuclear warfare was so frightening that a stalemate resulted. Climate change is so relatively incremental that nothing much is truly occurring to engender remediation.
Long ago I thought that a two-by-four club was needed to knock some sense into decision-makers. So I proposed The Venus Syndrome to evoke concern, for society acts only when threatened. An attack by Martian aliens would trigger sudden world-wide cooperation. If there were serious prospects for Planet Earth becoming Planet Venus, maybe then serious steps would be taken. After all, the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, and the temperature is at 900 F on Venus.
Sure I exaggerated, but no one took me seriously. However, I got worried, not for that reason, but if those methane clathrates escape from ocean deposits and the tundra, what then would be the solution? I could not conjure up any happy ending to my developing book. Then, more recently, other people began to also get concerned, like James Hanson. Earlier this month a United Nations report said cutting the super-potent greenhouse gas methane quickly and dramatically is the best hope to slow and limit the worst of global warming. Inger Anderson, Director of the UN Environment Programme:
The report said the methane reduction would be relatively inexpensive and could be achieved — by plugging leaks in pipelines, stopping venting of natural gas during energy drilling, capturing gas from landfills and reducing methane from belching livestock and other agricultural sources, which is the biggest challenge.
Sure, do that, but the report missed the whole point of my concern. What do you then do about the natural emissions from the sea and Arctic tundra? With the current warming, are we reaching this crucial tipping point?
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