Dear President of the U.S:

You have just inherited control of over five thousand deliverable nuclear weapons, more than enough to end life as we know it. Due to protocols set in place during the Cold War, you do not need the approval of Congress or anyone other than your own conscience to launch them. So I ask you, what is the point? A nuclear exchange on any scale would kill millions of civilians directly and even more indirectly. Why do we need these things? You might say we need them to deter our potential enemies from using them against us, but how are we so barbaric that the only thing preventing us from obliterating each other is mutually assured destruction? A society that is advanced enough to create devices that split or fuse the nuclei of the atom and then deliver those devices from rockets launched into space, should be advanced enough to realize they are pointless.

Should a war start, with all of our fighter jets, tanks, and assorted other military hardware, we are more than capable of waging it without using nuclear weapons. The only scenario where a nuclear missile is even remotely useful, is if an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth and we need to destroy it; and you don’t need five thousand of them to do that. Maintaining nuclear weapons costs taxpayers over twenty billion dollars every year, wouldn't that money be better spent elsewhere? Even if we didn’t get rid of all of our nuclear missiles, just maybe half or so, still enough to end life as we know it, we could have supplies in underfunded schools,we could have better healthcare for veterans, we could begin to fix our crumbling infrastructure, all at the cost of having slightly fewer giant death machines.

So I ask you, if the time ever comes, where your finger is on the button, ask yourself if you would feel comfortable explaining to the world why you killed millions of people? Imagine the events of the Mad Max franchise being real, sounds unpleasant, right? Now imagine that being your fault.

Sincerely,

Max Blumenfeld