After World War II the world entered a grey combat zone known as the “Cold War.” The two most powerful nations on earth, the US and the USSR, stood face to face, toe to toe, and seriously considered nuking each other. Thousands of nuclear warheads were armed and aimed by both nations, targeting each other’s homelands, in a strategy known by the acronym MAD: Mutual Assured Destruction. President Truman even had to fire General Douglas MacArthur because of his insistence that we use nuclear weapons against the Chinese during the Korean war. Key players in the nuclear drama carried endearing names like “Gadget” (1st atom bomb-1945), “Fat Man” (Nagasaki-1945), “Little Boy” (Hiroshima-1945), “George” (1951), “Mike” (1952). But there was anything endearing about these weapons. Clearly this was m…