Stay claim for Guam as we watch two angry men spout belligerent verbal diarrhoea

Poor Guam. I can only imagine the buzz that’s
pervaded every newsroom in the days since tensions
rocketed between the US and North Korea.
Where’s Guam? What is Guam? How fast can we get
there?
I had to Google it.
It’s a tiny US territory nearly 4,000 miles west of
Hawaii and it looks like a Pacific paradise.
All beaches and palm trees and a vibrant tourist
trade. That, plus two enormous American bases, more
stealth bombers than anyone will admit to and a huge
nuclear arsenal.
It’s the home of the THAAD – Terminal High Altitude
Area Defense – system, which launches missiles at
incoming attacking ICBMs and theoretically explodes
them in the upper atmosphere before they can do any
harm.
All very Cold War and supposedly reassuring for the
locals, who know they are first in the firing line should
the threats coming from Donald Trump and Kim Jong-
un become reality.
North Korea, which by the way Fox News abbreviates
to NoKo, has threatened to launch four missiles into
the seas surrounding Guam, 20 miles off shore.
Trump has warned this will provoke US “fire and fury,
the like of which has never been seen before”.
That was meant to echo President Truman in 1942,
after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki.
He warned Japan they “may expect a rain of ruin
from the air, the like of which has never been seen on
this earth”.
And then he gave the go-ahead for the second nuclear
bomb – and the last one ever to be used in anger.
So was Trump’s rhetoric irresponsible bluster or
strong, fierce leadership?
One islander said: “Trump doesn’t need to flex his
muscles to show the US is strong. Yet if something
happens, the thousands of us here on the island are
the ones who will be hit.”
I remember as a child during the worst of the Cold
War often having nightmares about how the world was
going to end.
Since then I’ve always thought it such a miracle that
we got through those years of escalating madness,
with billions of pounds spent on weapons that could
have devastated the earth several times over – the
amazing, life-affirming miracle that human common
sense prevailed and that we avoided mutual
destruction.
It seems such a gigantic step backwards that our
future once again seems to hang in the balance
between two angry men spouting belligerent verbal
diarrhoea.

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