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> If COVID taught us anything, when an actual crisis hits.

To be fair, nuclear crisis is not at all like COVID. It's one of those things that you can kinda see coming on the horizon. It's increasingly unlikely that, aside from a small scale nuclear attack, nuclear war will spring up without tons of advanced warning; for example, in the forms of degenerating relations between nuclear powers, and saber-rattling. Spending money on up-keep for these drugs isn't the best use of funds, and should only be done during periods of high tension.

And yes, as a society, our preparation for a COVID-like event was weak (in the US, in no small part due to Trump's efforts to reverse Obama-era preparations).



Except there are cases where nuclear emergencies do just pop up, take the Sendai earthquake in Japan for instance. Having some of the drugs ready to go seems like a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.


do you think the obama administration depleting the stockpile of N95 masks from 2009-2016 made any difference?

see section 3 “The Atrophy of Vigilance in the Strategic National Stockpile”

https://ethics.harvard.edu/files/center-for-ethics/files/23p...


I suppose I made a mistake in getting political, but there's a difference between atrophying something, and sweeping the whole thing into the trash.


Negligence vs Incompetence? From leadership? Different means. Same ends. The difference is semantic.




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