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Perhaps the strangest moment in the ridiculous action movie "G.I. Joe: Retaliation" is when the nefarious Zartan, impersonating the President of the United States, achieves total global nuclear disarmament.
It's strange to see a super villain accomplish something that liberals have been dreaming of for years, and what's even stranger is that his method of doing so seems (at least to someone who has been sitting in the movie theater for 90 minutes) like something that could almost work if we were crazy enough to try it.
NOTE: This would not actually work.
In the middle of a summit of the world's eight nuclear powers, the false U.S. president opens his nuclear briefcase and launches all of America's nukes.
Everyone at the table flips out, and then, moments later, they open their nuclear briefcases and launch all of their nukes.
Next, the false U.S. president presses another button to cause all U.S. nukes to self-destruct.
Next, he tells the dumbfounded seven other premiers in the room to destroy their nukes or be responsible for the end of the world. All of them quickly comply — except for the North Korean leader, who hesitates over his control panel, scowling at the false U.S. president and contemplating apocalypse, before finally cursing and hitting abort.
And just like that, all of the world's nukes are gone.
It's a glorious moment, even if Zartan immediately reveals that he has only gotten rid of nukes to make the world vulnerable to Cobra's own space-based weapons of mass destruction.
But the real world isn't that simple.
A wild maneuver like Zartan's would never be attempted, and anyway we could never launch or destroy all nukes at once.
Instead we are stuck in a world with 17,000 nuclear warheads that no major power dares to use but which are perpetually at risk of falling into the hands of someone who will.
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