Wit & Attitude Quote by Craig Bruce

The line lands like a slap because it’s engineered to deny the reader a comfortable middle ground. Bruce frames anti-nuclear protesters not as anxious citizens managing legitimate risk, but as useful idiots begging for their own extinction. The hyperbole is the point: by translating “don’t deploy nukes” into “we demand annihilation,” he performs a rhetorical mugging, forcing the audience to confront what he sees as the hidden bargain of Cold War peace movements - that opposing Western deterrence, in practice, meant indulging Soviet power.

Its specific intent is corrective and punitive. “Feeling appropriately stupid today” is less an argument than a moral audit, written from the vantage point of post-1991 triumphalism, when the Soviet collapse made a certain hawkish narrative feel vindicated. The subtext is that history rendered a verdict: Reagan-era rearmament and missile deployments were not reckless escalation but necessary pressure, and protest was, at best, naive and, at worst, complicit.

What makes the passage work is its ventriloquism. The invented chant (“Please don’t take away our precious Soviet Union!”) caricatures protest language to suggest sentimentality toward an empire, not fear of apocalypse. It’s satire by reduction: compress a complex coalition (pacifists, anti-imperialists, Europeans afraid of being the battlefield, voters distrustful after Vietnam) into a single grotesque motive.

Context matters, though. The 1980s nuclear debate wasn’t merely about loyalty; it was about credibility, miscalculation, and whether placing weapons in Europe increased deterrence or shortened the fuse. Bruce’s cynicism gains punch from hindsight, but it also reveals its blind spot: moral certainty is easiest when the mushroom cloud never arrives.