HOW THEY LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (TO SPITE THE LIBS)

Something weird I noticed: since that nerve-wracking Hawaii alert last weekend -- which brought back for this old duck-and-cover kid some old-fashioned end-of-the-world dread for which, it turns out, I was not really nostalgic -- conservatives have been talking about nuclear war as if it wouldn't be such a big deal.

“If a Missile Alert Sounds,” headlined David French of National Review, “Prepare to Live.” Hmm, I thought when I first saw that, some people are so jaded they need apocalypse porn to get excited; but it turns out French wants to convince readers that, despite what the nervous nellies say, they could happily survive a hail of H-bombs.

Prepare to live. As tempting as it may be, don’t spend the precious minutes between missile alert and missile impact texting family, sending tearful goodbyes on Snapchat, or attempting to reconcile old grudges. Don’t do it.

Your family will respect you more, knowing that in the final hours you didn't go all wobbly and tell them you loved them.

First, you have to understand that the odds are overwhelming that you’ll survive an initial blast. Nuclear weapons are devastating, but it’s a Hollywood myth that any individual strike will vaporize an entire American city, much less the suburbs and countryside…

Hollywood always exaggerates these things. For instance, they never show you the parts of Hiroshima that were open for business the next day.

Second, you also need to understand that you have far more control over your survival than you might think. Time and isolation are your friends…

No shock a conservative would argue for time and isolation — if living 80 lonely years in Gopher Hole, North Dakota makes you a loyal Republican in good standing, then being a nuclear attack survivor should make you a precinct captain!

Yesterday’s warning presents an opportunity to take stock. Do you have an emergency plan? Do you have a basic stock of emergency supplies? Do you know exactly where you’d go in your house? Have you gone to websites like ready.gov to understand the basics? There’s nothing weird or strange about being a basic “prepper.”

So stock up on Jim “Brother Love” Bakker’s Survival Chow!  And stock up on guns, ammo, crossbows, machetes (we calls ‘em “Mega-Bowies” so they sound less Messican), and quarterstaffs to fend off interlopers in your post-apocalyptic paradise! Remember, time and isolation are your friends.

French’s colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty chimes in: “a single, nuclear device exploding in a nearby city does not necessarily doom you and your loved ones to death.” He encourages readers to have “a little unpleasant discussion around the dinner table” with their families to prepare. Most memorable line: “If you ever received such a text warning, would you fill your bathtub with water, or with your family members?” Well, after they've been incinerated I guess your bathtub could accommodate quite a lot of them.

And Austin Bay — remember him? — complains that “the Clinton Administration slowed anti-ballistic missile development because hard left Democrats disdained Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative”; boy, some grudges really die hard. But his initial complaint is even weirder:

When told by government authorities that an attack was underway, Hawaiian residents felt vulnerable, even those who know the U.S. Navy deploys AEGIS ballistic missile defense warships in the area. Still, Hawaii's current missile defenses are quite thin, so many people panicked. 

Yeah, that’s why announcing a nuclear attack made them panic — they’d all been thumbing through Jane’s just the day before and had doubts about our missile defense system.

It's easy enough to conclude that they know a nuclear tantrum is a Trump possibility, and want to prep their people to roar approval rather than scream in terror when the mushroom clouds sprout. But as always I lean toward the psychological, and assume it's another form of culture war: Since back in the Cold War days liberals made all those movies about how bad nuclear war would be, for conservatives it stands to reason that nuclear war must actually be good. All it needs is the right publicity!