America's 'Doomsday Device'

My views and way of thinking have now changed after this whole mess. At first, I, like many Americans, wanted to just find out who did it and make them pay. But I really don't know what I want now. I definitely think that the evildoers should be punished, but I have a different view about the possible upcoming war against terrorism.\nMy view has changed after I watched the film "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."\nThe film was released in 1964 and is about accidental nuclear war. The plot line is that a crazy U.S. Air Force Commander decides to take the fight against communism into his own hands. He does this by sending a top-secret code to planes and orders them to drop nuclear bombs on crucial targets in Russia. The movie then deals with how to stop the planes because if the bombs are dropped, they will set off a secret Russian defense machine called the "Doomsday Device" that will wipe out all life on Earth.\n Now why this movie scared me so much is that it related to our current situation in a lot of ways. When the "Doomsday Device" is first mentioned, you wonder why this horrible machine would be created, but after thinking about it, one realizes that it is a very ingenious defense strategy. The "Doomsday Device" cannot be shut off and will automatically launch after the first bomb is dropped upon Russia. The reason why this would be an effective way of military defense is because nobody would ever want to drop bombs on Russia, because everything would then cease to exist. I then realized that in the United States we have our own "Doomsday Device"; our pride and hot-temperament.\nThe reason why we are going to start war and kill many is because someone did it first to us. We want to prove to the world that if you mess with the U.S., we're going to mess you up even more and no one will ever want to screw with us again. Is this a good solution, though? What happens if we just make them even more angry, but do not scare them enough to not fight back in the future? What happens if we make a mistake like in the film?\nThe whole mess started because one crazy commander wanted to fight communism his own way. What happens if one of these military personnel wants to take this war against terrorism into their own hands, sort of like Osama bin Laden does with his political agenda? I know that there have to be some pretty angry people in the Pentagon that have lost their friends and families due to the attack, and I know that President George W. Bush is pretty upset once he found out that one of the planes was aimed for his house. There's really nothing stopping them, except that our "Doomsday Device" has an off-switch, and our government has the choice to use it or not. \nI don't know what I'm getting at here; I just got pretty shook up about the future after watching this incredibly realistic film. The one thing I do know is that I don't want to cease to exist because America might revert back to playground fighting tactics in order to show the whole world that we still can steal their lunch money even if they have wounded the bully in charge.