Just a kinda nice thing

The item is a week old, but still worth noting, for the sake of history if nothing else.

Washington, Dec. 12 (U.S. Newswire) - The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has dismantled the last nuclear artillery shell in the U.S. nuclear stockpile, eliminating the vestiges of a type of battlefield nuclear weapons that comprised a key element of America's Cold War arsenal.

Employees at NNSA's Pantex facility in Amarillo, Texas, dismantled the last W-79 warhead earlier this year. Pantex officials will hold a ceremony at the plant today to mark the achievement.

The first such weapons were deployed in 1957; at one time thousands of them were deployed in Western Europe, particularly West Germany (as it was then), as a supposed "deterrent" to a hypothetical Warsaw Pact tank attack. The scenario never was realistic but the weapons were very real. Most Americans continued to believe (and perhaps still do believe) that the US would never "go nuclear" first, even though weapons such as the W-79 proved doing so was exactly the official doctrine.

With the collapse of the "Soviet threat," the decision was made in 1991 to dismantle the warheads. That process is now complete.

No, this does not mean the threat of nuclear war is over and it does not mean the US has become a champion of disarmament, except when it involves other nations disarming. But it is still nice to think that one type of weapon is gone and through that to think there is yet hope of change on the rest.