It's just a lead-in to the comments by Barbara Kingsolver. He knows that it's not 'over.' See later on:
> But more importantly, a few hundred of the successors to the
> Titans, the "Minuteman III" missiles, remain active in silos
> throughout the northern US, run by crews and following procedures
> essentially similar to those here. ICBMs are not yet history,
> even if the original motivation for building them now is.
> Second, I don't consider it a "terrible artifact". It's an awesome engineering project. And it helped preserve the freedoms we have today.
We arguably wouldn't have a lot of the advances we have today without WW2, but I'm not ready to shake Hitler's hand and congratulate him on a job well done. Just because something causes a good outcome doesn't mean that referring to it as 'terrible' is the opposite of the truth.
If some 'mad scientist' starts kidnapping homeless people off the streets and torturing them to death in his/her basement. Suppose through this process he/she discovers a cure for cancer. I'm not about to say that he/she "led the heroic fight to free us from the evils of cancer." But I'm not about to throw out the results (cure for cancer) either just because the method (torturing people to death) was misguided.
We arguably wouldn't have a lot of the advances we have today without WW2, but I'm not ready to shake Hitler's hand and congratulate him on a job well done. Just because something causes a good outcome doesn't mean that referring to it as 'terrible' is the opposite of the truth.
If some 'mad scientist' starts kidnapping homeless people off the streets and torturing them to death in his/her basement. Suppose through this process he/she discovers a cure for cancer. I'm not about to say that he/she "led the heroic fight to free us from the evils of cancer." But I'm not about to throw out the results (cure for cancer) either just because the method (torturing people to death) was misguided.