I am sitting here in the crosshairs of a madman out of North Korea. Incredibly, he’s fuelling up a Taepodong missile and getting ready to launch it in my direction. It can reach 9000 miles. And I am on the receiving end. The mighty U.S. military industrial complex has activated its missile defense system a few miles away, up in Vandenberg Air Force base.

In the 1980s, nuclear war used to be talked about all the time. Duran Duran used to sing about it. But ultimately, the idea of nuclear menace was an abstraction. Vandenberg was an abstraction, it was some place where important things were prepared, but nothing ever happened. I once lived near lots of military bases, and whenever a sonic boom broke across the high desert, I wondered if the Soviets were at long last finally attacking. They never did but that watchful readiness shaped what I thought about as I grew up. Then when I went to school in England, I found myself in the middle of mass nuclear hysteria – with Europeans more afraid of American nuclear strength than Soviet weaponry and intentions. It didn’t change my opinion any about the Soviets.

Now, I am back in this territory, and this time, for real, a madman may be right now targeting my city.

Is he targetting Los Angeles? He could be. Everyone targets Los Angeles. The Red Chinese general who threatened us in 1998 specifically mentioned Los Angeles. The al-Qaida Millennium Bombers, caught on the Canadian border in 2000, were targetting Los Angeles. Assorted freaks have already been caught shooting up airport counters and plotting mega-death in Los Angeles.

Now, Kim Jong Il, the Lil Kim of that Team America movie, may have a madman’s urge to send a message to the city of the film industry that had made so much ridicule of him.

I know what citywide catastrophes are like – the World Trade Center, as well as huge urban fires, earthquakes, blizzards, haze, in many different places. What’s happening tonight may be even worse peril. A nut with a nuclear device is pointing it at my country and maybe my city to “show” me how powerful he is.

He’s targetting this coast as men with radar screens in front of them, and men in uniform, and men with red phones, and men with supercomputers prepare for the Night Watch, waiting all night long – watching on this very night with the missile shield – to make sure this madman does not harm us.

Will they succeed? I have a gentle, unthinking trust that they will. After all, we are used to victory, we almost take it for granted.

And strange as it may seem, on this possible nuclear night … I don’t hear a thing from anyone and I don’t feel a thing. Is it because we are always spectators or victims?

It’s as if the enormity of it is just too big.

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker has a superb essay about it from the North Korean perspective here. Or, it can be read on today’s Real Clear Politics here.