A friend of mine looked me straight in the eye this week and calmly suggested we may need to nuke Iran.
Iran, he said, is a worldwide menace that needs to be fully neutralized to preserve peace. The only way to do that? Demonstrate overwhelming force.
Not Tehran, he clarified. Somewhere less populated. Just enough to force unconditional surrender. Something like Hiroshima-light.
He wasn’t joking. He’s a serious man. Thoughtful. Measured. The kind of person whose words you take seriously precisely because he doesn’t waste them.
I didn’t say anything for a moment. Beyond disbelief, what do you say?
I just let it sit there between us.
He stared back at me, fully convinced.
Ideas like that don’t appear out of thin air. They’re circulating somewhere.
We weren’t in a war room. We weren’t looking at maps. We were just two people having a normal conversation. And the word “nuke” entered it like it belonged.
You won’t hear that argument on Sunday morning talk shows. Not yet.
But the fact that it moves so easily through private conversation suggests it’s closer than we think.
That’s new.
Some things are supposed to be hard to say. They’re supposed to stop a conversation cold. A week ago, that one would have.
This time it didn’t.
Neither of us flinched.
I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
The next day, my banker called. Not about returns or rates. About paralysis.
“Clients are frozen,” he said. “A couple in their 60s who spent 30 years building toward retirement. They’ve stopped making decisions entirely. Trying to plan right now is like dancing on —” he paused. “I don’t even have a metaphor for it. There’s no ground under our feet.”
He’s been doing this for nearly as long as I’ve been planting trees. He doesn’t rattle easily. The fact that he was rattled told me more than the words did.
This kind of instability doesn’t wait for outcomes. It starts doing damage the moment it’s introduced. And this wasn’t a slow drift. It was a jump. A rapid escalation with no clear end and no real sense of where it stops.
People want this to end quickly. Just make it stop.
This past Sunday I sat in a gym watching my 45-year-old son play volleyball in a community league.
Men and women in their 20s, 30s, 40s. Diving, laughing, competing. Calling lines, arguing a little, then smiling and moving on. There was energy in the room. Real energy. The kind that comes from people using what they have while they have it.
No one was talking about Iran. No one was talking about nuclear weapons.
They were just living the way people are supposed to live.
I watched my son dive for a ball he probably shouldn’t have gone for and thought: He’s not thinking about any of this. Good. Neither should he have to.
That’s when it hit me.
Most of us are holding two realities at the same time. In one, we’re starting to talk about unthinkable actions as if they’re just options on the table. In the other, life goes on, volleyball, weekend plans, what’s for dinner, as if none of that language carries any weight.
Those two things don’t fit together.
There are things a society does not casually discuss unless it is prepared, somewhere deep down, to accept them.
That’s not about policy. It’s not about who’s right or wrong on Iran, or tariffs, or any of it.
It’s about a line.
And once that line moves, it rarely moves back.
An artist friend of mine in Ukraine wrote something recently that I haven’t been able to shake.
She was talking about black and white photography. About how maybe color is an illusion, something that softens reality, distracts from it. And that in the end there are only two honest colors left. Black and white. Clear lines. No hiding.
Four years repelling Russian invaders burned it down to that. Clarity.
Using a nuclear weapon isn’t a gray area. It should be black and white.
And yet, somehow, we’re starting to treat it like it lives somewhere in between.
I don’t know what happens next. None of us do.
But if the idea of using a nuclear weapon can sit comfortably in an ordinary conversation between reasonable people, if it can come and go like it belongs there, if neither person flinches, then something has already shifted.
Not out there.
Here, inside us.
And the part that stays with me isn’t the geopolitics.
It’s that I didn’t flinch either.
Gary Horton is chairman of the College of the Canyons Foundation board. His “Full Speed to Port!” has appeared in The Signal since 2006. The opinions expressed in his column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Signal or its editorial board.
