THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS by John Scalzi

for anything less seems a bit...overly dramatic. People would talk. 
    Finally, there's the matter that by the time anyone thought to use these sorts of weapons in another armed conflict, other people also had nuclear capability; the Soviets in 1949, followed by the British, the French, the Chinese, and so on down the line until you've got folks like India and Pakistan waving their uranium around. Others could make the bombs if they wanted to, thanks to sufficient infrastructure and know-how; for example, Brazil (take that, you lousy Amazon!). 
    As much as it pains any vaguely liberal person such as myself to say it, the specter of mutually assured destruction probably did more to keep humanity from making mushrooms than any other reason, certainly more than any sort of touchy-feely sentiment about how, you know, nuclear war was, like, bad . If nothing else, touchy-feely types generally weren't given launch codes. Because, really. It's not like they would do anything with 'em. Don't take out the car if you don't want to drive.
    People don't think much about nuclear war anymore, and there's a good reason for that: A nuclear war, in the classic look-out-here-come-the-ICBMs-over-the-pole sense, is wholly unlikely to happen. Russia doesn't want to bomb us anymore. If they did, where would their mafia launder their money?
    To the extent that people worry about it, they're more concerned about a lone terrorist walking into Central Park and detonating a bomb out of his knapsack. Even the most brain-dead terrorist organization, however, has to realize that's the sort of thing that the United States would feel obligated to respond to, and not in a dainty fashion. The universally recognized ability to peel the planet's surface like it was an orange is, in fact, a dandy deterrent.
    No, the next nuclear bomb that goes off around people is going to go off like the first one did: Against a people who won't have any possible way of responding in kind. Will it actually happen? I actually think the odds are against it: Them bombs are still hard to come by, and we do have people looking to make sure they don't pop up where they shouldn't. And the one thing that such a bomb was able to provide in World War II -- a definitive ending -- is the one thing that certainly won't happen the next time one goes off. 
    But you never do know. If it does happen, don't expect it near where you are. Expect it on or near the equator, in a hemisphere that is not your own. 

Best Hideously Inbred Royal Family of the Millennium.
    That'd be the Hapsburgs. And here you thought inbreeding (or, as I like to call it, "fornicousin") was just a low-rent sort of activity. In fact, it's the sport of kings: All your royal families of Europe have participated in a pro gram of inbreeding so clearly ill- advised that it would disgust Jerry Springer's booker. They paid for it, of course (how many royal families are left any more) but not before polluting their bloodlines to an intolerable degree. Any little girl who dreamily wishes to marry a handsome prince on a white steed is advised to marry the horse instead. The horse probably has better DNA.
    You'd think that the royal families of Europe would have figured out that a recursive family tree was not the way to go; at the very least, when you'd go to a royal function and everyone was married to a relative, you'd clue in that something was amiss. But royalty are different from you and me, and not just because all their children were still drooling well into the teenage years.  Royalty wasn't just about kings and queens, it was about families and dynasties -- single families ruling multiple countries, or in the case of the Hapsburgs, most of the whole of the continent. You can't let just anyone marry into that sort of thing. There had to be standards, genetically haphazard as they might be.
    The Hapsburgs, based in Austria, carried this admonition to the extreme, even for the royal families of Europe. Take the case of