They are missile launch crews, standing ready to send up to 450 ICBMs at targets in Russia, where, in equivalent bunkers, young Russians stand ready to do the same thing to targets here. Missile control officers are members of elite military units, yet they are also figures of the outmoded absurd. The context of what I am calling their imprisonment was laid out last week by the Globe’s Bryan Bender in an important article on America’s current nuclear arsenal.

“The US-Soviet standoff that gave rise to tens of thousands of nuclear weapons is over,’’ an arms control expert told Bender, “but the policies developed to justify their possession and potential use remain largely the same.’’ It is well known that the United States and Russian nuclear arsenals still count thousands of warheads, and President Obama has made their reduction a priority. Moscow and Washington are completing negotiations on a treaty to get the totals down below 2,000 on each side in the short term, aiming at further reductions to the 1,000-warhead range. After years of nuclear inertia, arms reduction is back on the political agenda.

But no one imagines that those missile officers in Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming will be released from their decades-old routines any time soon. They have their fingers on the hair trigger, and, whether it makes sense or not, they will, when ordered to do so, pull. Never mind that the country whose cities will be obliterated is not remotely an enemy any more. Never mind that civilization as we know it could end. The only reason Russian and American missile crews stand poised to kill millions of people and to rain radioactive poison down on the globe is, well, because they do.

The political requirement for national leaders to appear tough, the pressures of defense contractors that draw billions of dollars from this status quo, the callowness of politicians who refuse to cut weapons budgets because of constituents’ jobs and industry campaign contributions, the turf protection of military services - such are the broad factors than have kept the demonic structures of the Cold War in place across the two decades since the Cold War ended. But the narrow reality is that the strategic nuclear strike personnel, whether tending warheads in missile silos, bomb bays, or the launch tubes of submarines, are a match for the left-behind Japanese soldiers who emerged from Pacific island caves and jungles years after World War II was over. Bedraggled, dazed, and still convinced of a duty to protect a regime that was long gone, such men were figures of amusement and pity.

I don’t know how it appears on the Russian side, but the contemporary US nuclear force, for all of its spit-and-polish elitism, is a deliberately maintained anachronism - and there is the revelation. The insane accumulation of tens of thousands of nuclear bombs and warheads was never really about fighting a war. It was the unlikely Ronald Reagan who finally put the truth into words; “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.’’ That logic led Reagan to embrace nuclear abolition, but not even he could break the transcendent combine of industry-Congress-Pentagon. Those three define the sides of the iron triangle within which America still finds itself imprisoned.

But it’s a prison to which we ourselves hold the key. We stay because we love it. When the NHL Winter Classic, the festive hockey game held at Fenway Park, was kicked-off by the low, roaring overflight of a B-2, the crowd was awed and thrilled by the sinister black monster, centerpiece of the nuclear bomber force - and now symbol of American celebration. Those dedicated young missile officers who, season in and season out, stand ready to wreck the earth are this nation’s best - and there’s the thing to fear.