Here’s a scary news headline that leaps off the screen and slams right into your midsection: French, British Nuclear Submarines Collide in Atlantic.

If you don’t have time to click the hyperthingy, here’s the story in brief.  Keep in mind, I’m paraphrasing is some many places:

On February 4th, 2009 two nuclear powered submarines, one French, one British, both armed to their periscopes with nuclear weapons, crashed into each other in the Atlantic Ocean. I’m not lying. Honest. There’s more:

Britain’s top swabby, First Sea Lord, Adm. Jonathon Band told reporters that no nuclear reactors or nuclear missiles were harmed in any way:

The two submarines came into contact at very low speed. Both submarines remained safe.

While apparently speaking in unison, everyone at the French defense ministry corroborated the Sea Lord’s statement:

“They briefly came into contact at a very low speed while submerged. There were no injuries. Neither their nuclear deterrence missions nor their safety were affected,” France’s defense ministry said Monday in a statement.

Word leaked out, too, that both submarines had been offered crisis counseling after the incident but that both vessels had declined.

Let’s see, what else… oh, yeah! Here’s the shrill overreaction that, although entirely devoid of facts, was nonetheless forced upon us thinking folks by the apparently brainless Kate Hudson, chair of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament:

This is a nuclear nightmare of the highest order. The collision of two submarines, both with nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons onboard, could have released vast amounts of radiation and scattered scores of nuclear warheads across the seabed.

Across the seabed? Can you imagine? If that were to happen, then where would the sea monkeys, Charlie the Tuna and the Incredible Mr. Limpet sleep?

Finally (we knew you’d eventually get to the point, Toby!), here’s a video by a group that calls itself (you guessed it) The Submarines. By the way, the cute blonde you’ll see is named Blake Hazard. Her great grandfather was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Eerily enough, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby was published on April 10th, 1924. On the same day exactly 39 years later (April 10th, 1963) 129 people died when the submarine USS Thresher (there’s a picture of it at the top of this post) became the first nuclear-powered submarine to sink at sea. I’m not making this stuff up.  (Wikipedia might be, but I’m not. Of course, until just now I was under the impression that sinking is what submarines were supposed to do. But I digress.)

The song is titled, appropriately enough, “Brighter Discontent,” which is what we would all be feeling (and seeing) if all of our seabeds suddenly began glowing in the dark: