... by means on nuclear attack if necessary???

Do you really mean to advocate nuking these country's nuclear facilities in order to destroy them?

Yes. It would stop proliferation permanently, no?

This is nonsense, OJ. After their counterstrikes killed tens of millions of Americans, who would care that China, Pakistan, France, and North Korea no longer have nuclear capability.

Leaving aside our host's nukophilia, the answer to Kaplan's question is that, yes, lot's of people miss the nuclear confrontation of the Cold War. The Cold War world was stable and America's options were limited. That is a attractive for a certain type of American.

you left off the cccp's stockpile.

David, the only people who might have reason to be nostalgic for the nuclear confrontation of the Cold War are the Soviet apologists and Communist party members whose lies about the real nature of the USSR was exposed.

oj, you have expressed some crazy opinions before, but if you're serious here, it's clear that you have now lost your mind. Do you actually expect anyone (outside of mental wards) to agree with you?

We need Russia to have them for the same reason as Israel & India.

brandon:

There wouldn't be any counterstrikes.

Morko:

Communism did untold damage to mankind because we didn't use nukes. Why repeat the same mistake?

"The soundest doctrine is a variation on nukes as a deterrent-"
Yes, we need to develop our own emancipation proclamation for NUCLEAR energy power generation in this country. If its good for India, isn't it good for us too? We need to take the oil weapon away from the Mullahs by making that comodity less fungible.
Once a country has nukes, we'll never take them "out." The only time to move is before that happens. But I don't think that will happen either, so we need to make the Iranian Mullahs love life more than we think that they do so they will be more responsible when they do have them.

morry:

Which is why we need to do it at least once, to show that developing nukes against our wishes will only get you nuked.

oj: Your problem is that you think such drastic actions as nuking foreign countries will have only those consequences you want them to have and that non-Americans are a bunch of wusses who will stand idly by as the Americans massacre their countrymen.

Morko:

A nuclear monopoly is important enough to accept the side effects.

Side effects such as World War 3, with hundreds of millions dead? And even if the old nuclear stockpiles were destroyed, all first world countries and many developing ones could easily build new ones.

No they can't. We'll just nuke them pre-emptively this time.

Yeah, in your dreams.

Mankind doesn't have a particularly good record of developing weapons but then not using them. And, of course, the strategy worked brilliantly in Japan.

Forget about crazed fantasies of preepmtively atom-bombing the axis of evil--let's discuss deterrence.

Deterrence is not separate from nuclear warfighting. Here is the mystery: to be effective, deterrece must be credible. To be credible, the opponent must believe that it is possible. For the enemy to believe it is possible, we must have a plan for winning.

If we ourselves believe that we are bluffing, the bluff fails and the result is war. Weapons not effective for war-fighting are, ipso facto, not effective for deterrence.

A hard teaching, certainly, and many there were who could not accept it during our path to victory in World War III. Most fortunately, neither we nor the enemy doubted our purpose then. May we and the world be similarly blessed today.

Lou:

Yes, the reason weapons have proliferated is because by not using our nukes we made them uncredible.

It is to our everlasting glory, and history will marvel at the fact, that we haven't used nukes, nor have we allowed others in the nuke club to use them for over sixty years.

It's become such a taboo that I can't imagine any country, even Iran or NK, unleashing them because they know with absolute certainty that they and theirs will be annihilated and their land uninhabitable for a very long time should they decide to do that most forbidden of all things.

erp:

100 million Cold War dead wish we'd used them. Japan is inhabited and an excellent ally.

OJ,

If there wouldn't be any counterstrikes then foreign arsenals aren't a threat and there's no point in destroying them in the first place.

OJ, Just finished watching Major Kong activate the doomsday machine on TCM. He said to tell you "Hi There"!

Scott should have gotten an Academy Award.

Brandon:

Just the principle, like all our wars.

jd:

That's the key to the movie--we all realize he's right.

Yeah, but he was also right when he said " Sugar, don't forget to say your prayers."

How would 100 million people have been saved had we dropped the bomb where? Moscow, Beijing, Mecca, randomly in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Hyannis Port?

Comparing the bombs dropped on Japan to the kind of weapons we have now? Chernobyl isn't inhabitable and it wasn't even a bomb.

BTW, I'm sure Kubrick didn't think Buck was the hero of the movie. I'm not so sure I did either, but I'm glad it turned out that way. Peter Sellers as Jimmy Carter was a great touch. How did he know?

erp:

Almost all our weapons (the ICBMs and the SLBMs and the cruise missiles) have relatively small warheads (about 3 to 5 kilotons, about 1/3 to 1/4 of Hiroshima). And they are much cleaner, in terms of radioactive leftovers. The bigger weapons need different delivery arrangements (like the MX, which may have been retired, I don't know).

The 20 megaton monsters of the late 1950s and early 1960s were all bomber-delivered and were not really feasible weapons. What our current arsenal lacks in size, it more than makes up for in accuracy - we can hit within probably 50 yards of where we want anywhere on the globe. And an ICBM carries 10 warheads, independently targeted.

Chernobyl would be cleaner if it had been a bomb. The spent fuel from a reactor is much worse than what's left over from a fission weapon, unless the bomb is deliberately wrapped for maximum radioactive damage. I don't believe that is done anymore, either.

Your closing clause ("nor have allowed others to use them for over sixty years") is really at the heart of the argument. Obviously the French and the British are of almost no risk to use their weapons. China? Perhaps more likely than the Soviets. They are not calculating the balance of power the same way the Russians did, and it seems they believe in the inevitability of history (being on their side) more than the Russians ever did. They are certainly more patient that the Russians were, and more willing to take the gamble that some level of economic trade with the West is worth the risk (of political infection).

But Iran and North Korea are beyond the pale. They have almost no political constraints to stop their leader(s) from firing away. They are practically taunting the West (the USA) to engage them. Did you see the report a few weeks ago that Mugabe was thinking of buying a nuclear reactor for Zimbabwe? Silly and nuts, but that is the future if we do not stop the nuclear wannabes right now. The point made at the end of the excerpt in OJ's post is quite right also: if 30 or 40 nations have bombs, the chances of an 'accident' go up dramatically from where they are now. And what if Cairo or Jakarta or Ankara or Berlin or Hong Kong or Bogota receives such an 'accident'? Or Qom? Or Islamabad? Or New Dehli? There won't be any holding back, and do you know what the best US response is at that point? To destroy the war-making capability of all combatants (this is from one of Allen Drury's later novels, where China and Russia fight all-out war, and the US President decides that the best thing for America's security is to help both sides).

Nice dig at Hyannisport.

jd:

Of course he didn't understand the film. Graham Greene never understood his own books either.

Treat Communism as we did Nazism in '45 and you avoid the mistakes the Third World made. It was treating Communism as legitimate and a winner in WWII that made it attractive. We nade the identical mistake in Afghanistan, pretending that Islamicism had woreked rather than American arms.

Thanks for the technical info, Jim, I really don't know about bombs and their capabilities. My point is that most of us think of radioactivity, that's why the taboo against going nuclear really has sunk in. I very much doubt Iran or NK will go nuclear because they will lose the good will they now enjoy from the BDS crowd.

That said, I have no objections to bombing the sites you mention, it's only the nukes I object to. Take out all the nuclear bomb facilities ASAP. Works for me.

After 9/11, had I been in charge, I would have issued a statement that Moslem countries bring forward their terrorists by noon of the next day or their capitals would be bombed, and then do so. Once again the next day, and so on. Civilian casualties would have been awful, but entirely within the control of the Islamic leadership.

In less than a week, the terrorist networks would have been wiped out and Islamic countries could either join the family of nations or not, as they like.

Oil? Let's not fall for the media bleating that without Middle Eastern oil, we'll be freezing in our cold rooms and have no gas for our behemoths. We have other options. They can only sell their oil or drink it.

erp:

I doubt if the mullahs or little Kim read The Nation, and the adulation of the BDS crowd and other various fools in the West may be nice, but I don't think it will restrain them from doing whatever nasty idea pops into their heads.

Jim, it has so far.

I agree about Pakistan, France and North Korea, but I think China is responsible enough, and democratically-trending enough, to be allowed to keep theirs.

Too unstable.

As a practical matter, attacking China has a bigger cost than attacking any of the others. (what's France going to do? FIght back?)

As a matter of precedent I'd leave France off the list because we let them get nukes with our approval back in the early Cold War, and leave China off because we've already pretty much accepted it.

I think the principle we should be asserting is "If Uncle Sam says you can't have nukes, you can't have nukes." Which means NK and Iran, both of which have been told quite plainly that we don't liike what they're doing, need to be shown that defying us is a bad idea.