How is it that we suffer a filthy, fanatical psychopath who is willing to use A-Bombs on Israel and for intimidation of us?
Yet our administration is weak and unwilling to stand up to this insane little murderer and too ignorant to counter his petroleum blackmail with unfettered domestic and North American production! No guts----
"When it comes to nukes, who has them matters a lot more than how many there are."
By Victor Davis Hanson
February 21, 2012
Given the worrying over nuclear Iran, it is timely to review the rules of nuclear proliferation.
NUCLEAR CRED
Otherwise insignificant nations and failed states gain credibility by shorting their own people to divert billions of dollars to acquiring a bomb. Take away that fact from Pakistan, and the United States would probably have reduced aid to such a de facto belligerent long ago. Without the ongoing appearance of possessing nukes, North Korea would probably earn about as much foreign aid as Chad or Niger. What makes France a world player, in a way that the much larger and richer Germany is not, is not just the burdens of German guilt, but also the fact of a nuclear France. The bomb sometimes achieves what even GDP, population, strategic location, or natural resources cannot.
MADNESS AS FORCE MULTIPLIER
Presumed madness is a force multiplier of nuclear capability, especially in an Islamic apocalyptic context. Under conventional nuclear deterrence, rough nuclear parity, and the assurance that neither side has a first-strike capability sufficient to render its opponent nuclearly impotent, prevent both wars and nuclear blackmail. But if a head of state can feign insanity, or, better yet, convincingly announce a wish for the apocalypse, then he can, in theory, circumvent some traditional rules of deterrence. An Iranian theocrat’s supposed willingness to use his sole nuclear weapon to wipe out tiny Israel — at the cost of losing 30 million Iranians from retaliation — yields a cheap way to obtain not just parity with Israel, but potentially a nuclear advantage.
In any given Middle Eastern crisis, a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran will always talk of the return of the hidden imam while threatening to repeat the Holocaust. By these means, it hopes to reap political concessions that its paltry array of nukes would not otherwise warrant. Acting as if one had nothing to lose is an advantage in nuclear poker — analogous to the supposedly prison-bound high-school dropout picking a fight with his graduating, Harvard-bound counterpart.
SORTA, KINDA NUCLEAR
All intelligence concerning the current status of the world’s nuclear club is inexact at best. Therefore, to achieve nuclear deterrence, it may not even be necessary for a rogue state to provide conclusive proof that it has nuclear weapons on hand and that they actually work.
Iraq might well never have been able to produce enough weapons-grade plutonium from its Osirak reactor to make a bomb, even had Israel not destroyed the plant in 1981. No matter: Had we known in 1991 that the reactor was intact and had been working for a decade, there is real doubt whether the United States would have dared to invade Iraq during the first Gulf War.
Moammar Qaddafi reportedly gave up his nuclear-weapons program for fear of meeting the same fate as Saddam Hussein. ...
-Read on at link-
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