September 23, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Why do people keep saying
Why do people keep saying "He won't give nukes to terrorists" as if they know this for a fact? You're almost certainly middle class, probably a guy, sitting in a comfy chair somewhere in America. How the hell do you know what Saddaam will or will not do? What, are you channeling Idi Amin?
The Cold War doctrine of deterrence was intimately tied to non-proliferation, the doctrine that the anti-war crowd is explicitly abandoning. No one serious doubts that Saddaam is trying to get nukes; almost no one doubts that he has the blueprints for a bomb, and needs only fissile material. Of course, this is very, very hard to get, but it is not, as many have argued, impossible. They've caught 200 people trying to smuggle fissile material out of the former USSR; you quant types want to bet that any inspection system is catching 100% incidence? You libertarians in the crowd should go back and read what you've written about the War on Drugs before you answer that, and be prepared to explain how they are different.
Deterrence was predicated on the ability to know at all times where any offensive action was coming from. Specifically, that with only five nations in possession of nuclear weapons, you could not degrade another nation's capability with a stealth nuclear attack, because it would be immediately obvious which one or two nations could have been responsible. In fact, it would have been obvious which one it was coming from, since Chinese missiles didn't have the reach to go to the US, and while the US could have launched to Russia and China, the trajectory would have been different from a launch originating in Russia or China and targeted at the other. And Britain and France's intercontinental nuclear ability was provided by us.
Proliferation destroys that. It becomes possible to launch a plausibly deniable stealth attack. And Saddaam with a nuke means massive proliferation.
If Saddaam gets nukes, Iran will get nukes. They've been squabbling over the same damn territory since the Persians poured into Mesopotamia; neither will cede the other military advantage. If Iran gets nukes, the entire region is going to try to go nuclear. You want unstable? Try five or six Middle Eastern nations with nukes pointed at each other and Israel, all with the hope of launching a strike on a neighbor that will be taken to be from someone else. And Israel, who if attacked, will blow up all of them.
And the "Saddaam won't because of his self-interest" argument doesn't hold up. Saddaam has demonstrated that he is willing to strike at the US for spite, with an action that did nothing to advance his interest, yet would certainly result in his own demise if it were successful: his attempted assassination of President Bush. If he had succeeded in assassinating an American president, there is nothing more certain than the speed with which the US would act to remove him from power. He did it anyway. Stupid? Psychotic? Attempting to play to the folks at home? Who knows. The point is, you can't say that he wouldn't risk his regime to lash out at the US, because he did.
I frankly cannot understand why anyone is willing to argue in favor of allowing Saddaam to acquire nuclear weapons. No damage wrought by the US could begin to compare to the damage that would be done, to us and to them, by a bevy of dictatorships in the Middle East armed with primitive nukes.
Update: No, we're not abandoning non-proliferation, say correspondants; we just want to wait until we're sure. Come again? When you're sure will be when Saddaam has fissile material. You'll find out about that when it's in a bomb, pointed at civilians. Non-proliferation is, by definition, pre-emptive.
Posted by Jane Galt at September 23, 2002 11:42 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links