Keep the nukes, forego the utopians and guilt-ridden Cold Worriers

GLOBAL VIEW COLUMN: “Who Needs Nukes,” by Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, 20 March 2007, p. A18.

In general, I like Bret Stephens, but he writes in such a sarcastic way at times that I think he’s too clever by half, meaning he often buries his lead.

He starts off by saying that nukes are “going out of fashion where they are needed most and coming into fashion where they are needed least.”

Again, a bit too cute.

Nukes have never gone out of fashion among great powers that already have them. Yes, we fuss here and there with arms control reductions that make the masses and certain eggheads very happy, but the U.S. will never get rid of them, any more than any other nation with significant holdings will ever get rid of them. It’s a club worth belonging to--pure and simple.

Nukes are not coming into fashion where they “are needed least,” but rather with countries who are truly roguish in their behavior and yet seek--in the post-9/11 environment--serious hedges against the possibility of U.S.-led invasion. That’s a whopping two states known as North Korea and Iran, the surviving members of the “axis of evil.” Nobody else is seriously pursuing nuclear weapons, because basically everyone else is convinced that their relationships with the great powers and especially with the United States is such that, in the event of serious crisis, our nukes will be used to deter certain escalations from happening.

But even with Iran and North Korea, it’s clear that nukes are for having, not using. If either just wanted a nuke to be able to pop one off pronto, it would have done that a long time ago. No, both regimes want nukes primarily as bargaining chips with the U.S., as both see their antagonistic relationship with us as their primary international security issue. Neither state would gain any “hegemony” over anybody else by threatening the use of nukes. They’d simply invite U.S. strikes.

Having said all that, I am one who will never argue against modernizing our nuclear arsenal nor maintaining it at a level that makes it clear to anybody on the planet that we can and will vaporize them under certain intolerable conditions and/or acts of aggression.

Without a doubt, nukes have been the best thing that’s ever happened to great power relations, effectively killing great power war (unless you think it a strange coincidence that as soon as nukes were invented and used in 1945, great power warfare disappeared from the planet, never to appear again).

Of course, the threat of such war’s return always lingers, and that’s why retaining nukes in sufficient numbers will make sense for the foreseeable future, no matter the weird, self-indulgent guilt trips foisted upon us by scientists and aging statesmen.