Nuclear … First… Strike
My peacenik professor assigned the class to argure over whether it was a good thing for the USA to toss a nuclear bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I argured in favour, mostly because of a bit of Teachers’ psychology I had picked up somewhere around eighth grade when I had an assignment to argure for or against building a prison in town, and I noted that I was graded a bit more leniently than a fellow student who had done a better job of his paper who had agreed with the teacher. Despite what the David Horowitzs of the world want you to believe, I have found that College Professors regularly to the point where it is the norm throw a large net over opinions diametrically opposed to their Left-wing tendencies.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki plague America with a few problems. Number one, Harry Truman threw out the lie that we had just bombed a “military base” after Hiroshima was bombed. The chilling implications is in the malleability of politicians’ and warriors’ definition of military purposes, which extends right into “Collateral Damage”. Number two, there really was no moral decision to be made regarding the bombings at the time, which largely makes the “Should we or shouldn’t we” discussion the professor was throwing at us moot, or rather the question is a narrow and meaningless one. It was really a case of “Bombs Away!”, and the US Government was a couple days away from blasting Tokyo. And the third problem:
Thanks for playing, but the United States remains the only nation to deploy full-borne Nuclear bombs. Perhaps had Kennedy’s bluff during the Cuban Missile not worked out, things would be different — and, by the way, in the wild ways of history, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the last time that there was any realistic possibility Nuclear War-heads might be used by anyone… a suggestion that, maybe God is working with us after all.
Sometimes I think that we have, as a species and collection of nations, and develop nuclear weapons for the sole purpose of having Something, anything at all off limits and beyond the pale for when we engage in war. “Sure, we can drop this new-fangled ‘MOAB’ thing, but at least we’re not spreading Nuclear Destruction!” Nuclear weapons are the province of rogue states, and rogue units of terrorists. It’s okay that we and some other sane-acting states have them — even the Iranian Government would be okay ala Soviet Unions’ acquiring of them, if it weren’t for the possibility it would slip into the hands of Terrorists– but…
I remember it was Bill Maher, in his post 9/11 hawkish state, who was speaking on the subject that “We’re Responsible, because everyone knows that we’re not going to use them.” The Responsible Ones get to have the Nuclear Weapons, you see… the Civilized.
The nation, under the steady leadership of Bush Administration, has lost that moral authority. He will not take a Nuclear First Strike against Iran off the table. The very fact that it “is on the table”, even rhetorically, throws the “We’re Responsible” argument ashunder.
The funniest segment I heard on the radio this week was Tim Riley on the Rick Emerson show staggering about for five minutes about this Nuclear First Strike, playing the part of the sane man in an insane world. Doesn’t anyone think it may be a bad idea to nuke Iran? Everyone knows the consequences of nuking another country don’t they? The President is not ruling out such a thing, and no one is speaking up against the prospect that such a move would bring payback to us here at home. Maybe nothing will change until a dirty bomb goes off in a midwest city. Wake up America! This country is being run by a group of religious extremists, not that much different than those we’re fighting abroad in the so called “war on terrorism.”
The peaceniks, and no less a smart-guy than Albert Einstein falls under this category, have and do frequently argure that we need a shift in Human Understanding concerning war. In a way, we have had a shift. Not precisely that which they want, and the implications for them that, but it’s there. Give almost any war-leader in history an Nuclear Bomb, explain to them what it does, and it would be deployed with no haste. Andrew Jackson’s Genocidial policy against the Native Americans would be expedited a lot more easily.
Similarly, the world is actually more at peace than it has ever been in Human History. This is a staggering thought, but realize that throughout our history and prehistory this basic theme that when the Spring blossoms, you line up your soldiers and fight until winter descends, at which point you go home. The one thing that runs ahead of us and throws us for a loop is that the Technology at our disposal is a lot more deadly effective. And by the way, to the detractors who rail against the UN, I fail to understand how the world would not be simply at each others’ throat without this Institution. If this makes me a defender of a sometimes ineffectual and sometimes corrupt and sometimes morally in-flux with its guiding principles institution, so be it.
There is a strange thought that the passage of time simply makes it inevitable that every and any nation will have nuclear weapons. And the presense of nuclear weapons makes it, perhaps, inevitable that one will be used. And the troubling thought in my mind is that the most likely nation to be the one to breach that line that cannot be crossed is…
… Well. Look in the mirror.