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Bush Goes Nuclear, Part II
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by The_Tom: [QB] No, there is a valid point there, Sol. It's just that a line has to be drawn in the sand somewhere between "weapon of mass destruction" and "big honking bomb." It's somewhat arbitrary and not flawlessly logical, but the global political consensus has chosen to consider bombs that explode thanks to nuclear fission to be in a different class to your garden-variety anti-Taliban "daisy cutter." Think of it as a bit like the legal drinking age: arguments can be made to set it anywhere you want and inevitably it'll be a silly rule that people will argue should go somewhere else. Reagan's development of tactical nukes and neutron bombs was viewed by the Soviets and the rest of the world as a major escalation in the arms race, even though I'm sure Reagan was willing to make the argument that tactical nukes are only itty-bitty bombs, barely 10 times what they dropped on Hiroshima and all. :rolleyes: We're used to a global political structure where weapons deriving their destructive power from the fissioning or fusing of atoms are deterrants from future war. The jury's still out on whether we'd have been better off with a Cold War with nukes or without. Today, we have some degree of stability because of MAD. Saddam damn well didn't crack out his biological and chemical warheads because he knew that provisions in the global arms infrastructure, namely nuclear-tipped missiles off his coast, existed that would mulch his sorry ass, for instance. (Then again, this works both ways: a commonly cited reason for the allies not going after Saddam after victory in Kuwait was the fear that when cornered he would have fewer qualms about getting himself nuked if he could take down as many Allies and Israelis as possible with biological and chemical weapons in the process.) Anyway, while we've got a measure of global familiarity with the schoolyard's "rules" regarding nuclear weapons at present, when Bush starts putting up missile shields and building tactical nukes the balance starts to break down and we have ourselves a tilted situation that pisses off people and raises uncertainty. We simply do not have a global political architecture that likes having nuclear-energy-based weapons, even if they're not quite 25 megatonners, used as an offensive weapon. And to be quite honest, from what I can tell from the war on terrah, I'm skeptical that these sort of weapons are any more needed today than fifty years ago. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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