The (Real) Nuclear Option
Here’s an interesting, if kind of scary, article from William Arkin in the Washington Post: Not just a last resort?
It concerns Defense Dept. plans, quietly prepared, to have a nuclear option (the real thing, not the silly buzzphrase from recent Senate politicking) for dealing with security threats around the globe. Like, for example, we might use some “precision” nuclear weapons to take out a suspected nuclear weapons facility in Iran.
By the way, I love (or rather, I don’t love, but feel compelled to point out) the Orwellian nature of that language; I realize it’s pretty much the same doublespeak you get with “precision” weapons of the conventional kind, but the relative scale of destruction represented by even a “low-yield” nuke (jeez; I don’t think I can talk about this stuff without scary quotes) makes it even more ridiculous. I don’t mean it’s ridiculous in terms of the technical military sense, in which it really does make a difference to be able to center a bomb’s damage on a particular phonebooth, because then you can more-reliably take out a specific target, but in the abhorrent politician-speak sense, in which the notion that you can center that blast radius on a particular phonebooth is used to try to sell the politically-useful falsehood that such precision allows one to drop bombs on civilian areas with “minimal” “collateral damage.” (Eesh! Enough “already”!)
Anyway, another nightmare scenario for me to obsess about, and to connect in my addled mind to George Bush (of course!), the linchpin of all Scary Evil Things in my warped personal reality: Because Bush’s poor decision-making skillls have saddled the military with the Crimson Permanent Assurance of being bogged down in Iraq for the forseeable future, we are short on manpower, and therefore must turn to less-desirable options (like breaking the world’s collective 60-year de-facto ban on military use of nukes) in order to deal with the real security threats multiplying beyond Iraq’s borders. Thereby making it more likely that the collective horror of larger-scale nuclear war will be unleashed at some point in my or my children’s lifetimes.
