Didn't(may he rest in peace)former President Ronald Reagan have the same vision?

This move isn't making us less safe. The whole world knows we would still be able to blow up their countries a couple of times over. This move on Obama is purely a publicity stunt to show the world that our government is no longer run by mad men who believe in crusades and attacking countries in order to control their natural resources.

Less safe. This President is making the country weaker all around. He is alienating our friends -Israel, France, Afganistan. Our enemies are laughing at us. He is spending us into a death spiral. I can't wait until November so we can vote his party out of office.

Robert: "Didn't(may he rest in peace)former President Ronald Reagan have the same vision?"

Reagan was "Star Wars" (Strategic Defense Initative). Obama is more like "lost in Space"!

Part of a strong defense is letting people 'think' we intend to use these weapons, even if we never would. Obama is making us less safe by telegraphing our intentions.

"Ronald Reagan called for the abolishment of "all nuclear weapons," which he considered to be "totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization." Mikhail Gorbachev shared this vision, which had also been expressed by previous American presidents."

http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=2252&issue_id=54



""Star Wars"

One of Reagan's controversial proposals was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a system intended to make the U.S. invulnerable to nuclear missile attacks by the Soviet Union. By stationing those defenses in outer space, the U.S. was able to circumvent the United Nation's Anti-Ballistic (ABM) Treaty"

http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1957.html


Apples & Oranges.

After nearly a year of tough negotiations, the signing by Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in Prague, the capital of a former Soviet satellite now in NATO, will symbolize cooperation between Washington and Moscow for the sake of global security.

Both presidents say new cuts in the largest arsenals on the planet are a step toward a world without nuclear weapons and a signal to nations seeking them that there is no need.

But the successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) will not come into force without ratification by lawmakers in both countries, and could face a rough ride in the U.S. Senate.

Analysts say it will be no cure-all for Russian-American relations, which have improved after hitting a post-Soviet low during Russia's 2008 war with Georgia but remain troubled by a range of disputes.

Neither will the START successor deal resolve simmering tension over missile defense, which has haunted ties since the Reagan era and hurt them badly in the past decade.

With Russia saying it could withdraw from the pact if its security is threatened by U.S. missile defences, the divisive issue could come to the fore again.

Russia has long complained that cutting its offensive arsenal could leave it exposed if the United States builds a missile shield in Eastern Europe. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin clouded hopes for the offensive weapons pact by suggesting in December that it should also limit missile defences.

The pact is expected to acknowledge a link between offensive and defensive weapons, but U.S. officials have stressed it will not restrict the development of missile defences.

The United States says its defensive plans are no threat to Russia.

The Kremlin's top foreign policy adviser, Sergei Prikhodko, said on Friday that Russia would underscore its right to bow out of the pact in response to U.S. missile defences in a unilateral declaration alongside the treaty, Russian news agencies reported.

FOREIGN POLICY

Moscow's concerns about missile defense and Western conventional weapons superiority also mean further nuclear arms agreements Obama hopes can follow will be far harder to secure.

"It took 10 months, but this treaty is going to be fairly easy compared to the next one," said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Negotiators missed an initial target of December 5, when START I expired, and failure still seemed possible until both sides announced late last month that Obama and Medvedev would meet in Prague on April 8 to sign the pact.

The treaty would limit the number of operationally deployed nuclear warheads to 1,550 for each country -- down nearly two-thirds from START I and 30 percent lower than the ceiling of the 2002 Moscow Treaty set for each side by 2012.

The signing will be the first major concrete foreign policy achievement for Obama, who has sought to "reset" Russia ties.

It will pave the way for a nuclear security summit he is hosting the following week -- hoping to marshal broader support in standoffs with Iran and North Korea -- and a May conference meant to bolster the global nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

But there is no guarantee it will translate into stronger Russian backing for U.S. policy on Iran and Afghanistan.

"Agreeing a strategic arms treaty is a big achievement, but it does not automatically carry over into other aspects of relations," said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs.

Signing a major nuclear weapons treaty is also a boost for Medvedev, still in Putin's shadow. The pact with the United States will remind the world of Russia's nuclear might.

And it is in the Kremlin's interest because Russia's aging arsenal would likely drop to the limits set by the treaty in several years anyway, analysts say.

But the signing will leave one crucial hurdle: ratification.

Even without limits on missile defense, which would have ruined the treaty's chances in the Senate, Obama may have trouble securing the 67 votes needed -- particularly if the process drags on beyond November elections in which his Republican foes are expected to pick up seats.

The Kremlin faces no such challenge from Russia's docile parliament. But Moscow has urged "synchronized" ratification, hinting it will hold back until Senate support is assured.

"Russia is ready to ratify the treaty, but Russia absolutely does not want to find itself in a position where it ratifies and the Senate does not," Lukyanov said.

-Reuters-

Right on time fred.

When Korea looks particularly unstable, do we back off and cower in a corner? Or do we prepare to remove the threat? The "mad man" theory has always sounded entirely backwards to me.

("Mad man" theory: If the world thinks we have a mad man at the controls, they'll somehow manage to think it's safer to let us continue being a dire threat.)

Not ony less safe but could actually encourage conventional war.

----------------------------------------

Nuclear Posturing, Obama Style:

There is no greater spur to hyperproliferation than the furling of the American nuclear umbrella.

April 9, 2010 12:00 A.M.



Nuclear doctrine consists of thinking the unthinkable. It involves making threats and promising retaliation that is cruel and destructive beyond imagining. But it has its purpose: to prevent war in the first place.

During the Cold War, we let the Russians know that if they dared use their huge conventional military advantage and invaded Western Europe, they risked massive U.S. nuclear retaliation. Goodbye Moscow.

Was this credible? Would we have done it? Who knows? No one’s ever been there. A nuclear posture is just that — a declaratory policy designed to make the other guy think twice.

Our policies did. The result was called deterrence. For half a century, it held. The Soviets never invaded. We never used nukes. That’s why nuclear doctrine is important.

The Obama administration has just issued a new one that “includes significant changes to the U.S. nuclear posture,” said Defense Secretary Bob Gates. First among these involves the U.S. response to being attacked with biological or chemical weapons.

Under the old doctrine, supported by every president of both parties for decades, any aggressor ran the risk of a cataclysmic U.S. nuclear response that would leave the attacking nation a cinder and a memory.

Again: Credible? Doable? No one knows. But the threat was very effective.

Under President Obama’s new policy, however, if the state that has just attacked us with biological or chemical weapons is “in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),” explained Gates, then “the U.S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it.”

Imagine the scenario: Hundreds of thousands are lying dead in the streets of Boston after a massive anthrax or nerve-gas attack. The president immediately calls in the lawyers to determine whether the attacking state is in compliance with the NPT. If it turns out that the attacker is up to date with its latest IAEA inspections, well, it gets immunity from nuclear retaliation. Our response is then restricted to bullets, bombs, and other conventional munitions.

However, if the lawyers tell the president that the attacking state is NPT noncompliant, we are free to blow the bastards to nuclear kingdom come.

This is quite insane. It’s like saying that if a terrorist deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections.



Apart from being morally bizarre, the Obama policy is strategically loopy. Does anyone believe that North Korea or Iran will be more persuaded to abjure nuclear weapons because they could then carry out a biological or chemical attack on the U.S. without fear of nuclear retaliation?

The naïveté is stunning. Similarly stunning is the Obama pledge to forswear development of any new nuclear warheads — indeed, to permit no replacement of aging nuclear components without the authorization of the president himself. This under the theory that our moral example will move other countries to eschew nukes.

On the contrary. The last quarter-century — the time of greatest superpower nuclear-arms reduction — is precisely when Iran and North Korea went hellbent into the development of nuclear weapons.

It gets worse. The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review declares U.S. determination to “continue to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterring non-nuclear attacks.” The ultimate aim is to get to a blanket doctrine of no first use.

This is deeply worrying to the many small nations that for half a century relied on the extended U.S. nuclear umbrella to keep them from being attacked or overrun by far more powerful neighbors. When smaller allies see the United States determined to move inexorably away from that posture — and for them it’s not posture, but existential protection — what are they to think?

Fend for yourself. Get yourself your own WMDs. Go nuclear if you have to. Do you imagine they are not thinking that in the Persian Gulf?

This administration seems to believe that by restricting retaliatory threats and by downplaying our reliance on nuclear weapons, it is discouraging proliferation.

But the opposite is true. Since World War II, smaller countries have agreed to forgo the acquisition of deterrent forces — nuclear, biological, and chemical — precisely because they placed their trust in the firmness, power, and reliability of the American deterrent.

Seeing America retreat, they will rethink. And some will arm. There is no greater spur to hyperproliferation than the furling of the American nuclear umbrella.

"Didn't(may he rest in peace)former President Ronald Reagan have the same vision?"


Only after expanding America's conventional and naval nuclear strength, far surpassing the Soviets, sending the Soviets into economic depression trying to compete with us and with the final end of Communism as a caviet.

"we let the Russians know that if they dared use their huge conventional military advantage and invaded Western Europe, they risked massive U.S. nuclear retaliation." Op ed, pasted by Bill F

I see, this was AFTER we sat by, with our nukes, and let Russian tanks rumble through all of eastern Europe. What an umbrella. What a deterrent.

As for this umbrella,-if we protected any country, it was only if we deemed it useful, and then only, presumably, if it was being attacked by the Soviet Union. That's not particularly useful for a good part of the world. We haven't seen much value in the African continent, so anything goes there.

Op ed's argument that our nukes made it unnecessary for smaller countries to develop them, doesn't follow very well with the comment that if the US reduces its nukes, smaller countries would then get the message "Fend for yourself. Go nuclear if you have to." Iran and North Korea don't think for a minute that they're covered by this umbrella, and so they felt the need to go nuke. How many countries feel valuable enough to the US to be confidant about this umbrella, or feel they are even covered by it? India apparently didn't. If the umbrella only covers western Europe, it's not all that worthwhile that we need to keep enough nukes, even after reduction, to sterilize the planet. And what about Israel? We pledge to protect it, yet it went nuke. All in all, this "umbrella" crap isn't very convincing.

"if the state that has just attacked us with biological or chemical weapons is 'in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),' explained Gates, then 'the U.S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it.'”

Why did Gates (or DID he) say that? There is an exclusion in the treaty that explicitly deals with that contingency. How limited are we in what situations call for use of nukes? Even when we're directly attacked we don't use them. At this point, the bluff doesn't fool anyone any more. Therefore, this weapon is no longer useful.

"I see, this was AFTER we sat by, with our nukes, and let Russian tanks rumble through all of eastern Europe. What an umbrella. What a deterrent."

My example is the Cuban Missile Crisis where the threat of nuclear war cancelled out the eminent prospect of an all out naval and conventional war. No doubt about it, the Soviets were biting at the bit. JFK's resolve with the fact that he redied the missiles in the silos was the only thing that prevented WWlll.

Gas Us Without Fear of Nukes:

Apr 12th, 2010

If any nation wants to attack the United States with chemical, biological or electromagnetic pulse weapons, it need not fear nuclear retaliation as long as it has no nuclear weapons and abides by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Obama has announced.

So, as New Yorkers are coughing their lungs out from mustard gas or .

In effect, Obama has said if you are a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and do not have nuclear weapons, we will not hit you with nuclear bombs even if you unleash poison gas or biological microbes in crowed American cities or cripple our economy by a massive electromagnetic pulse.

His incredible announcement amounts to a green light for anti-American nations to hit our cities with gas or poisons, resting secure in the knowledge that we will not use our nuclear arsenal to reply.

The Nuclear Policy Review, issued by the Pentagon yesterday, said that “the U.S. does not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states party to the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) and (who are) meeting their obligations.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates went on to say that “there is a limited range of contingencies in which U.S. nuclear weapons may have a role to stop an attack with conventional or chemical or biological weapons.”

He said that these contingencies only included countries “that possess nuclear weapons or that do not comply with their nonproliferation obligations.” In other words, if Iran, India, Pakistan or North Korea hits us with chemical weapons, we will reply with nuclear retaliation.

But if any other nation (like a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan) does so, we will only use conventional weapons to retaliate.

Republicans should reply by introducing a bill in the Senate committing the United States to a nuclear response should any nation attack us with biological, chemical or electromagnetic pulse weapons. Let the Democrats vote against it. Let them filibuster it. Let them explain why we will not use our strongest weapons to deter an attack that could kill millions of our citizens or immobilize our entire economy!

Obama’s motivations for this absurd policy are plain enough. He wants to up the ante for Iran and make it clear that the Islamic Republic can develop crippling weapons for use against the United States without going nuclear. He wants to invest chemical, biological and electromagnetic pulse weaponry with an impunity that can only be obtained at the price of nuclear virginity.

But think about the consequences of his policy! Are we really going to overlook so horrendous an attack and confine our response to cruise missiles with conventional warheads or a few divisions of American soldiers? Is it really material to our nation whether millions of our fellow citizens die of a nuclear bomb or are slain by chemical or biological weaponry?

Obama has violated the Ronald Reagan rule that a president must “never say never.” He has eliminated the ambiguity that has kept us safe for decades and made it clear that our nation will not use its full resources to defend its citizenry even if millions are obliterated by heinous biological or chemical weaponry.

He has made a big mistake, and the Republicans must pounce on it.

Our Nuclear Posture
Under the Obama administration? Supine.

April 19, 2010

During the course of the 1991 Gulf war, Iraq fired 88 Scud missiles at targets in Israel and Saudi Arabia. All of them were armed with conventional warheads. This despite the fact that Iraq then possessed large stocks of chemical and biological weapons. Indeed, after the war, U.N. chief weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus found that Iraq had armed 25 missile warheads and 166 bombs with biological weapons. None of them were used, even as the Iraqi military faced the overwhelming might of a U.S.-led international coalition in a war Iraq was sure to lose.

So what stayed Saddam Hussein’s hand? As the Iraqis tell it, they feared an American nuclear response. They had reason to.

In the run up to the war, senior officials—from President George H.W. Bush on down​—made a series of barely ambiguous and sufficiently ominous threats to Iraqi leaders. The president sent a letter to Saddam which informed the Iraqi tyrant that “the United States will not tolerate the use of chemical or biological weapons. .  .  . The American people would demand the strongest possible response. You and your country will pay a terrible price if you order unconscionable acts of this sort.” Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was equally blunt: “Were Saddam foolish enough to use weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. response would be absolutely overwhelming and it would be devastating.”

The Iraqis took those threats seriously. Four years later, Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz told Ekeus that Iraq had been deterred from using its WMD because it interpreted these (and other) American threats as promises of nuclear retaliation.

This episode is arguably the most successful example of deterrence in action in recent history. Could the United States repeat that performance if we had to? Not if we were to follow the letter of the Obama administration’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, released (after many delays and much hype) last Tuesday.

Among the changes to American nuclear strategy announced in the review, the United States has now promised not to threaten or use nuclear weapons in response to a chemical or biological attack by a nonnuclear state. It is the worst element of a document that could in fact have been much worse.

The arms controlling left had high hopes for this report. Indeed, many of them—studded throughout the National Security Council staff, the State Department, and in civilian positions at the Pentagon—helped to draft it. But despite the numerous items on their extensive wish list, what they got were mostly stocking stuffers. They sought a pledge that the United States would never be the first to use nuclear weapons; a declaration that the “sole purpose” of the American nuclear arsenal is to deter nuclear attacks; elimination of one leg of the “strategic triad” of nuclear-armed ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers; a pledge to withdraw the few remaining forward deployed American nuclear weapons from Europe; “de-alerting” more of our nuclear forces—and this litany is by no means exhaustive. They got none of it.

Much of what they did get turns out to be something like a cheap, Canal Street knockoff of the object of their desire. Consider the pledge to renounce the use of nuclear weapons in response to biological threats. It is immediately followed by a caveat: “Given the catastrophic potential of biological weapons and the rapid pace of bio-technology development, the United States reserves the right to make any adjustment in the assurance that may be warranted by the evolution and proliferation of the biological weapons threat and U.S. capacities to counter that threat.”

So will we or won’t we? To say that the policy is now muddled would be an understatement. Who knew that Obama was a believer in strategic ambiguity?

This caveat pointedly does not apply to chemical weapons, however. Hence a repeat performance of our Gulf war deterrence of Saddam would seem to be off the table. Or is it? The Nuclear Posture Review for the first time links two formerly separate policies: “negative security assurances” (promises not to attack nonnuclear states with nuclear weapons) and implicit or explicit threats to wield nuclear weapons in response to nonnuclear attacks. The United States has always reserved the right to respond to conventional or chemical-biological warfare (CBW) attacks with nuclear weapons. Now, apparently, we won’t even threaten a nuclear response to biological (unless we decide otherwise; see above) or chemical attacks if the attacker is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in good standing. Got it?

Iraq signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in the treaty’s first year (1968); hence, had the new policy been in place at the time of the first Gulf war, we could not have made the threats that we actually did use to good effect. But wait! Was Iraq “in compliance with their nuclear nonproliferation obligations”? If not, then the assurance would not have applied. We now know, thanks to the war and the inspections that followed, that Iraq maintained a secret and extensive nuclear weapons program. We realized little of this before the war, when the threats were made. So would they have been allowed or not?

In any case, why the two concepts are now linked is not clear. One of the rationales for the United States’ forswearing the development of biological and chemical weapons (apart from their inherent repugnance) was that our nuclear arsenal remained the surest guarantee against CBW attack. Well, not if we explicitly renounce the use of nuclear weapons in such circumstances.

Also, the point of the negative security assurance is to encourage regimes to live happily without nuclear weapons. This is not entirely fanciful. Tom Reed and Danny Stillman, in their history of nuclear weapons The Nuclear Express, tell how the reluctance of some of the former Soviet republics to return to Russia the legacy weapons of the USSR was overcome. Some Ukrainian generals were invited to StratCom headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, whereAir Force brass, poring over maps of their guests’ country, explained in vivid detail what it meant to be on the American target list in the event of nuclear war. The Ukrainian visitors turned white, returned to Kiev and recommended that all nuclear weapons in their country be repatriated to their motherland.

So, if promises not to use nukes against the nuclear-chaste encourages states to swear off nukes, how does promising not to use nukes against CBW-capable states discourage the development of the latter weapons? Wouldn’t that rather encourage it? If the clear consequence of being nuclear-armed is to place your country on the American nuclear targeting list, why shouldn’t the clear consequence of seeking, possessing, or using CBW not be the same?

No doubt the Obama officials who drafted this document believe that its many caveats, exceptions, and trapdoors leave sufficient flexibility for the president to do whatever he may think he needs to do in any contingency. And they may be right. But that misses a larger point. Deterrence is not always, or even mostly, effective in the midst of a crisis. It is also a function of an enemy’s impression of how far its intended victim can be pushed, and how hard he might push back if pushed too far.

By that standard, the new policy is a failure. It amounts not so much to strategic ambiguity as to strategic obfuscation. The new policy is deliberately designed to sound softer than the old, but is also qualified to the point that the new softness will appear to any semi-careful reader to be highly questionable. What is the real policy? It’s impossible to say simply from reading the report. What will an enemy take away from it? That we deeply desire to cultivate a reputation for dovishness while we reserve the right to revert to hawkishness at a moment’s notice. Whom is this supposed to scare or impress, much less deter?

Thankfully, the truly bad news pretty much ends there, at least in the Nuclear Posture Review. There is however a bit of bad news in the New START treaty, the text of which was finally released after Thursday’s Prague signing ceremony. The administration has repeatedly sworn that the treaty places no constraints on missile defense. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates: “Missile defense is not constrained by this treaty.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “The treaty places no constraints on our missile defense plans—now or in the future.” Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher: “There is no limit or constraint on what the United States can do with its missile defense systems .  .  . definitely, positively, and no way, no how.”

And yet, there is this in the treaty’s preamble:

Recognizing the existence of the inter-relationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms, that this interrelationship will become more important as strategic nuclear arms are reduced, and that current strategic defensive arms do not undermine the viability and effectiveness of the strategic offensive arms of the parties .  .  .

There are two possible ways to interpret this: (1) Who cares? It’s just the preamble. (2) It is the first-ever formal linkage between offensive and defensive systems and an implicit promise to limit the latter in the future. Russian president Medvedev’s foreign minister believes interpretation Number 2. “Linkage to missile defense is clearly spelled out in the accord and is legally binding,” Sergei Lavrov said. He would appear to be at least partly right. The linkage is there for all to see, though it’s a stretch to say that the preamble language is legally binding.

Linkage, however, is bad enough. For two decades, the United States has deliberately refrained from designing missile defense systems that could counter the Russian (or Chinese) nuclear arsenals. Moscow’s response has been to unceasingly complain about a system deliberately limited so that their huge arsenal could easily overwhelm it. Now we have the worst of both worlds: a missile defense system designed not to defend against a Russian strike but nonetheless formally linked to Russia’s nuclear posture. Worse, the Russian foreign minister has hinted that his country may invoke the treaty’s otherwise standard withdrawal language if “the U.S. strategic missile defense begins to significantly affect the efficiency of Russian strategic nuclear forces.” Given that the Russians publicly insist (though cannot possibly believe) that virtually anything we do on missile defense affects their strategic forces, this was not encouraging news.

It gets worse. Article V, paragraph 3:

Each party shall not convert and shall not use ICBM launchers and SLBM launchers for placement of missile defense interceptors therein. Each party further shall not convert and shall not use launchers of missile defense interceptors for placement of ICBMs and SLBMs therein.

Now, this is a constraint. On its website, the White House asserts that “the Treaty does not contain any constraints on testing, development or deployment of current or planned U.S. missile defense programs.” Possibly the administration could fall back on the “current or planned” qualifier to insist that, since we do not currently plan to reuse retired SLBM or ICBM launchers for missile defense, this limitation is not really limiting. But it might be. The treaty after all calls for steep cuts in delivery vehicles. Absent this provision, we might have reused those retired launchers in the missile defense program. The treaty forbids that. Expect this provision to cause serious problems in the ratification debate, and also to undermine—justifiably—the administration’s credibility. Republican senators Jon Kyl and John McCain have already noticed: “While we were initially advised that the only reference to missile defense was in the preamble to the treaty, we now find that there are other references to missile defense, some of which could limit U.S. actions.” Translation: We were misled.

In the Nuclear Posture Review, there is some good news, though one has to be willing to parse to find it. One of the marquee items on the arms controllers’ wish list was a pledge not to develop any new nuclear weapons. Since the United States has been out of that business for more than 20 years, why make this a priority? The issue is the reliability of the existing stockpile. Nuclear weapons are complicated; the older they get, the less sure you can be that they still work. One way to know is to test them, but there is no appetite in this country to resume testing (which we unilaterally halted in 1992). Another option is to do what we are doing now: conduct an extensive maintenance program to identify problems and replace degraded components. But that doesn’t yield certain knowledge; it only raises confidence.

Yet another way would be to make more warheads. That’s what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wanted to do when he was serving in the prior administration and reportedly still supports. It’s also what every Republican senator plus Joe Lieberman says will be the price of ratification of the New START treaty.

But the Nuclear Posture Review emphatically says “the United States will not develop new nuclear warheads.” Game over, right? Well, it depends on the meaning of “new.” The approach favored by Gates—called the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW)—would use existing fissile material, parts stripped from decommissioned weapons, and design specifications that were developed decades ago. If a skilled mechanic were to build a car using spare parts, old steel, and blueprints from a 40-year-old file cabinet, would it be a new car? In one sense, yes. In another sense, no.

Arms controllers emphatically answer “Yes!” to that question. While it might appear that they have won the day, a careful reading reveals a few escape hatches. First, the document specifically renounces “new military missions” and “new military capabilities” for the arsenal. But that is like a Catholic ostentatiously pledging not to eat meat on Fridays during Lent. He has to do that anyway. Nobody is talking about building a new warhead for a new mission. The last time such a proposal was floated—the “Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator” advocated in the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review—it was quickly scuttled owing to intense opposition. The mission of the RRW would be the same as the mission of the warheads in our current strategic arsenal. Moreover, the report specifically allows for the “replacement” of nuclear components—language malleable enough that it could be stretched to look a great deal like RRW.

At a press briefing at the Pentagon the day the report was released, National Nuclear Security Administration head Thomas D’Agostino and Joint Chiefs vice chairman General James Cartwright seemed to confirm this interpretation. Here is the general: “Nobody has ever removed from the commander or anyone else in that chain the ability to stand up and say, ‘I’m uncomfortable; I believe that we’re going to have to test, or I believe that we’re going to have to build something new.’ That’s not been removed here.” And D’Agostino: “So what we want to do is .  .  . create a position or a point in time where we say, if we have to go to that replacement category whereby—because we think it’s the only way or one of the best ways, to achieve the aims that we have—safety, security, reliability, and no underground testing—then we have the flexibility to do that.”

Ellen Tauscher, perhaps the most determined RRW opponent in the administration, stood by mute. So who really won that fight?

The answer would appear to be Gates. He is almost certainly the reason why the arms controllers lost so many key fights, and a living example that sometimes engaging with those with whom you disagree can make a bad policy better or at least less bad. Would that he could have saved us from the dismal policy of strategic obfuscation and the formal linkage of missile defense to Russian strategic forces. But it would be ungrateful to complain. At least about Gates.

"My example is the Cuban Missile Crisis where the threat of nuclear war cancelled out the eminent prospect of an all out naval and conventional war."-BF

Whenever has any standoff at sea escalated into a war, conventional or nuclear? Our ships blocked Russian ships steaming toward Cuba, the two sides sat there waiting for word from their respective commanders, and the Russians apparently felt that the hope for a nuclear base in Cuba was a nice gamble, but not worth war of any kind. Seeing as Russia also had about as many missiles as we had, the threat of nuclear war should have been no more terrifying to them than to us. Did Kennedy look "madder" than Kruschev?

"Did Kennedy look "madder" than Kruschev?"

I'm pretty sure he wasn't, as Nikita made front page news by banging at his desk in the UN with his shoe, to make his point. Something like, "we will bury you", or some such thing like that. The fact that the Kremlin was convinced that we were ready to use our nuclear arsenal over Cuba made them blink, and then we all lived happily ever after. Too bad Obama is giving away our ability to bluff, which alone has been our number one deterrent, without it costing many lives and strategic goals. Had Bush not been at the end of his second term as a lame duck President with Obama, the entire world fully aware, that the peace-niks
would soon be in complete command, then Putin would never have taken advantage of the situation as he did in Georgia.

"The fact that the Kremlin was convinced that we were ready to use our nuclear arsenal over Cuba made them blink."

No, that's just what you're telling yourself, without backing, simply a necessary belief or the whole argument falls apart.

"No, that's just what you're telling yourself, without backing....."


Without backing??? The Soviets dismantled their missiles in Cuba and sailed back to the USSR....crisis instantly over. Blink blink - Period!

Arms control without deterrence:

Friday, April 16, 2010

President Obama has signed a new arms-control agreement with the Russians, but this does not mean we no longer require adequate nuclear deterrence. The president, in his naivete on matters of national security and foreign affairs, continues to weaken the U.S. capability to deal with serious threats. Multiple existential dangers still exist, and this country will have to ensure that our remaining strategic-force assets are always capable of reaching their intended targets. At a minimum, this will mean maintaining a thoroughly modern and penetration-capable nuclear force.

To be sure, further nuclear proliferation should be curtailed, yet that particular goal will be degraded by the new treaty. The president's underlying and overriding objective, "a world free of nuclear weapons," is not attainable, and it is not desirable. By themselves, the president should understand, nuclear weapons are neither good nor evil. In certain circumstances, however counterintuitive, those weapons may prove indispensable to international stability and national security.

How quickly we forget that the nuclear stalemate between the United States and the former Soviet Union played a decisive role in preventing World War III. Today, a tiny American ally's physical survival is plainly contingent upon having nuclear weapons. However ambiguous or implicit, Israel's nuclear deterrent is required for that always-imperiled country's very "life."

The naive nuclear hopes of Mr. Obama will present a grave hazard. What we require in any effective arms-control policy is a model of international interactions that reflects, realistically, the passions and principles of all our potential enemies. Such a complex model would be drawn not from idealized visions of worldwide denuclearization, but from the informed awareness that America's multiple enemies still remain resolutely face-down to peace with the United States.

When Pericles delivered his funeral oration, with its praise of Athenian civilization, his perspective was inner-directed. He remarked: "What I fear more than the strategies of our enemies is our own mistakes." Later, in Rome, Cicero inquired: "What can be done against force without force?" Today, a president of the United States still must understand that in a world of international anarchy, foreign policy must aim at maintaining and improving his country's power position.

America needs nuclear weapons for deterrence and to meet strategic operational requirements. We need continually to modernize and upgrade and refine those weapons as well as associated strategic doctrine. We need to recapitalize our national nuclear deterrent and ensure that we can maintain all essential global power-projection capabilities.

This means, at a minimum, a capable re-examination of nuclear targeting doctrine, now with regard to current threats from other countries and their proxies. It also means preparing for a world in which both our national and subnational enemies may be irrational. In all of these matters, the president's current glide path to a nuclear-free world is counterproductive and dangerous.

A key concern of U.S. strategic doctrine must still be pre-emption. Like it or not, there are major threats on the horizon that may call for anticipatory self-defense. In our uncertain strategic future, where enemy rationality cannot always be assumed and where the essential effectiveness of national ballistic-missile defense would be problematic, the only alternative to an American pre-emption could be abject surrender or defeat.

Future enemy missile launches could come from container ships off our shores. Launches against Israel likely will come directly from Iran and from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Israel has been smart in moving its expanded capability offshore, with a modernized U.S. anti-missile fleet and with Dolphin-class submarine capabilities. These assets are well-positioned in the Mediterranean, Red and Arabian seas. The current Dolphin-class submarines already are being upgraded, as is Israel's Arrow-centered system of missile defense.

A nuclear threat to American cities need not come from enemy missiles. As the president has recognized, it also could come from cars and trucks and from ships used only for "dirty-bomb" dispersals and missile launches off our shores. Ballistic-missile defense, of course, would be of no use against any such attacks.

Could we make enemy states and their surrogates believe that proxy acts of nuclear terrorism would elicit an unacceptable retaliation against them directly? Perhaps, but functionally useful answers can never emerge from any grandiose plan for global nuclear disarmament.

America's strategic doctrine must rest on the idea that threats of war and global jihad may derive from a genuine clash of civilizations. This does not mean Mr. Obama is wrong in his expanding and codified emphasis on diplomacy (though it has been ineffective to date) but only that he should acknowledge that some of our principal enemies will be unresponsive to traditional deterrence policies. Those enemies, sworn to unyielding expectations of jihad, will be animated not by the ordinary secular promises of hegemony, wealth and privilege, but rather by power over death. In all world politics, there is no greater power.

Some of these enemies could come to resemble the suicide bomber writ large. Such enemies may not concede an inch to proposals for compromise, coexistence and peaceful settlement. Effectively controlling these enemies will fall outside the bounds of any strategic arms-reduction agreement.

The president understands that an act of nuclear terrorism against the United States could have unendurable consequences. To prevent the "Ryder truck scenario," which could involve either a radiological or authentic chain-reaction nuclear weapon, Mr. Obama's strategic policy must hold the state sponsors accountable. This policy initially must offer these states a suitable diplomatic option, but there must be persuasive alternatives if diplomacy should fail.

The president should then make clear that any proxy nuclear explosion in this country would certainly elicit an unacceptably damaging retaliation. This means we should (1) unambiguously target these sponsor states; and (2) plainly and regularly "war-game" retaliatory and pre-emption options with National Command Authority. Surely, it is imprudent for the United States to rule out in advance any use of nuclear weapons for certain deterrent objectives, as the president already has done regarding nonnuclear adversaries that would sponsor chemical and/or biological terror attacks.

Nuclear weapons are not going to go away. Understanding this, Mr. Obama must begin to construct a broad and coherent strategic plan from which specific nuclear-policy options can be suitably drawn. This compelling plan, against which any prospective strategic arms-control agreements should be vetted, must prepare to deal effectively with both our national and subnational adversaries and must take into serious account that some of them might sometimes be willing to act irrationally.

"Without backing??? The Soviets dismantled their missiles in Cuba..."

Because they were afraid we'd nuke them? They gambled on our letting them set up missiles in Cuba, and lost. So they went home. Not because they thought we were crazier with our nukes than they were. You said "the Kremlin was convinced that we were ready to use our nuclear arsenal." That's what I said was without backing.

"the Kremlin was convinced that we were ready to use our nuclear arsenal." That's what I said was without backing."

Your opinion that the Kremlin wasn't convinced that we were ready to use our nuclear arsenal is without backing and illogical as well given the circumstances and reporting at that time. Are you a revisionist as well???

Nonproliferation? How Quaint!:

April 17, 2010 7:00 A.M.


The mound of corpses being piled up around the world today is not from high-tech nuclear states but from low-tech psycho states.

In years to come — assuming, for the purposes of argument, there are any years to come — scholars will look back at President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit and marvel. For once, the cheap comparisons with 1930s appeasement barely suffice: To be sure, in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it’s difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia, and Thailand . . . but not even mentioning Germany.

Yet that’s what Obama just did: He held a nuclear gabfest in 2010, the biggest meeting of world leaders on American soil since the founding of the U.N. 65 years ago — and Iran wasn’t on the agenda.


Granted that almost all of Obama’s exciting, innovative “change we can believe in” turns out to have been exhumed direct from the sclerotic Seventies to stagger around like a rotting zombie in polyester bell-bottoms from some straight-to-video sequel, there’s still something almost touchingly quaint in the notion of an international summit on nuclear “nonproliferation” in the 21st century. Five years ago, when there was still a chance the world might prevent a nuclear Iran rather than pretending to “contain” it, I remember the bewildered look from a “nonproliferation expert” on a panel I was on after I suggested nonproliferation was a laughably obsolescent frame for this discussion. You could just about enforce nonproliferation back in the Cold War, when the only official nuclear powers were the Big Five at the U.N. Security Council and the entry level for the nuclear club was extremely expensive and technologically sophisticated. Now it’s not. If Pakistan and North Korea can be nuclear powers, who can’t? North Korea’s population is starving. Its GDP per capita is lower than Ghana’s, lower than Zimbabwe’s, lower than Mongolia’s. Which is to say its GDP is all but undetectable.

Yet it’s a nuclear power.

That’s what anachronistic nonproliferation mumbo-jumbo gets you. If you read in the paper that New Zealand had decided to go nuclear, would you lose a moment’s sleep over it? Personally, I’d be rather heartened. It would be a sign that a pampered and somnolent developed world had woken up and concluded that betting your future on the kindness of strangers is a helluva gamble. What Obama and his empty showboaters failed even to acknowledge in their “security” summit is the reality of the post–Big Five nuclear age: We’re on the brink of a world in which the wealthiest nations from Canada to Norway to Japan can barely project meaningful force to their own borders while the nickel-’n’-dime basket cases go nuclear.

How long do you think that arrangement will last? Iran has already offered to share its nuclear technology with Sudan. Sudan? Ring a vague bell? Remember that “Save Darfur” interpretative-dance fundraiser you went to where someone read out a press release from George Clooney and you all had a simply marvelous time? Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed — with machetes. That’s pretty labor-intensive. In the Congo, five and a half million have been slaughtered — and again in impressively primitive ways.

But a nuclear Sudan would be a model of self-restraint?

By the way, that’s another example of the self-indulgent irrelevance of Obama. The mound of corpses being piled up around the world today is not from high-tech nuclear states but from low-tech psycho states. It’s not that Britain has nukes and poor old Sudan has to make do with machetes. It’s that the machete crowd is willing to kill on an industrial scale and the high-tech guys can’t figure out a way to stop them. Perhaps for his next pointless yakfest the president might consider a machete nonproliferation initiative.

Nuclear technology cannot be un-invented. All you can do, as President Reagan understood when few others did, is invent something that will render it, if not yet obsolete, at least less lethal. Until that moment, what makes the difference is not the technology but the regime. The Obama Happy Fairyland Security Summit was posited on the principle that there’s no difference between a Swiss nuke and a Syrian nuke. If you believe that, you’ll be thrilled by the big breakthrough agreement of the summit: Canada, Chile, Mexico, and Ukraine have agreed to reduce their stocks of enriched uranium. Peace in our time! I have here a piece of paper from the prime minister of Canada!
This is the nuclear version of Janet Incompetano’s initial reaction to the Pantybomber — when she banned passengers from having paperback books on their laps for the last 45 minutes of the flight. In an age of freelance nukes, we shouldn’t be banning items but profiling threats. For 30 years, Iran has acted with extraterritorial impunity and without even the minimal courtesies of international relations — seizing embassies, taking out mob contracts on British novelists, seeding terrorist proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, blowing up community centers in Latin America . . . Washington’s pathetic fallback of “containment” is intended to prevent Tehran using a nuke in the Middle East, Europe, or anywhere else within range. There is no strategy for “containing” Iran’s leverage of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, and no strategy for “containing” the mullahs’ generosity to states and groups more inclined to use the technology.

In a characteristic display of his now famous modesty, President Obama reacted to the hostility of the Tax Day tea parties by saying, “You would think they should be saying ‘thank you’” — for all he’s done for them. Right now, the fellows saying “thank you” are the mullahs, the Politburo, Tsar Putin, and others hostile to U.S. interests who’ve figured out they now have the run of the planet.

As for Obama’s pledge to set a good example by reducing America’s nuclear arsenal, there’s no correlation between peace and the number of weapons — except insofar as states with only a few nukes are more likely to use them than states with gazillions: If you’ve only got a dozen, you’re under more pressure to let ’em fly before they’re taken out by incoming. So the principle underpinning Obama’s Seventies-retro nuke summit — that the size of a civilized state’s stockpile adds to the global threat — is not just false but dangerously delusional. Likewise, the urge to forswear nuclear innovation. It would be greatly to the advantage of civilization if responsible powers were to develop new forms of limited, highly targeted, bunker-busting nukes. As is well understood by our enemies, the modern West has no stomach for large-scale casualties: On the morning of September 11th, for example, Mullah Omar had no fear that Washington would nuke even remote and lightly inhabited parts of the Hindu Kush. As we learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, stupid, ill-trained illiterates with primitive explosives who don’t care who they kill can inflict quite a lot of damage on the technologically advanced, highly trained warriors of civilized states. That’s the “asymmetric warfare” that matters. So virtuously proclaiming oneself opposed to nuclear modernization ensures a planet divided into civilized states with unusable weapons and barbarous regimes happy to kill with whatever’s to hand.

So another grand week’s work for a president pressing full steam ahead into the post-American global order. The good news is that at least you don’t have to worry about a nuclear blitzkrieg from Winnipeg. Sleep easy.

"given the circumstances and reporting at that time."

What circumstances? What "reporting?" From the American press? From a select portion of the American press? It keeps boiling down to this question: Did Moscow believe the US was "madder" than they were, more ready to destroy the world over a gambit? Not even to start a massive conventional war, but to destroy the world in a nuclear exchange? Did Kennedy look crazy, or pliable enough to yield to putative crazy advisors? When you commit to that, we can continue.

"What "reporting?" From the American press? From a select portion of the American press? It keeps boiling down to this question"

Yes and yes, have you no memory....or

From the sound of it you weren't there or weren't paying much attention. It was a given that the Soviets were not prepared to back up their actions with a nuclear strike when it was reverberated throughout the world that JFK ordered our ICBMS into a ready state within the silos. What is wrong with you anyway?

"It was a given that the Soviets were not prepared to back up their actions with a nuclear strike."

Given by whom? Any editorialist or pundit or TV news commentator who thought this gambit by the Russians was so important to them that they would push it if confronted, was naive.

I, too, was worried, as all the senior boys wondered how many of us would be drafted into this war that was sure to consume the world.... Until our history teacher spoke to us. He showed us, piling history upon history, how wars do not start this way. He detailed to us all the political calculus that had taken place before this day, and exactly what would come in the days ahead. He batted a thousand in his sure prediction.

He also made clear just how our journalists would handle the incident, how our historians, for years to come, would somehow "fail to see" how Russia tweaked our nose that week and got away with it.

What's "wrong with" me, you ask? What's wrong, I ask, with your John Wayne fantasy version of reality?

"What's "wrong with" me, you ask? What's wrong, I ask, with your John Wayne fantasy version of reality?"


Typical peace-nik revisionism that would have had us lose WWll with the total extinction of the Jewish peoples. Thank God for Americans like John Wayne who weren't ashamed of who we are and what we stand for.

A warning on Iran:

April 21, 2010

Robert Gates isn't just our secretary of defense -- he's our national damage-control officer.

The closest thing this love-your-enemies administration has to an indispensable man, Gates is fighting the good fight in the worst of times.

Ever since signing on as President George W. Bush's SecDef in early 2005, Gates has fought to reform the Air Force, improve the Pentagon's dysfunctional acquisition system, give our troops in the field what they really need and cut through the red tape that's paid for in red blood.

The greatest sacrifice any top-echelon public figure has made in decades was Gates' agreement to stay at his post and serve the new administration. He wanted to go back to Texas. Instead, he stood up in the line of fire.

That new administration's rapidly getting old, but Gates continues to serve, struggling to limit the damage done to our national defense.

Recently, he fought to keep our new nuclear-giveaway treaty with Russia within tolerable bounds. That treaty's bad -- but without Gates it would have been worse. Now we know that he was also pushing on Iran.

Last week, somebody (not Gates) leaked a January memo the SecDef sent to the White House. The message? We need to prepare for all contingencies regarding Iran. Now.

The New York Times reported the leak breathlessly and vaguely. But Gates was just doing his duty -- saying, essentially, Mr. President, you may hope that Russia and China will support meaningful sanctions, and you may hope that Iran will give up its nuclear ambitions, but it would be irresponsible not to plan for the worst.

If forced to take military action against Iran, we'd better have a realistic plan. The president couldn't just phone the SecDef one fine morning and tell him to take out Iran that afternoon. It may work that way in Hollywood, but reality's another matter.

A serious campaign against Iran's nuclear program wouldn't be a matter of a few quick pinpoint strikes, but of massively complex coordination, from positioning forces and prepping allies, to airspace management (a devilish challenge in a surprise attack, with commercial aircraft everywhere) and protecting the region's energy infrastructure.

War planning isn't just about getting the initial attack right, but involves calculating how to respond to the actions the enemy could take after the bombs start hitting. The planning process also identifies previously unrecognized vulnerabilities and challenges.

All plans evolve once the bullets fly, but the more rigorous your preparation, the readier you are to deal with the full range of consequences.

Our military knows how to plan. The problem -- a bipartisan one -- is that Washington elites don't want the military to plan for realistic scenarios. Because serious planning makes the costs and dangers of policies all too clear.

We first saw this see-no-evil pattern under President Bush, when Pentagon neo-cons (with no military experience) forbade planning for an occupation of Iraq. They didn't just refuse to acknowledge any possible need for an occupation, they feared that detailed planning would reveal the potential costs of taking down Saddam -- numbers that might've been a red flag to Congress.

The consequences of failing to plan? The price we paid after reaching Baghdad without a "what now?" plan was vastly higher in lives and dollars than it should have been.

Now we face a similar threat from the other side of the aisle. Peace-at-any-price zealots don't want a military strike against Iran's nuclear program, no matter what. Their avoidance technique is to prevent serious military planning -- under the principle that, "If we don't prepare for it, it can't happen."

Once again, we may end up sending in our forces under disastrous political restrictions, with unrealistic goals and inadequate resources. Gates is doing his damnedest to prevent that.

Yet grumpy conservatives mumble that he should resign in protest over Obama's policies.

Really? You want Gates gone? Who do you think this administration would nominate to take his place? William Tecumseh Sherman?

One man stands between a willfully naive administration and a colossal bloody mess in the Persian Gulf: Bob Gates, American hero.

"Typical peace-nik revisionism that would have had us lose WWll with the total extinction of the Jewish peoples."

And this is revisionism of the topic.

"And this is revisionism of the topic."

As far as the scenario, this is what's known as extent of condition when evaluating one with terminal pacifism.
The result always leading to the same self destructive result.....and oddly in the name of peace yet! Go figure.

"that would have had us lose WWll "

We talked about WWII before, you and I. Losing all of Europe, having Europe and the north Atlantic in Hitler's control, and all of the Pacific in Japan's control, would have been grim for us. We did have to fight that one. Being that exclusive, that's not pacifism, that's being reasonable about what's important enough to justify carpet-bombing cities with incendiaries, and what's just ego and ideology and trivial games.

"and what's just ego and ideology and trivial games."


Trivial games are living through the Cuban Missile Crisis, being exposed to all the media coverage available in that era, speaking about it with family and friends where everyone agreed that by arming the ICBMs in their silos JFK scared the living shit out of Khrushchev, the Soviet Military, and the entire Iron Country Eastern Block of Nations, and then still try to re-write history, then pacifism should be your best and only defense against the intentional blindness you are displaying. Any alternative explanation would be quite uncomplimentary.

Bolton Examines Obama’s Foreign Policy Dystopia:

2010 April 23


Anyone looking for a veritable picture-window into President Obama’s non-defense policy would do well to peruse John Bolton’s A Treaty for Utopia posted on National Review Online a few days ago.

The subject, as the title suggests, is the recently concluded “New START” bilateral arms-control treaty between the United States and Russia, a topic – typically devoted to convoluted and highly technical bean-counts (albeit with Biblically dangerous beans) – that would normally inspire narcolepsy in all but the most committed policy wonks. However, we don’t live in normal times and, with our President roaming the world looking for new constituencies to apologize to, no one who understands the implications is getting much sleep
Unlike the patter-chorus of Obama apologists whose mantra appears be to some variation of “nothing to see here, move along, move along,” Bolton actually knows what he’s talking about, and he makes a compelling case that this agreement is not only deeply flawed but also reflects Obama’s larger world-view.

"Substantively, the most appalling aspect of the Obama-Medvedev treaty is not its specific provisions, but what it reveals about President Obama’s national-security psychology. He has repeatedly said he believes lowering U.S. nuclear-warhead levels will encourage support for the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s weapons prohibitions on non-nuclear-weapons states. This is the purest form of theology, since the empirical evidence is entirely to the contrary. As the Cold War ended, Moscow and Washington made dramatic reductions in warhead levels, huge in percentage and absolute terms. Nonetheless, nuclear proliferation continued, and the pace is quickening. After START I and II, India, Pakistan, and North Korea tested nuclear weapons, and Iran rapidly approaches that point. Syria had a clandestine nuclear reactor until Israel destroyed it in September 2007. And if current and aspiring nuclear proliferators keep or develop weapons, this will encourage still more proliferation activity.

Approval of American disarmament in European capitals and American academic salons is not proof that disarmament strengthens international nonproliferation norms. In fact, Tehran and Pyongyang will conclude the opposite, namely that America is getting weaker, and react accordingly. Faced with the Obama mindset, Iran and North Korea are now more likely to fall all over themselves getting to the bargaining table. There seems to be no limit to what they would be able to extract from Obama’s negotiators, to our serious and perhaps permanent detriment."

The analysis that follows, especially as concerns US self-imposed constraints on missile defense, beggars belief in an era when Iran, for one, is projected to have a deliverable nuclear weapon within the next five years. Given the administration’s current scrambling to find a policy – any policy – that will constrain Iran, this is remarkable double-think.
There is arguably no area of American life that isn’t being negatively impacted by the ideologically-driven amateur night that is this administration, and it can be difficult to remember foreign policy issues behind the flood-lights of Health Care Reform, Cap and Tax etc. especially since a lot of it is about what isn’t happening. We owe Ambassador Bolton a debt of thanks for a timely reminder.

"everyone agreed that by arming the ICBMs in their silos JFK scared the living shit out of Khrushchev."

"Arming the ICBMs" is meaningless. They were armed and disarmed frequently in drills. They could not have been too time-consuming to arm or they would have been useless in an attack, now wouldn't they? How would Russia even know if we had indeed actually armed anything? All they had was our assurances that we had. Big deal. It's called bluffing, saber-rattling, and other things. You can't be seriously saying you bought the showmanship, can you? I'm as sure as can be that the Russians didn't, they weren't that stupid. They just saw that their gambit wasn't going to go over, they were far from home, on our turf, so they called it a day. No melodrama needed.

"You can't be seriously saying you bought the showmanship, can you?"


I bought it, the Russains bought it, and the whole of the remainder of the civilized world bought it, by all accounts and most importantly JFK knew what he was about to do. There really is no one else left out who mattered much anyway. By the way thanks for making my point, the biggest sin, as I mentioned before is that Obama has given away any chance that we could ever bluff again (if that really is what you believe it was).

“I bought it.”

You were supposed to buy it. The razzle dazzle was meant for the good, simple folk. The problem with believing is that you can then become invested in it and HAVE to believe that everybody else believes as you do.

Starting this discussion was not to find out what you believe; I guess maybe I already knew what you believe (that any US war is ipso facto a good war). No, I wanted to find out if you had anything more than belief and the safe consensus of select sources. Like maybe a good argument. Analysis. Your study of war would put you at an advantage over me, if it was an open study.

But belief alone? You exalted John Wayne because he stood for what he believed. Like Tim McVeigh. Like the 9/11 hijackers. On that day of 9/11, some guy where I was working kept going around saying “You gotta hand to those guys (the hijackers): they really believed in what they were doing.” And he kept being met with glassy stares that bottled up comments like: “Who gives a flying f-bomb that they ‘believed’?” Does belief excuse anything, ameliorate any tragedy? But the phrase “They believed” was so pregnant with meaning to that worker that it actually distracted him from those deaths. Those who were killed were not church bombers, lynchers, molesters, so no vigilante justice was an issue here. No, belief didn’t care about that, because belief didn’t see the faces of the people inside the buildings, just as a B52 bombardier, with his dog-eared copy of belief tucked in his back pocket, doesn’t see the people 15,000 feet below as he burns them to death with incendiary explosives. Belief is nothing. Actions, consequences are everything.

So when I see commentary that looks formulaic, copied from some ersatz scripture, I want to poke it, to see if it’s real or if it’s Memorex, live or long dead and mummified. I kept asking you if you thought Kennedy was the model “mad man,” crazier than Kruschev, likelier to loose nukes upon the world. You could have said, yes, missiles in Cuba posed a threat to our hemispheric autonomy, so maybe Kruschev thought this would drive Kennedy to do the unthinkable. But you didn’t say that. You just kept insisting that everybody, everywhere believed that Kennedy would have started WWIII, just insisting because it was the result of believing it yourself.

Was Kennedy ready to sterilize the globe because of something going on in HIS head, like the crazed father who kills his family because HE’S distressed? Somebody’s ideology or pride above all life, all species, all accomplishments? A frequently heard message at that time was “Better red than dead.” Not to welcome communism, not to assist it or passively let it come. America was stronger than Russia. But if that changed, how many people would slit their children’s throats and fall on their swords rather than settle for life under Soviet rule? For several years after the democratization of the former Soviet Union, a solid 50% of Russians pined for the good old days. Life, day to day, matters to far more people than do economic theories, politicking, ideology. To decide for them that they must die rather than add to the scoreboard of numbers under the wrong flag is not something that any national leader who is not deranged would do. Kennedy, I feel, in the final analysis, would not have launched the first missile. Neither would Kruschev. Those years, that “crisis”, were a Kibuki dance with its stylized narrative for an audience that expected just that.

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