My recently married brother has requested a post on North Korea's latest round of nuclear blustering. Not only will I gladly oblige with a pontification on that particular issue, I will also toss in The Hermit Kingdom's deranged associate in A-Bomb ambitions, The Real Estate Formerly Known as Persia, Iran.
There has been much bipartisan handwringing and angst over the possibility of these impoverished and antediluvian regimes procuring the tools of the apocalypse. Anxiety over Iran and North Korea has climbed to crescendo proportions of late, with President Obama confronting the conundrum of what to do about nuts with nukes.
There are two basic questions about this situation that have two simple answers. The answer to the first question is seemingly stark and terrifying. The answer to the second question is equally stark and eminently reassuring.
Question #1: Is there anything that the U.S. can do to prevent either of these nations from getting the weapons they so feverishly crave?
Answer #1: Nope.
Question #2: Does it really matter to the U.S. if either or both of them have these weapons?
Answer #2: Nope.
Think long and hard about a third question...what would Iran do with a nuclear bomb? Attack Israel? Why? Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons with a wide array of efficient delivery options. To attack Israel with nuclear weapons is to invite annihilation. Furthermore, assuming Iran manufactured a nuclear bomb, how would it deliver it?
The same rationale can be deployed with regard to North Korea. So you got a big bomb. What are you going to do with it? Blast South Korea? Do that and you kill U.S. troops stationed at the 38th parallel. That triggers a U.S. nuclear response, which in turn means the national suicide of Kim Jong Il's Malnutrition Paradise.
These weapons are almost totally useless in a world where the U.S. possesses THOUSANDS of nuclear bombs and a dizzying assortment of ways in which to deliver them. Our first strike advantage over the Soviets during the Cold War was staggering. Are we really going to dignify these moral and economic pygmies with a fear that we erroneously reserved for the USSR during the overhyped days of the Cold War?
I'll never forget the words of Cold War scholar Timothy Naftali when he spoke about the paranoid assumptions that led us into the tragedy of Vietnam. Naftali said that Americans in the post-World War II era have the recurring tendency to wildly underestimate their power in relation to the rest of the world, and this tendency is matched by an absurd overestimation of the power and peril posed by other nations.
Why do the North Koreans and the Iranians want these bombs that they can never use? Why are nations that cannot adequately feed and fuel themselves expending precious resources mining for the iron pyrite that is nuclear weaponry? I really don't know. Prestige? As Calvin Coolidge said (or should have), you can't eat prestige. Won't make your cars run. To give to terrorists? Seriously? You go to all that trouble to make one of these things, and you're going to hand it off to other random nutjobs? Not likely.
There is a comforting historical precedent to our current situation with Iran and North Korea...Red China in the early 1960s...
JFK was so concerned about the prospect of Mao getting The Bomb, he contemplated a pre-emptive air strike on the Chinese to prevent their acquisition of nuclear weapons. Like Ahminejad and Kim today, Mao was publicly terrifying with his rhetoric about launching full-blown nuclear war to achieve the triumph of his demented ideology. Privately however, Mao was quite rational and pragmatic about having a bright, shiny Nuke. It was a bargaining chip. Red China got The Bomb, and nothing bad happened. Nothing. Today the Great Nuclear Bogeyman of the early 60s is the Great ATM for the debtor empire that is the U.S.
Choosing to worry about Iran and North Korea getting the Bomb is a waste. Deterrence renders the acquisition of such thermonuclear toys utterly pointless.
Worry about something else...
