Cold Warriors Question Nukes

Martin Hellman writes "George Shultz served as President Reagan's Secretary of State, and Bill Perry as President Clinton's Secretary of Defense. Henry Kissinger was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to both President Nixon and Ford. Sam Nunn was Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee for eight years. Their key roles in the Cold War has led many to call them 'Cold Warriors.' That status makes their recent, repeated calls for fundamentally re-examining our nuclear posture all the more noteworthy. Their most recent attempt to awaken society to the unacceptable risk posed by nuclear weapons is an Op-Ed in today's Wall Street Journal titled Deterrence in the Age of Nuclear Proliferation. (That link requires a subscription to the Journal. There is also a subscription-free link (PDF) at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.) Key excerpts and links to other resources are available as well."

Like Robert McNamara

[jjohnson]

Robert McNamara was in a documentary a few years a back, expressing his regret over the Vietnam strategy he implemented, mainly because it led to so much destruction and slaughter.

Well, that's great, Bob. Too bad you didn't THINK OF THAT AT THE TIME.

There's something chillingly cynical about guys like Perry and Kissinger complaining now about the nuclear posture that they created, as if the closeness of their deaths has made them fear an everlasting punishment. Like Lee Atwater in the last few months of his life apologizing for the blatantly racist campaign strategies he crafted, the only human response should be "TOO FUCKING LATE, YOU ASSHOLE!"

Re:In the suicide-bombing age...

[interkin3tic]

Time to stand up to the "let's not offend the Muslims" crowd. Every time they claim to be offended by people in the western world exercising their western rights (whether it's to draw cartoons or write novels) we should tell them to go fuck themselves.

I'm skeptical that we're dealing with one big population that is offended at those things and is also trying to nuke us. Rather, I think we're dealing with a large number of people who are offended by such things, who would maybe burn an American flag and throw rocks but are mostly harmless.

Then there is a much much much smaller group who is trying to get nukes to destroy us because they're messed up in the head. Maybe Al Quaeda spouts off about the danish cartoons, but even if we were completely nice and respectful to them, and even if we were to convert to Islam, they'd still try to destroy us. It's worth keeping in mind that most Islamic terrorism is focused against other Muslims, even ones who were being respectful of their own religion.

It really doesn't matter if they're offended by "The Satanic Verses" for example: the harmless ones don't matter (and of course it's our right to say whatever we want) and the dangerous ones are trying to destroy us anyway. Their taking offense to whatever is a separate issue from terrorism.

Politics will block it

[mr100percent]

Ronald Reagan called for a world without nukes, and took concrete steps to slash the arsenals of both the US and USSR.

Obama calls for a future where there will be zero nukes, and his administration's policy is to have both US and Russia reduce the number of nukes by several thousand. And for this, he's rewarded with screeches from the left that Obama hates America, wants to let the terrorists win, doesn't understand war, etc. This is all coming from the Right, a group that is trying to portray Reagan as a saint. How odd that Obama copying Reagan gets jeers.

Re:In the suicide-bombing age...

[catmistake]

In truth, the passage in question was indeed mistranslated [guardian.co.uk]

Bummer, bombers.

Re:In the suicide-bombing age...

[cold fjord]

Totally. I'm sick of atheists and their "logic" and "rationality". They're clearly worse than people blowing themselves up in the name of religion.

You mean the likes of the secular Marxist Tamil TIgers?

Tamil Tigers: Suicide Bombing Innovators [npr.org]

Prof. PAPE: No. Actually, the Tamil Tigers are a purely secular suicide terrorist group. They're not a group that most of the listeners will have heard too much about because even though they're actually the world leader in suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2003, carrying out more suicide attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad, they're not attacking us and they're not attacking our allies.

And so, even though they've done really quite tremendously spectacular suicide attacks - for instance, in 1993, it's the Tamil Tigers who assassinated - with the suicide assassination a sitting president, Premadasa, a president of Sri Lanka. That's the only time that a suicide attack has actually assassinated a sitting president.

And then just a few years before that, Rajiv Gandhi, when he was running for prime minister in 1991, a Tamil suicide attacker, this time a woman by the name of Dhanu assassinated him. And so, despite the fact there have been these spectacular attacks, they have been occurring not against us or against our allies, and so many folks won't really have been as familiar with them.

But they are not religious. They're not Islamic. They're a Hindu group. They're a Marxist group. They're actually anti-religious. They are building the concept of martyrdom around a secular idea of individuals essentially altruistically sacrificing for the good of the local community.

The militantly atheist communists were, and are, one of the most dangerous threats to humanity.

The Black Book of Communism [stanford.edu]