Going Nuclear
This NRO piece by Rich Lowry reminded me of something Bill Van Cleave said in a graduate seminar on the characterization of the spread of weapons of mass destruction as a proliferation versus as an Nth Country problem. Van Cleave joked that it always seemed a little backwards to promise that we wouldn't even consider the use of nuclear weapons against states that didn't have them, when a purely Clausewitzean strategy would suggest those are PRECISELY the states you want to use nuclear weapons against!
I always thought that was a pretty amusing way of looking at it. Of course, enlightened people like William Arkin, Warren Christopher, and the editors of the NY Times would have been alarmed.
My amusement aside, this is an interesting paragraph from Lowry:
Consider: Arms-controllers oppose American missile defenses because it is supposedly destabilizing for the U.S. to have sites that can be protected from rogue-state (or Russian or Chinese) attack. On the other hand, arms-controllers apparently don't mind rogue states' having deeply buried sites that can be protected from U.S. attack.
[Posted at 21:49 CST on 03/12/02] [Link]
