Only America fears nukes

In his speech in Prague a few days ago, President Obama called for a world without nuclear weapons. Timing, as they say, is everything. Only five hours before he spoke, North Korea launched a ballistic missile it claimed was putting a satellite into orbit. The missile flopped into the Pacific Ocean somewhere instead.

Rich Lowry takes the rather conventional loyal-opposition stance that "Obama hitched himself to a project as utopian as Pres. George W. Bush’s ambition to end tyranny in the world."

In fact, they are essentially the same goal. The bipartisan congressional Strategic Posture Review concluded in an interim report that to achieve Global Zero would require a “fundamental transformation of the world political order.” All significant geo-political conflicts would have to end, and all untrustworthy governments disappear. The verification regime would have to be so all-encompassing as to constitute a kind of world government.

Well, yeah, but remember that a world government is not really something Obama would oppose. Anyway, what I haven't read in punditry about "Global Zero," as the White House calls the president's proposal, is that the United States is afraid of everyone else's nukes, but no one is the whole world is afraid of ours.

Now, I don't mean that we fear Britain's SLBMs. But we're not actually afraid of Russia's for the very good reason that the Russian government is merely tyrannical, not insane. The Putin regime may be corrupt and self aggrandizing, but it's not a "rogue" government willing to operate wholly outside whatever passes for international norms. The Russians, OTOH, do not fear our nukes for the same reason. We each know our ICBMs are aimed at each other only in retaliation, not for first shot. And neither of us will fire the first shot.

As unthreatened as Russia is by our nuclear arms, Iran and North Korea are even less so. Both the Mad Mullahs and Kim Ding-Dong Jong Il have no doubt we have the capability to pave their countries with alamogordite (the heat-fused ground at ground zero at 1945's Trinity Test Site). But they very realistically do not believe that we would ever do it.

And we wouldn't. Not this president, not another. (I addressed why an American nuclear strike would be morally, politically and strategically bankrupt back in 2003. The context was different, but not by much, and I stand behind it today.)

Iran, though, knows that Israel would retaliate in kind. A few years ago an Iranian mullah dismissed such retaliation, though, pointing out that a mere two nukes would obliterate Israel forever, but Islam could not be destroyed by all of Israel's atomic arsenal. Yet Iran can win an atomic war with Israel with neither side firing a shot.

One also must note that Iran is not threatening the Russians, godless commies though they recently were. Iran is under no illusions about Russia's will to go Roman on its enemies.

The real reason that Obama's goal will not be achieved is that the the US, Britain and France maintain their nuclear arsenals only for symbolic reasons. Only the great powers see their nukes as not basically useful and terrifically expensive to maintain. For every other actual or wannabe nuclear power, nukes are the international Colt .45, the "great equalizer."

"Global Zero" can do nothing to address this fundamental dynamic. If the US, Iran and North Korea all three truly, totally denuclearized, only the two of those countries would be more vulnerable to the third. America alone would be safer. And that is exactly why the rogue states will never disarm.