The Gathering Nuclear Storm - WSJ:
By MARK HELPRIN
"Even should nuclear brinkmanship not result in Armageddon, it can lead to abject defeat and a complete reordering of the international system.
The extraordinarily complicated and consequential management of American nuclear policy rests upon the shoulders of those we elevate to the highest offices.
Unfortunately, President Obama’s transparent hostility to America’s foundational principles and defensive powers is coupled with a dim and faddish understanding of nuclear realities.
His successor will be no less ill-equipped.
Hillary Clinton’s robotic compulsion to power renders her immune to either respect for truth or clearheaded consideration of urgent problems.
Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state once said that he was “pure act” (meaning action).
Hillary Clinton is “pure lie” (meaning lie), with whatever intellectual power she possesses hopelessly enslaved to reflexive deviousness.
Donald Trump, surprised that nuclear weapons are inappropriate to counterinsurgency, has a long history of irrepressible urges and tropisms.
Rather like the crazy boy-emperors after the fall of the Roman Republic, he may have problems with impulse control—and an uncontrolled, ill-formed, perpetually fragmented mind.
None of these perhaps three worst people in the Western Hemisphere, and few of their deplorable underlings, are alive to
the gravest danger.
Which is neither Islamic State, terrorism, the imprisoned economy, nor even the erosion of our national character, though all are of crucial importance.
The gravest danger we face is fast-approaching nuclear instability.
Many believe it is possible safely to arrive at nuclear zero.
It is not.
Enough warheads to bring any country to its knees can fit in a space volumetrically equivalent to a Manhattan studio apartment.
Try to find that in the vastness of Russia, China, or Iran.
Even ICBMs and their transporter-erector-launchers can easily be concealed in warehouses, tunnels and caves.
Nuclear weapons age out, but, thanks to supercomputing, reliable replacements can be manufactured with only minor physical testing.
Unaccounted fissile material sloshing around the world can, with admitted difficulty, be fashioned into weapons.
And when rogue states such as North Korea and Iran build their bombs, our response has been either impotence or a ticket to ride.
Nor do nuclear reductions lead to increased safety.
Quite apart from encouraging proliferation by enabling every medium power in the world to aim for nuclear parity with the critically reduced U.S. arsenal, reductions create instability..."
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