Notes of Concern…
…Jackson Blair
NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT?
As I write I have just read the following headlines on an online news service:
Iran test-fires short-range missiles...
'Could reach Israel'...
Revolutionary Guards begins war games...
Venezuela exploring uranium deposits with Russia...
When I was growing up, and throughout my years as a young adult, the world made regular attempts to encourage nuclear disarmament
The United States and the USSR worked to find ways to mutually lower the storehouse of nuclear weapons both nations possessed. And the nations with nuclear weapons worked very hard to make certain they did not proliferate, that other nations did not develop them.
It was pretty much agreed that nothing good could come from nuclear energy that was intended for wartime use. It was also agreed that many wonderful things could come from nuclear energy reserved for peacetime purposes. Therein was the problem.
The people who were against disarmament were concerned that we would be defenseless in a future encounter with a hostile nation that had nuclear weapons.
It was not popular to be against nuclear disarmament in those days.
Now we have by most accounts a nuclear capable Iran that is run by a nut case fanatic. We have a nuclear ambitious North Korea run by a similarly morally challenged dictator. Very recently we read in our newspapers that the third leg on the “outrageous” chair, Venezuela’s leader Hugo Chavez, had struck a deal to develop nuclear capability with the help of the Iranians and the Russians want to help the Iranians, the same Russians that used to be working with us to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
India has nuclear weapons and isn’t too fond of Pakistan. Pakistan is reported to have them, too, and wouldn’t mind rolling a few toward India if circumstances warranted. Everybody knows Iran wants to bomb Israel, all you have to do is read Ahmadinejad’s speeches in which he makes his intentions completely clear.
I think I will stop listing nations. It makes me uncomfortable.
These people hate us!
It might help if voters kept that in mind. Every time we select national leaders we need to understand clearly where they stand on our national defense.
Now after our efforts to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq made any such effort in another country the source of unending humor, we find the president announcing in Pittsburgh that not only do the Iranians have the capability to quickly develop nuclear bombs, they have been hiding their development efforts from the world in a secret cave.
No one is going to look for these weapons. The last leader that went looking for such weapons is widely considered to have been a fool. That was not lost on today’s leaders.
The United Nations has enacted so many sanctions against nations that do not play nice that they are pretty much out of ideas. There are not many more sanctions they can apply. They have used all the arrows in their quiver and may be considering adopting every mother’s favorite ploy: the “time out” punishment. In this approach, the UN can tell Ahmadinejad he has to take time out and site for a couple of weeks in a hotel in Jerusalem. Netanyahu will take his time out in Caracas. Hugo Chavez will spend his two weeks in Tehran. The Russian leader will spend his “time out” in Los Angeles.
During this time, the world will breath easily knowing that no nukes will be flying at those countries while they host the “time outs” of various leaders.
Mothers of the world have solved many problems. Maybe it is time to turn this one over to them
And as anyone who can read The Weekly Reader in grade school knows, the United Nations does not follow through on any of the penalties they threaten in these sanction decisions.
So here is the new world in which I find myself. Not one where the leaders of the U.S., Russia and China control the smaller countries in such a way that they can effectively make certain there is not a nuclear holocaust.
I live in a world where some of the craziest of the crazies not only have the weapons, and announce they have the weapons, and threaten to use the weapons, no threaten is not the verb, they promise they will use the weapons, and the world body designed to keep my world safe is totally impotent.
There will be different views on this.
My view is that the implosion of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the neutering of the United States Government as a result of the incursion into Iraq has opened Pandora’s box and we are marching steadily toward an abyss.
This nation must revisit the subject of what is required to protect the citizens from danger, internal and external, and take the action that is required to ensure that. The president took an oath to do that.
We live in a time when it is dangerous to trust the leaders of other lands, seriously dangerous to think naively about the intentions of other countries, and potentially fatal to be anything but vigilant.
If we fail to step up to the requirements of twenty first century life, our children will be living in a very different world from the one in which we grew up. And it will not be a pretty world. It will look a lot like what we see in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan on the news.
As Teddy Roosevelt so importantly warned, we can talk softly to power everywhere, but in the absence of a big stick no one is going to listen.
