Monday, August 03, 2009

War as the Remedy to Nuclear Ambitions

Stephen Walt reminds us again today that attacking a country to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons has been proposed before. It would have been the US against the Soviet Union or against China in the fifties and sixties. And then there was Iraq...
...trying to re-establish and preserve a nuclear monopoly would be very costly, and would have required the United States to fight a series of preventive wars. U.S. leaders thought seriously about preventive war against the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, and pondered it again when China was developing its own nuclear arsenal. We should all be grateful that cooler heads prevailed, because nuclear strikes or a conventional invasion of the Soviet Union or China would have been a disaster for the United States. We did invade Iraq in 2003 in order to end Saddam's WMD ambitions once and for all -- unaware that he'd already abandoned them -- and we all know how well that worked out.
Let's remind Israel about all that too.

1 comment:

J. said...

Next on the plate - invading Burma, not because of the massive human rights issues, but because it may be that North Korea is aiding Burma in setting up a nuclear reactor to create plutonium for a future bomb (because that technology worked so well for N.K.). And then again, maybe Burma isn't creating a nuke, but invading Burma would result in their people throwing flowers at our feet and singing songs...