Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Politics: The Real News - Bush heats up words with Iran and Russia



Who has the right to own a nuclear weapon? I've been pondering this for a while now. When Russia and the US both had enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other, we arrived at peace. When India and Pakastan both achieved nuclear weapons, they were forced to decide how far they were willing to go. It seems to me that nuclear weapons may actually be one of the best war deterrents that has ever existed. It brings two sides of a conflict face to face with annihilation. It forces them to decide how important their hatred of the enemy really is. When only one side of a conflict has a nuclear weapon, the side without it is at a decided disadvantage.

The yahoos over here in the US are always running around saying "we should just nuke em" to just about any small country that represents the slightest threat. With this kind of casual attitude about our power, what would they be saying if we attacked a country like Iran and they then shut down the oil infrastructure crippling the US economy? How easily would desperate people in the US, who are now paying $10 per gallon for gas, be convinced that nuking Iran was actually a good idea if it might make it all stop? How likely would they need to be to decide nuking Iran was a good idea if Iran could nuke us back?

So I ask again. Who has a right to own nuclear weapons? Who has a right to say "we should just nuke em?" Now that the genie is out of the bottle with nuclear weapons how can only some people be forced to live under the threat of nuclear annihilation while others can casually sit back and gloat about their ability to annihilate? Don't gun advocates always argue that the best defense against a man with a gun threatening your family is to own a gun yourself? How is it these same people would say that we should attack someone for wanting the national defense equivalent of a gun to protect their families?

I'm just sayin. . . .

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