Topic: Axis of Evil and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation

I don't want to say much about the "Axis of Evil"--there was no axis, they just happened to be the three most significant nasty national regimes with which we had bad relations at the time. Catchy phrase with no coherent policy backing it up.

I do want to make a comment about the nuclear weapons issue. The policy of nonproliferation worked very well for 30-40 years, but the cat is now well and truly out of the bag. There are now more holes in the dyck than we have fingers to plug them with. The evidence is all too apparent that having nukes--or at least giving a convincing impression of having them--gets you in a club which has some added security and gets you an added level of respect. In terms of the science and engineering required, it's not a serious obstacle for a nation that wants them. There's also big money and influence in spreading the information around, as Pakistan did.

The U.S. does not have very clean hands on this issue, either. Of course, we started the whole thing in the first place, but in more recent years we have plenty of harmful behavior at our own feet. Apart from the hypocrisy of the "No, you can not have them, but we will keep ours" argument, our willingness to continue to develop new weapons, unilaterally end our test-ban restraints, and blur the borderline with our depleted uranium weapons and tactical devices should give us reason to question our own moral high ground on this one.

We (all of us, the red states, the blue states, the swing states, and the ROTW states) have to rethink from fundamental principles how we can assure a modicum of safety and hope for the future in a world of readily accessible nuclear weapons. Our bully-boy tactics have seen their limits; our bluff has been called. By India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea, so far, recently. There are probably 50 other countries that will have them by 2050 unless humanity comes up with a more convincing rationale not to go nuclear.

Then I got into a weird debate with a guy--normally a progressive--who insisted that the proliferation of nukes was a reason to cheer, because of the advancement of those societies that the weapons constitute. Wha?

(from Politics Talk, Washington Post)