from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 26 Sep 2009 08:17 PM PDT

The media is praising Obama for chairing a UN National Security
Council summit at which everyone agreed that the world would be better off
without nuclear weapons... someday. This groundbreaking achievement
parallels similar UN conclusions that the world would be better off
without poverty, hunger, war and other ills... someday. In the present day
however, the UN has once again sidetracked a specific problem with a
general prescription. That is par for the course for pushing general
disarmament, when the problem is that specific nations which could not be
named at the UN are working to create nuclear weapons with the intention
of distributing them and using them.

While it would be very nice indeed to have a world without
nuclear weapons, the door to that Utopian nuclear free realm closed on
August 5th, 1945. It has not and will not reopen since, short of the
coming of a new technological dark age. Once something can be done, it
will be done by others. It is not possible to remove nuclear bombs, nerve
gas, mines, dynamite, revolvers, swords and stone clubs from the arsenal
of humanity's technological know-how. And while some of these are uglier
than others, all weapons are ugly, some are only ugly in intent. Nuclear
weapons remain at the far end of the spectrum because they have few
legitimate military purposes, they are all-encompassing weapons of mass
destruction to be used with catastrophic results. They are weapons of mass
death or mass genocide.

But at the same time diplomatic disarmament
approach is worse than folly, because if the United States and even Russia
may want to put the weapons back in the box as toys for the homicidally
insane, that only makes them more appealing to homicidally insane states.
The Western fear of nuclear weapons paradoxically makes them extremely
appealing to brutal totalitarian regimes like Iran or North Korea, giving
them an inflated sense of power vastly beyond their actual military
capabilities. The premise behind diplomatic disarmament is that fallacious
chestnut about people everywhere wanting the same things we do. The
problem is that isn't true.

Some people don't at all want the same
things we do. Some of them want entirely different things altogether. WWII
demonstrated the truth of that in all its abiding horror, but those
lessons continue to go unlearned by Western leaders who still seem to
believe that all it takes is getting the world to sing together, which
would work better if the tune they didn't insist on is "Give Peace a
Chance" while their enemies picked the "Horst Wessel Lied".

Nuclear
disarmament, like most forms of disarmament, remains a pacifist vision.
Most countries who have weapons are willing to endorse it, but only fools
would actually practice it. That is because every weapon is also a
deterrent, and we live in a world in which deterrents remain necessary.
While nuclear weapons are horrifying, they are only horrifying when they
are used. Which means disarmament is primarily an issue for those who
would use them, or pass them along to those who would.

Nuclear
weapons, like any other weapons, are not universally bad. They are however
quite bad in the hands of a homicidal maniac. Not even the most passionate
Second Amendment defender would suggest that a serial killer has the right
to own a machine gun. Serial killer states in turn have no right to own
nuclear weapons, because only in their hands are nuclear weapons a true
threat. Such states who develop nuclear weapons are like a serial killer
stockpiling weapons in his attic. It's only a matter of time before those
weapons will be used.

The world's inability to do anything about Kim Jong Il's
nuclear ambitions helped create a pipeline through which nuclear
technology passed on down the line to Islamic states, where it's only a
single degree of separation before they end up in the hands of terrorists.
Pakistan's nuclear arsenal makes that likely for Sunni terrorists. Iran's
own nuclear development will be the final step for Shiite terrorists. When
that link is finally closed, terrorists will have the ability to kill
thousands, not millions. And whether those weapons are used against
Israel, the United States, Australia, France or all of the above... is
only a question of circumstances and timing.

During the Cold War,
it was understood that we could not turn back the clock on the USSR's
nuclear arsenal. Instead we implemented a policy of MAD, Mutually Assured
Destruction for either side in a nuclear exchange. We placed our bets on
global destruction to serve as a deterrent to nuclear war. It was an awful
bet to take, but after two generations, the bet was won, and everyone
breathed a sigh of relief. Our luck had held.

But will it always
hold? Living under MAD often had a negative effect on the American psyche,
and it provided fodder for the anti-war movement, and for pacifists to
characterize the US military posture as insane. And they were not entirely
wrong. MAD was a defensive response that gambled daily with the lives of
every American in the hopes of outwaiting the USSR. But there is no
outwaiting all of Islam.

MAD was premised on an enemy that
understood the consequences of a nuclear war and controlled enough
territory to not wish to face them. The next generation of MAD would take
place against terrorist groups that do not control any actual territory we
can strike, and against regimes that think of themselves as invulnerable
thanks to Allah's guiding hand. MAD was useful against nations that were
evil, but sane, and determined to survive. The nuclear threats of tomorrow
will come from nations and factions that are evil, but not sane, and do
not necessarily care whether they live or die.

21st Century Islam
has made the suicide bomber its statement of choice. Whether exploding in
a crowd or flying a plane into a skyscraper, martyrdom has given Islamic
homicidal and genocidal mania the facade of religious nobility. And no one
has yet tested how far that mania may stretch. During the closing days of
WW2, before the US dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, its leaders were
seriously considering using their non-productive women and children as
either human shields or culling them altogether to preserve wartime
productivity. Such plans are a disturbing reminder that our enemies do not
think the way we do, and that we cannot presume their moral limits to be
anywhere within our own.

So then what can we do? Universal
disarmament remains a pacifist's pipe dream. MAD is insufficient at best,
and highly dangerous at worst. Furthermore it presumes that the enemy is
unwilling to die, and that he believes that we are willing to kill his
people by the millions. American foreign policy if anything gives the
opposite impression. That leaves us with few options. We can try to
develop a system that will make nuclear weapons irrelevant, but no such
system exists. Missile shields may prevent large scale nuclear war, should
they be successfully implemented, but no such shield will stop a suitcase
nuke going off in Downtown D.C.

All that remains is
to stop a nuclear weapons program before it produces its deadly results.
The only successful form of disarmament, is disarmament by force. Had we
applied that to North Korea in a timely manner, the world wouldn't be
facing the current shocking wave of nuclear proliferation. If we don't
begin taking action now, nuclear weapons will be sold and traded on the
black markets of the Third World tomorrow, the way Stinger missiles are
today. And then the death toll will make 9/11 seem utterly
insignificant,

The ultimate question is do we let a serial killer
stockpile weapons in his attic, and wait until he actually walks into a
shopping mall and opens fire, before we do something about him. The
current mindset is to wait and see. And so we've been waiting and seeing.
We waited while North Korea developed nuclear weapons. We waited while
Pakistan developed nuclear weapons. We're waiting while Iran develops
nuclear weapons. What we're really waiting for, is for the day when those
weapons are actually used. A day that our waiting is bringing ever closer,
day by day.