If you believe that an insane individual could not threaten
the human race with annihilation unless he held a high position such as the one
that was occupied by Hitler, you should think again – and here is why. A man
named Jack David who is now a fellow at the Hudson Institute was once a member
of the George W. Bush administration in charge of negotiating policy and
combating weapons of mass destruction.
For someone to be in that position and hold the views that he
is revealing only now, should send the chill down your spine and everyone
else's. For, the man may not have had his finger on the nuclear button but he
came close to that. He may also have looked saintly and may have acted normally
but he was insane all along.
You get a sense of all that when you read: “Obama's
Nuclear-Zero Dream,” an article in which Jack David reveals a few things about
himself, and what he believes would be good for America and the human race. The
article also came under the subtitle: “His idea that we will be safer with
fewer nuclear weapons is, quite simply, absurd” and was published on June 29,
2013 in National Review Online. What Jack David is complaining about is that
“President Obama proposed that the U.S.
and Russia
reduce their strategic nuclear warheads by one-third.” David calls that
proposal pure fantasy and dangerous. In case you forgot, this man was in charge
of combating weapons of mass destruction.
So you look to his argument to see how he explains that
point of view, and you are astounded by the tortuous nature of his logic.
Without saying it, he bases his argument on the theory of Mutual Assured
Destruction (MAD) that used to prevail during the Cold War. It was argued then
that because NATO and the Warsaw Pact had the capacity to absorb a first
nuclear strike and then retaliate, neither of the two adversaries launched a
war against the other. This may or may not have been a factor for the fact that
a nuclear exchange did not occur, but we cannot be certain because we can never
give a definite answer to the question: What if?
In fact, there is another plausible reason why a Third World
War did not occur. It is that the world had lived through two great wars in a
span of time that was shorter than a generation. The result has been that 16
million people died in the first war, and up to 75 million in the second. And
the question was asked: With or without nuclear weapons, how many will die if a
third war erupted? The irony is that Jack David uses this example to make his point.
Because he did not admit he borrowed the logic of the Cold War, he did not have
to mention that the situation was defused due to the Strategic Arms Limitation
Treaties (SALT) that were negotiated and signed at the time. And so, he calls
his point of view a paradox then attacks President Obama's point of view.
He calls the President's notion an absurdity and cites two
reasons for that. They are that man already knows how to make nuclear weapons,
and that some men are willing to use them to gain advantage over other men.
Well, that's what the situation was like during the cold war. In fact, America had
already used the bomb twice by that time. But the choice facing man was to
either have the SALT talks and reduce the threat of a nuclear exchange or
escalate by engaging in a never ending arms race. President Richard Nixon,
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Ronald Reagan chose the SALT
route; now Jack David wants to turn the clock back and push the world into a
new arms race.
Again, Jack David uses a mutilated form of logic to make his
point. Without saying that Russia
cheated on the treaties it signed – which it did not – he uses the double-talk
of mixing apples and oranges to make it sound like it did. He says that America reduced its strategic weapons but that Russia
increased its tactical weapons. Well, that was in the provisions of the
agreements all along because both sides needed to recalibrate their forces
given that China – which is Russia 's
neighbor – was now a rising nuclear power.
With this in mind, Jack David brings into the discussion the
fact that Iran and North Korea are two potentially rising nuclear powers, and
argues not that steps be taken to limit the proliferation of these weapons but
that the arms race be escalated. And he does this in a way that is so insulting
to the intelligence of the reader; you can only conclude that the man is
insane. He says this: “Should the U.S.
wish to take action regarding Syria
... or Japan that is not to
the liking of Russia or China … can there be any doubt that those
countries could be tempted to consider nuclear blackmail as a means of
persuading the U.S.
not to act?”
By imagining that absurd scenario, the man dismisses off
hand the notion that the choice is between returning to the Cold War era where
the arms race continues, or moving forward into the SALT era where escalation
is brought under control, and proliferation is eliminated. In fact, he
indicates what his choice would be by the manner with which he ends his
presentation.
He basically says that America will be safer in a world
that is full of nuclear weapons than a world which is free of them. He goes on
to say, this would be true provided that America
has a stockpile of weapons large enough to scare everyone else, even if America must
also be scared by everyone else's stockpile.
His is a MAD world indeed because the man is insane.