Bowl Cut Jr. to U.S.: We're ready to nuke you pretty much any time now

My guiding principle on the matter of nuclear proliferation has always been based on something my dad said during the '80s, in the days when notions of a "nuclear freeze" were all the rage on the left because they were terrified that the warmonger/cowboy Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart (whoever that happened to be at the moment, since they all kept getting those fatal colds) would go ahead and push all the buttons.

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Was that the threat? Nah. My dad wasn't buying it: "It's not the Russians having nukes that worries me. It's what happens when some nut gets his hands on one." Exactly. The Soviets were evil, but they weren't crazy. They wanted to survive, and they knew what mutual assured destruction meant. For the superpowers of the '80s, nuclear weapons were an effective deterrent against each other and against any smaller power that might even think of doing something belligerent. They weren't something you would just go ahead and fire on a rival, because you knew what that would mean. The Soviets had a wish for world domination. They did not have a death wish. Now if you had asked at the time for an example of a regime full of nuts whose attainment of nuclear weapons would represent the most horrifying possible scenario, the most likely answer would probably have been Iran. This was the extremist Islamic regime that had held 44 Americans hostage for more than a year, and was known even then to be a state-sponsor of terrorism. Today, although the exact same regime remains in power - still calling America the Great Satan and still threatening to wipe Israel from the map - the American left has gotten quite cozy and comfortable with the idea of the mad mullahs getting the bomb. Because, you see, they really are rational and they really don't mean what they say. That's right. The same people who think Kim Davis is a crazy religious fanatic are quite certain the ayatollahs have sound minds and wouldn't ever dream of nuking anyone - even though they say they will. OK. Fine. If the left wants to stop worrying and learn to love a nuclear Iran because the ayatollahs are really oh so rational, let's see how the rationality test applies to the latest despot to threaten nuclear holocaust against us:

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In its latest bout of saber rattling, North Korea says it is ready to use nuclear weapons against the United States and other foes if they pursue "their reckless hostile policy" toward Kim Jong Un's regime. In a statement carried by the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency on Tuesday, an atomic energy official said Pyongyang is improving its nuclear weapons arsenal "in quality and quantity." "If the U.S. and other hostile forces persistently seek their reckless hostile policy towards the DPRK and behave mischievously, the DPRK is fully ready to cope with them with nuclear weapons any time," the director of the North Korean Atomic Energy Institute said, using an abbreviation of the country's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korea's main nuclear complex at Yongbyon, which includes a uranium enrichment plant and a plutonium production reactor, is operating normally, the official told the news agency. Notorious for issuing alarming and attention-grabbing statements, Pyongyang has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons against the United States in the past. But strong doubts remain over whether it has the missile technology to target the U.S. mainland.

I share in the doubts that Bowl Cut Jr. has the capacity - at the present time - to launch a nuclear missile that can reach the shores of the continental United States. But that is completely beside the point. Only three questions really matter here: 1. Does North Korea have the capacity, if allowed to do so, to eventually develop a nuclear weapon that could strike the United States? Probably. 2. Does the United States have the political will to take out Kim's regime before it can do so? Probably not. 3. Is he crazy enough to actually do it? Probably. That is a very bad combination of questions and answers, and it's exactly why world powers at one time took seriously the imperative of nuclear non-proliferation. It was understood that we had to do whatever was necessary to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of "some nut" precisely because we could all be held hostage to the whims of someone like this. This is one of the reasons the United States used to exercise global leadership back before the days when America got tired of it and decided to elect a president who wasn't interested in doing it. We don't do that anymore, nor do we make Russia and China pay a price for propping up a regime like this because we'd rather kowtow to them on the world stage so we can reduce our defense budget and focus on giving people free stuff in exchange for their votes. So that nightmare scenario my dad envisioned? Some nut gets nukes? It's every bit the nightmare it always was. But the world is much better at self-soothing delusion than it was back in the days of the Cold War. The clarity of those days was worth more than we understood at the time.

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