(Author’s note: This is NOT a call for personal nukes.)
The secondary purpose of the 2nd Amendment, the purpose most widely in-use today, is self-defense and defense of others. In States that elect politicians who choose to follow the Rule of Law, attacks on persons are much lower than in States whose voters elect politicians who reject the concept of self-defense, and who disdain the Rule of Law to follow the Rule of Man.
So let’s take a look at this philosophy of self-defense at the nation-state level.
What nations have not recently been attacked by other nations? Those with nuclear weapons in their arsenals.
Sound familiar? Self-defense.
What nations HAVE been attacked recently by another nation? Ukraine and Georgia, by Russia. What did Georgia & Ukraine lack? Nukes. Ukraine USED to have nukes, but gave them up in the Budapest Accords because Russia guaranteed the inviolability of Ukraine’s borders.
Had Ukraine kept their nukes, would Russia have attacked? No. Russia (or the USSR) never attacked Britain, France, the USA, China, India or Pakistan, right?
Has any nation-state attacked Israel lately? No. Why? They have nukes. Since 1973, when Israel evidently was within several minutes of nuking advancing Egyptian tank columns, attacks on Israel have been by non-State actors: muslim terrorists.
How did Ike get us out of the Korean War? Backchannel threats to drop nukes on our enemies. How did he keep us out of war, a feat no president since has accomplished? Go read the “Massive Retaliation” speech in which SecState Dulles announced Ike’s policy of the same name to the Council on Foreign Relations in January, 1954. Just as it sounds, Ike refused to build and deploy massive, expensive, conventional forces when he had inexpensive weapons that could far more productively end attacks on America or our allies. (Would that modern presidents had his foresight and good judgment.)
The point is, whether we are talking personal or national self-defense, weapons that can kill the attacker – human or nation – do, in fact, deter attacks. Or kill the attacker, deterring future attacks.
In the Ukraine example, no European leader today would be wetting his or her pants had Ukraine kept their nukes. Japan wouldn’t be wringing their hands over China’s incursions into the South China Sea if Japan had nuked-up, which they more than likely now are doing.
Would China attack a nuclear Japan? No more than Russia attacked a nuclear Ukraine. So the South China Sea would be? Safer.
Iran, today’s bugaboo in the proliferation argument (an argument made moot by the non-response of the West to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, a clarion call FOR proliferation if ever there was one), wants nukes, and the world apart from Israel doesn’t care.
(“Caring” is binary: You care enough to do something about it, or you don’t care and are just salving your ego & wringing your hands.)
So let’s look at the probable results of an Iranian nuke, and judge them by the results of an American citizen not unconstitutionally denied his or her right to self-defense. But let’s also recognize those Iran sees as her real enemies.
If Iran were to gain a nuke, what would she do with it? Iran – Persian Shia – uses Israel as a State threat to keep the support of her islamists, much as Obama and the UN use the phantom of “global warming” to maintain the support of Western Useful Idiots. But – with whom does Shia Persia Iran actually go to war? Sunni Arabs.
Who has granted Israel overflight rights for an air assault on Iran? Sunni Saudi Arabia.
Who is scared to death of a Shia Persian – Iranian – nuke, and has been angered by Obama’s interactions with Iran, which no intelligent person doubts will lead to an Iranian nuke? Sunni Saudi Arabia.
Ahmadinejad no longer is in power. He was a nut who believed that he needed to push along the End Times to achieve full islam, and nuking Israel would have helped him do this. But – would he actually have done so? We’ll never know. Will his successors nuke Israel? No one knows. But they are far more likely to nuke essentially defenseless Sunni Arabs with whom they have been at war for a thousand years, than to attack a Jewish State they know will annihilate them.
Could Iran have other ideas, other reasons for wanting nukes? After all, they live in a dangerous neighborhood, and they are NOT the baddest dude on the block.
Pakistan (Sunni) is next door. So is (Sunni) Afghanistan. Pakistan HAS nukes. India has nukes and is a Medium-Range Ballistic Missile flight away. But these nations have enough problems of their own that expecting any to nuke Iran is nuts.
But, then, when one considers SWAT, the homeland of al qaeda, nuts do crazy things.
Look north. There’s a quite large and expansionist Bear on Iran’s northern border. A Bear that already consumed Georgia, is consuming Ukraine, and likely will consume Chechnya now that the West has proven irrelevant to Putin’s expansionist drive.
Putin recently made news regarding Syria’s chemical weapons. Why did Russia care about Syria? Because Syria hosts Russia’s only naval port on the Med. Ukraine, specifically the Crimean Peninsula, is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which sorties through the Bosporus to reach the world’s oceans. Did you think annexing Crimea was about beach vacations?
Iran can read a map as well as Russia. A permanent – Russian – warm water port has always been a Russian strategic desire. Iran knows this. If the West is going to roll over for Georgia (done) and Ukraine (doing), who would complain of Russia whacking Iran? No one.
Do you – really – think Russia … and Iran … don’t grasp the strategic situation? Only Western liberals don’t understand what’s going on in the world.
Take Israel out of the discussion and what do you see? A small, declining Iran holding the keys to the world’s oceans 12 months a year, and a large, seasonally ice-locked, expansionist Russia desiring those keys. If you were Iran, would you not be pursuing a nuclear deterrent? You’d be nuts not to.
And I would posit that one must take Israel out of the discussion. If Israel were to conduct a first strike on an Iranian nuclear capacity, the entire world would come down on Israel, rightly or wrongly – and it most certainly would be the latter.
But it wouldn’t matter. Unless Israel is nuked first, and perhaps not even then, would the world sensibly acknowledge Israel’s need and right to defend herself. Israel likely would lose all trade, all exchange, all future… just for killing her attacker. Just for exercising her innate right to self-defense.
But leaders of the muslim world trying to ride the tiger of the islamist terror they have created and enabled suddenly would lack an enemy around which to rally their illiterate, poor, unemployed, un-free, starving masses, who next would be coming for … them.
And for Arab leaders, that would be worse than an Israel they can blame, redirecting the focus of the hundreds of millions those leaders have led only to squalor.
So look ‘outside the box.’ Consider that Iran – might – have a sensible reason for wanting nukes. They know what happened to Georgia. They know what’s happening to Ukraine. They know Sunni Pakistan has nukes. They know that not one Western country would care if Russia nuked them; heck, we’d probably cheer!
The muslim world is in turmoil within; it is Western ignorance that sees only muslim-on-Western terror. India could tire of the occasional Mumbai attack and just nuke Iran as a within-range enabler. In fact, as Iran gets closer to a nuke, the odds of this increase drastically. It is far more likely that India or Pakistan (or Russia) nukes Iran than that Israel does so pre-emptively. Israel is run by intelligent leaders; Pakistan is run by nuts. India? Who knows? India has a billion impoverished illiterate persons who would not care in the least if Iran were nuked – as long as they could get their next meal. Few of them even would know, and fewer care. India’s leadership knows this.
And if you think Sunni Saudi Arabia isn’t looking into building or buying nukes to deter Shia Persian Iran, I have a TSA deterrent to an Ebola-infected traveler to sell you.
The larger point is this: Just as personal weapons in America deter crimes against persons, nuclear weapons in the hands of States deter crimes against States. And, if they do not, if the occasional murderer gets through before being shot, well, he finally DOES get shot and the community is safer by the removal of a bad guy.
The same is true for States. If, say, I am wrong about Iran’s first target, Israel will respond massively and Iran no longer will be an extant enemy, for Iran will be glowing glass.
The same philosophy that informs America’s 2nd Amendment needs to inform the global nuclear proliferation discussion. Just as in America, the facts are “More Guns, Less Crime.” A nuclear world will be safer, even if one or two nations must die to get the point across. As with a dead rapist, the community will be safer for their eradication.
If we really want a more peaceful world, we should encourage, or at the least not discourage, the acquisition of nuclear weapons for the same reason that armed communities experience less personal crime. Just as crimes against persons are lower in 2nd Amendment States, crimes against nations would be lower in a 2nd Amendment (nuclear) world.
This also is why the Libertarian argument against denying Iran nukes makes sense – more sense than the anti-2nd Amendment argument made by Left AND Right today.