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I am going to advance, once again, my modest proposal that, at least in certain areas of the world, we need to cut loose this one-size-fits-all nonproliferation article of faith. The disarmament crowd had huge amounts of fun with the MAD acronym for mutual assured destruction back in the bipolar cold war, but it worked.

China is finally getting serious about the fruitloop in North Korea, but for several years they sat back and chuckled their inscrutable a**es off watching our policy there resemble a monkey attempting carnal knowledge with a football. Consider how much of their attention we'd have gotten if we pulled our 35,000 men out of the peninsula and set them to providing security for the handful of nukes we gave Japan on loan while they developed their own capability, and don't even think Japan is not quietly working on that anyway.

While we have been over-extending ourselves in the middle east to the point China can pretty openly threaten Taiwan knowing our military option there is limited, to put it generously. Japan is for very good reason, very nervous about the aformentioned fruitloop.

Israel probably exists today because they had the nuclear ace up their sleeve. The logic is not that different from armed homeowners or concealed carry laws, the bad guys will hesitate when confronted with the potential of deadly response from the victim.

I grant, this logic only works with identifiable nation-states, and even then one has doubts about such as North Korea. The potential for a terrorist group with no particular return address to pull off a nuclear event is frighteningly close to achievable, but that genie is already out of the bottle. God knows, I am glad I won't have to make the call if some unidentifiable group takes out half of LA with a device hidden in a seatainer. Do we turn a nation of 95% innocent people from which the zealots operated into a glass-lined parking lot if we do trace it back? And if we did, would it actually take out a religious/idealogical organization with no real allegiance to any given geographical base. The sort of people who will turn pregnant teenagers into suicide bomb vehicles won't think twice about putting the host nation of the moment at risk of obliteration as they judiciously move on to another base of operations, they'll just holler "Allahu Akbar" as they pack for moving day.

As much as that is my nightmare, it has no relevance to allowing responsible nations to have a nuclear deterrent. That will not be the source of a non-governmental terror group's fissile material, there is entirely too much of that already available.

I remember thinking as I watched the old USSR collapse, that the destabilization that event created would someday make us look back fondly on the relative stability of a basically balanced three party world. I truly hope I am wrong, but as a gambling man, I do not give us good odds of avoiding this grim scenario in my lifetime.