"Missile defense is cheaper than filling the hole that used to be San Francisco".
Dingbats of the world opposed to missile defense unite!:
No-Nukes
Turn
Pro-Nuke
Missile defenses are one thing the Left hates more than Armageddon
By P. J. O’Rourke
Ladies and gentlemen, for your interest and edification, I’d like to make you sick with fear at the prospect of an attack on America involving missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Unfortunately I don’t know how to perform this stunt. The missile attack part is easy enough. There are scientists, generals, and irrational zealots all over the world who know how to do it. But the sick-with-fear aspect of the feat is daunting.
If I say that Washington, D.C., is the target, you say it’s about time something was done about our politicos. A mushroom cloud consumes Manhattan? Considering recent NASDAQ performance, it could be mistaken for an e-commerce stock crashing—another “dot.bomb.” When Palm Beach County, Florida, gets nuked, the dim-wit residents will think the flash of light comes from more television cameras outside. If they do figure out what’s going on, they’ll be dialing 991 or 119 or P-A-T-B-U-C-H-A-N-A-N.
But seriously. There you are in a pile of rubble, bleeding profusely. Everything you have is gone. Your spouse and children scream in agony. If they don’t die, they’ll waste away–from hideous radiation sickness.
So how did the notion that America should posthaste build a system for fending off such horrors get to be a liberal joke? Well, it’s remarkable what a small group of dedicated activists can achieve.
For 40-some years the ban the bomb bums, unilateral disarmament goonies, nuclear freeze sleaze, peace creeps, and no-nukes kooks bragged about the horrors of atomic war. There was no end to their end of the world. They painstakingly detailed Armageddon, polished the Apocalypse, rubbed and loved a radioactive holocaust that made the Jonathan Edwards sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God sound like a vacation postcard from Cozumel. “Better red than dead,” they shrieked. Never mind that they could have gone to Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia and been both.
This P.R. for extinction had a dramatic effect on popular culture. There were books, movies, plays, even earnest top-40 songs about how we were all going to die, plus at least half a dozen “Twilight Zone” episodes where people emerged from their fallout shelters to find the world ruled by three-headed mutants in a bad mood. It scared the dickens out of us.
But so did being late for work for the third time in a week, and that ominous clunk in the car’s transmission, and the kid having a temperature of 103 degrees. Extremely bad things might happen, maybe, in the future. But fairly bad things will happen, definitely, any time now. We could only expend so much of our adrenalin being panicked over “maybes.”
Frankly, we got pooped with the horrors of atomic war. And then one day in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and it was over. No more On the Beach, no more Dawn of Destruction, no more nuclear winter that would be a hundred times worse than global warming.
Except it isn’t over. Our danger has just begun. And the fact that the whole world will not be blown up doesn’t mean your house won’t. There are “rogue states” to be considered, and in the long haul of history it turns out that all states are rogue states sooner or later. We certainly were, from the point of view of the Cherokee. Bland, unassuming Belgium ravished the Congo basin. The boring do-gooders of Scandinavia, when they had their long boats, terrorized everyone from Moscow to Goose Bay, Labrador.
Knowledge of how to trigger fission and make ICBMs won’t disappear like the lost works of Euripides. Too many laptops have been in and out of the Los Alamos Laboratory for that. How will rogue states—or rogue organizations, or just plain rogues—acquire this expertise? Here’s a dark side to the free market sunshine in which mankind has been basking: They’ll buy it. Too costly? Even the most miserably poor governments seem able to fund large armies, large espionage operations, and large corps of secret police. Is one missile ordered with the
H-bomb option really out of the reach of Iraq?
Then there’s logic and reason. For all their faults, the leaders of the USSR at least retained their reasoning faculties. Russian commies wanted to destroy America in order to dominate the planet. But if the planet was destroyed in the process, planetary domination lost much of its value. Ergo, commies used Cubans, Vietnamese, and New York Times op-ed pieces rather than nuclear weapons.
But what if destroying America is an end rather than a means? Or what if the rogues are theosophists who, due to transmigration of souls, know they will be reborn as those cockroaches that are supposed to be the only things likely to survive a mega-blast? The result, as far as American homeowners are concerned, will be the same as the Cuban missile crisis—if Khrushchev had been drinking more and Jack had doubled up on the back pain medication.
So give a high five (high seven, if you’ve mutated) to atomic war twenty-first-century style. It doesn’t happen only in places like Vladivostok and Chicago anymore. It can happen anywhere anyone is mad at anybody, which is everywhere. There’s nobody pounding his shoe on a desk at the U.N. by way of warning. The bombs explode one-by-one instead of simultaneously. And this continues for…for as long as you happen to live or can bear to go on doing so.
But that’s not the scary thing. The scary thing is the Americans who don’t want to prevent this atomic war.
They’re not a majority, perhaps, but if newspaper editorials and television commentaries are any measure, they’re a minority of gruesomely influential proportions. These Americas say a missile defense would be expensive. (Like cleaning up the hole where San Francisco used to be is so cheap.) They say the technology is imperfect. (“You spent only 12 seconds in the air? Let’s give it up, Orville, and go back to running the bike shop in Dayton.”) They say Russia and China will feel more comfortable, psychologically, if they remain able to lob a missile our way unfettered. They say missile defense upsets peaceful feelings in Europe—among our allies who, in 1914, 1939, and lately in the Balkans, have proven themselves so knowledgeable about peacekeeping.
And chief among these Americans who want nuclear weapons to remain an option in contemporary international conflicts are, strangely enough, the moldy old anti-nuclear protestors of yore.
They have risen from their tombs of policy irrelevance and are marching on our homes in a grisly pack. The shock wave ghouls, the test ban zombies, the strontium 90 goblins are today at least as dangerous undead as they were when they were red. They are ready to rip our flesh and roast our bones so that the hell they foresaw all through the Cold War may yet prevail on earth.
theamericanenterprise.org |
