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Do you remember MAD? Back when President Reagan was President, and the Soviet Union developed sufficient nuclear force to destroy the planet, we described our strategy for saving the world. And it was called Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD for short.
According to MAD, the only thing that protected us from nuclear destruction, was the threat of nuclear destruction. They wouldn't launch their missiles to destroy us, because in the time it took for their nukes to reach us, we would launch ours and they would die with us.
And of course, they said the same of us.
It began with the Cuban missile crisis, and lasted for decades, and every once in awhile you'd see a doomsday movie come out which reflected the darkest nightmares of the time; that someone in a missile silo went nuts, or got control of a nuclear submarine and launched a missile.
And of course, if that ever happened, MAD would make a terrible incident even worse. Instead of one nuclear weapon killing millions, the retaliation would kill literally billions. Perhaps all humanity would die.
And then finally the Soviet Union collapsed, and everyone's fear of that one lunatic able to overcome the system and launch a nuke, or just steal one subsided. But it probably shouldn't have, because various idiots in the Soviet Union decided the best way to make a little spare cash was by selling nukes out the back door to anyone who would buy them.
But the US breathed a sigh of relief, content to be the only superpower left in the world.
It's a MAD, MAD world.
And now, though most haven't noticed, MAD is returning in a new, even more dangerous form. It's not going at full speed yet, but we are almost there.
Now we are told that both Iran and Korea is developing nuclear technology, and a substantial portion of the population thinks dealing with Iran with massive force is a good idea. And even as this problem unfolds, we have another as Pakistan finds its constitution suspended, another country with nuclear weapons which may become unfriendly.
While the headlines have been talking about these three countries, how many others are developing nuclear weapons? Let's forget the headlines. If you were a developing country, and you didn't have nuclear weapons, would you want them?
The new game of MAD involves a new sort of deviant psychology. In the old one both powers had nuclear weapons, each presuming the other wouldn't be so stupid as to attack. The new form makes the old seem positively sane. After all, once you have a half dozen different small countries entering the mix, the odds of one of them being too stupid to realize that they are not actually supposed to use the weapons increases geometrically.
Meanwhile, we scurry about trying to make certain that only people we like have nuclear technology, and the way that we do this guarantees that whoever finally gets them will view us as some sort of ogre. So our means of preventing problems is one that might help our security for a year or two, but is almost guaranteed to eventually lead to disaster.
Recently when discussing Iran, I've listened to people say, "We'll surely if they are responsible they will allow us to let us into their country to look for weapons."
We sent inspectors into Iraq. We were even guaranteed the existence of WMD's. If Iraq teaches the world anything, it's that we are not to be trusted. We will look into all the dark corners of the earth and see weapons of mass destruction, even when they do not really exist. The rest of the world has become quite aware of our paranoia.
Every time that we act against any one of the smaller developing countries, we make every other country developing it's own weapons nervous as well. In a sense, it becomes their best interest to see it to that we don't act against other countries developing nuclear capability.
It has always been easier to destroy, then to create. And strangely, our own increasing technology coupled with the same fears which we have always had, encourage us to make war. In the early 1900s we were secure that anyone who wished to make war on us had to sail across the ocean. Today, weapons of war are not so limited.
And so, we watch as they build factories and make assumptions about what they are for. And if it might be used against us, some of us want to lash out with violence. The simple existence of a weapon is enough to create the desire for war. How fortunate we were to develop them first.
Our feeling of insecurity creates in us the desire to do evil. And whether we were right to fear them or not, inevitably war must result from a world view that is based on fear.
As our technology increases, we need to move beyond the thinking of yesterday which permanently put us at one another's throats. The neoconservative philosophy which has motivated recent policies is as incapable of looking ahead as it is to remember our history, reacting to each crisis of the moment and shrilly announcing that every new threat must be crushed underfoot.
This new era of development doesn't need to be tragic. We can increase our powers, feed more people with less land, revolutionize medicine. But for the era of nuclear proliferation to be a positive one, we must stop simply looking at what is around us, and look ahead of us.
Technology cannot be neatly packaged into that which can be used offensively, and that which cannot. Any nation which develops industrially will ultimately be capable of building missiles and placing warheads on them. We can try to keep our foot on the throat of the developing world and ensure that they hate us, and perhaps put off the inevitable for a few short years.
Or we can back away and allow the hatred we have recently fostered to begin to die out. Perhaps in time we can build new positive relationships, and when the rest of the world has caught up with our industry we will not find the world such a frightening place.
