Monday, November 13, 2017

Preserving Nuclear Deterrence

The US developed the atomic bomb and used it in 1945.  A few years later, the Soviet Union developed and tested their own atomic bomb. In the cold war from 1945 to 1989 the deterrent to using the atomic bomb was “Assured Mutual Destruction”. This only works with countries who conform to this concept. When rogue governments want to develop their own nuclear weapons and threaten other countries like Iran threatens Israel and the US and North Korea threatens the US and its neighbors, we must act to prevent them from getting these nuclear weapons.  We have already learned that when countries turn rogue, like Hitler’s Germany, we are warned not to let these rogue countries succeed.

 

In these cases, sanctions make more sense than war, so we have tried sanctions, but our sanctions haven’t worked. Sanctions need to be designed to produce overkill on these rogue governments. This requires isolating them to ensure that they won’t have the money or components to build these nuclear weapons. If we are going to impose severe economic sanctions that will impact their civilian population, we need to arrange for the creation of refugee camps in neighboring countries ahead of time. It makes sense for these refugee camps to allow these refugees to provide for themselves as much as possible. Ideally, they would be hired to do public works in these host countries or grow their own food.

 

If we need to use military force on Iran or North Korea, it should be modeled after the 1990 Gulf War with lots of air strikes and few casualties, with conventional weapons hitting military and government targets, while avoiding civilian areas. China would need to be the host country for these refugees and should communicate their plan to do this. That alone should make North Korea to close its nuclear weapons program.

 


Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

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