MAD: 21st century thoughts

I’m writing this from Seoul airport, which is somewhat disturbingly close to Pyongyang and its “dear leader” Kim Jong-il. The cold war is over in Europe and so it’s easy to forget the nuclear threat. Instead, we worry about (grossly overstated) terrorist risks to our day to day existence. I have long felt that the threat of Islamist terrorism is comparable to the daily threat of the cold war (which I’m just old enough to remember) is like comparing one sneeze to a base dose of hepatitis, yet there seem to be much more noise day to day about threats now than when the Soviets were aiming hydrogen bombs at all our population centres. (Discuss: 25 marks).

Anyway, being in reach of North Korea’s new nuclear capability and aware of the recent attempts by Iran to piss off the West by kidnapping sailors got my mind moving to nuclear proliferation. As it would. Upon minor jet lag driven consideration, I’m of the mind that we shouldn’t worry too much about it for most states, as most states fundamentally act rationally. So I’m not too worried about Iran developing a nuclear weapon; not least as I don’t see how they could deliver the thing to Manchester unintercepted. Rocket technology is much tougher than nuclear weapons and making nuclear weapons small enough to “deliver” is much tougher than making one so bulky that nothing could ever get it in the air.

If I were the president of Iran, I’d sure as shit want my own nuclear weapons. History would tell me that the USA government isn’t averse to invading countries it sees as a threat, even a rather spurious threat. Israel has nuclear weapons that point at me 24 hours a day and they have a record of a distinct lack of restraint in dealings with Arab neighbours. In other words, I’d want big bombs for defence (a much mis- and over-used word). If I had some nukes in the basement, I’d be rather more confident that the yanks weren’t about to roll tanks into my country as such a move would provoke immense retaliation. In other words, mutually assured destruction.

People of my age (37) were brought up with MAD as a faintly cosy concept that guaranteed peace. I was never totally sold on that but it made a certain amount of sense. Only when leaders can be 100% sure that their own lives and lives of their families with be practically destroyed are they reasonably certain not to invade other countries. I wonder if Bush would have been so determined to invade Iraq if he’d known that his twin daughters would probably die as a result? I doubt it.

So I think we should stop being hysterical. There are rogue states in the world (eg North Korea) but even a fairly superficial analysis of just about every other purported threat shows them to be repugnant, but rational. If they develop the bomb, so be it. Meanwhile, I hope that somebody’s trying really hard to do whatever’s necessary to protect the good people of South Korea and Japan from their genuinely crazy neighbour.