The Obama administration has said that its goal is a world without nuclear weapons — a goal repeated recently by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a speech about Iran’s aggressive pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Considering the huge destructive potential of nukes, it is understandable why a person might long for nuclear weapons not to exist at all. But that is not facing reality.
The “genie cannot be put back in the bottle,” and the technology to build nuclear weapons cannot just disappear.
It is also useless to hope that the U.N. or any other international body can monitor the nations of the world well enough to ensure all nuclear weapons will be dismantled and new ones will not be built.
Think of the heavy scrutiny that Communist North Korea has been under because of concerns about its nuclear intentions. Despite intense opposition from the watchful “international community,” North Korea has built nukes anyway. Demands for “inspections” couldn’t stop that.
But as bad as that is, imagine how much worse it would be if a belligerent nation or a terrorist group had nuclear weapons and the United States had no nukes as a deterrent against any serious national or terrorist threats.
Nuclear weapons are a fact of our modern world. Disarming the United States in the vain and foolish hope that we could ensure other countries would abandon nukes would be very unrealistic and very dangerous.