Nukes and Consequences

Thinking about nuclear weapons is sort of like looking directly at the sun: If you do it for more than a split second, you go blind. Or insane.
Our government is now contemplating such a ne plus ultra of idiocy that it's enough to make one yearn for the dear, departed days of MAD (mutual assured destruction). MAD was such a sane policy.

We are about to get a new nuclear-weapons policy -- cute nukes. Teeny-tiny nukes. I was betting the Pentagon would name them ''precision nukes,'' but I have once again underestimated our military's ability to obfuscate with mind-numbing language. The cute nukes are ``offensive-strike systems.''

Now here's a sane sentence from the Pentagon's new Nuclear Posture Review: ''Non-nuclear strike capabilities may be particularly useful to limit collateral damage and conflict escalation.'' That means we won't wipe out entire populations and start WW III if we stick to non-nukes. A point to consider.

But our busy military planners like to plan for all contingencies (except terrorists with box-cutters) and are proposing ''a new generation of nuclear weapons'' -- just what we need. The cute nukes are to be ``employed against targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack (for example, deep underground bunkers or bio-weapons facilities).''