Versión Español
With the announcement that the Nobel Prize committee has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to ICAN (International Committee Against Nuclear Weapons), the showdown between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un looms large on the horizon. To listen to Beatrice Fihn, the head of the Australia based NGO network, one might presume that Donald Trump is the main threat to the world.
She notes, “The election of President Donald Trump has made a lot of people feel very uncomfortable with the fact that he alone can authorise the use of nuclear weapons…there are no right hands for nuclear weapons.”
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Interesting. So, the threat to world peace, really, is Donald Trump, and his access to nuclear weapons. It’s the United States which is the global menace, the global bully. Fihn apparently seems to have forgotten that the one time that nuclear weapons have been used in history, it was in an effort to save lives from a totalitarian Japanese government that had already enslaved half of Asia, and showed no signs of diminishing their aggression. The vast majority of historians agree that the use of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved hundreds of thousands, and more likely, millions of lives.
The Japanese army, air force, and navy, fanatically loyal to the Emperor, was prepared to fight to the death, and dig themselves into bunkers across Japan’s four main islands. An amphibious assault in Japan would have cost infinitely more lives, both Allied and Axis, than the estimated 129,000 casualties of the 1945 bombings.
Fihn and friends are hopelessly deluded idealists whose policies would be disastrous if ever implemented in the real world. They view the United States and North Korea as moral equals: both grievously in the moral wrong for possessing weapons capable of such vast destruction.
Just imagine for a moment, a world in which the current 9 nuclear super-powers destroy their nuclear weapons.
Is it really necessary to state the obvious here? Kim Jong-Un can not be trusted in the least. He is a totalitarian dictator, a megalomaniac, and a bald-faced liar. Does anyone, outside the ICAN organization, actually believe that Kim Jong-Un could be trusted to give up his nuclear weapons? It is a complete and total farce.
Yes, a world with no nuclear weapons sounds wonderfully idyllic. It sounds just about as practical as realizing a world without artillery or guns or tanks or knives.
Upright, law-abiding, moral people will observe such rules and regulations, leaving the degenerate, lawbreaking, immoral people and organizations to terrorize the rest of us.
Trump’s tweets have basically confirmed what has been a longstanding of presidents of both parties with regard to North Korean policy. Namely, that a North Korean attack on the United States, or our allies Japan or South Korea, would be met with a nuclear response, leveling the city of Pyongyang.
That may sound harsh or unjust to the snowflakes, but it is precisely what Obama, or George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton would have done as well.
We can have a discussion about whether or not it is prudent to discuss our geopolitical and military strategy on Twitter. I, like many, regularly find myself wishing that Trump would stay off social media and focus on the big picture. But Trump’s social media musings are not the main problem: the brutal totalitarian dictatorship of North Korea is.
The United States and North Korea are not moral equivalents. The United States and China are not moral equivalents. The Asian nuclear tandem runs governments featuring totalitarian Communism. While China presents a slightly more humane face to the world, they also share their next-door neighbors’ penchant for execution of political dissidents, forced labor concentration camps, and complete lack of political and social freedoms (despite the veneer of economic freedom that China has afforded its citizens in the last generation).
Suffice it to say…one would have to be a complete fool to conjure up a world where nations such as China and North Korea would accede to some type of “nuke free” world and then merely destroy their stockpiles.
This type of argument draws considerable parallels with the gun control argument. Sure…let’s restrict or completely rescind Second Amendment rights. Who would be left with heavy weaponry? Well…the North Koreas and Chinas of the world: the urban thugs, the street gangs, the corner drug dealers, the human traffickers: the very people who have no respect for the law, and make a living off of terrorizing hard-working, law-abiding citizens.
Imagining a world without nuclear weapons is as lofty and idyllic as imagining a world without violence itself. And just as impractical.
