Comments on "Nucular" Weapons End-All, Be-All of Foreign Policy?

It's only mutually assured destruction if the other side doesn't want to get annihilated by nukes either. The Soviets didn't want to be wiped out, so MAD worked. When you're dealing with regimes that are basically Shiite Death Cults (Iran) or that obviously don't give a fig about the condition of their population (NKorea), you can't count on MAD to prevent nukes from being popped off.

Also how is there MAD is when someone says we will nuke the shit out of Iran if they nuke Israel, and everyone goes "ooooh oooh! Too warmonger-y! Bad candidate bad candidate! Evil! She should be all peace talking like the other one and only HINT at any kind of violence because you know -- whatever you talk about it means you think about it and whatever you think about, the Universe makes it happen like it says in the Law of Attrraction! So please don't talk about what to do if diplomacy fails you are no different than evel Bush if you do!"

When are we going to ask Israel -- our favorite rogue nuclear state -- to disarm?

Probably when someone has definitive evidence they actually possess nuclear weapons.

(Not saying they don't, just saying they've never acknowledged they DO, and SFAIAAL, nobody has actually PROVEN they do.)

@1: also required for MAD is enough distance that a first strike can be responded to before it actually hits. If you're talking about neighbors (say, India-Pakistan or N. and S. Korea) it doesn't work.

Just make a big deal (real or not) about stationing our own nukes in neighboring countries. Their own people will not care for having , say, one hundred nukes pointed at them because their government has a wrong headed policy. Eventually, they will be forced to come to their senses without a shot fired.

iran's a shiite death cult? interesting.