Attack of the Nuclear 'Softball'

In his speech at Cincinnati on October 7, President George W. Bush, seeking to rally support for his authorization to launch a military invasion of Iraq, portrayed the threat posed by the Iraqi regime in lurid terms.

The Iraqis, he asserted, possess dreaded chemical and biological "weapons of mass destruction," and they seek to develop a nuclear weapon. "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball," the president warned, "it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." And then? "Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America."

Bush urged that "we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Reiterating that Saddam can "develop a nuclear weapon to blackmail the world," the president opined that "the situation could hardly get worse" and therefore that the United States must eliminate the grave Iraqi threat before it comes to fruition.

This view of the world is so grotesquely out of proportion, so preposterously hyperbolic, that one scarcely knows what to make of it. The president, along with all those who find his presentation compelling, seems to have forgotten everything about the long Cold War, and he seems oblivious to nearly everything about the current world situation.

For some forty years, the United States lived under constant threat of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. For those who have forgotten, the Soviet regime was not composed of poets and flower peddlers. If Saddam Hussein is, as the president insists, "a ruthless and aggressive dictator," what was Joseph Stalin? What was Leonid Brezhnev?

Nor did the rulers of the USSR play single-softball with respect to nuclear warheads. By the mid-1980s, the Soviet arsenal contained more than 10,000 strategic nuclear warheads and some 30,000 nonstrategic nuclear warheads. Unlike Iraq, which has no capability to deliver a nuclear weapon at long range, the USSR had more than 6,000 nuclear warheads mounted on more than a thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles, most of them programmed to strike targets in the United States within half an hour of launch. In addition, thousands of submarine-launched nuclear weapons and more than a thousand nuclear bombs carried by long-range jet aircraft augmented the Soviet threat.

Yet, notwithstanding the tens of thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads and their sophisticated delivery vehicles kept in constant readiness, the United States was not "blackmailed" by the USSR. Odd that now the United States should quake at the prospect of a single Iraqi softball of fissionable material.

The United States itself, of course, created an awesome nuclear arsenal (not to speak of its vast stocks of chemical and biological weapons). Even today, after substantial post-Cold War cutbacks, the U.S. nuclear arsenal contains more than 3,000 strategic nuclear warheads and thousands of nonstrategic nuclear weapons. Given that the United States is the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons in warfare, its willingness to use such weapons cannot be doubted.

Whereas Saddam Hussein has never threatened to use nuclear weapons against the United States, the United States has threatened to use such weapons against Iraq, most notably when President George H. W. Bush sent a letter to Saddam Hussein in January 1991, warning him against using chemical or biological weapons to fight the U.S. and other forces about to attack Iraq, and not so subtly suggesting that nuclear retaliation might ensue if he did.

The Iraqi dictator was deterred in 1991; he can be deterred just as well in 2002 or any future year. He understands fully that any use of weapons of mass destruction--suitcase nukes, deadly germs, nerve gas, or anything else--by him or any agent of his against the United States will elicit his immediate destruction, most likely by means of U.S. nuclear retaliation. Nothing in his history suggests that he is suicidal; on the contrary, he works extraordinarily hard at personal survival.