The Left Coaster: Draft U.S. paper allows commanders to seek preemptive nuke strikes

It seems to me that as long as we have an irrational fear of WMDs we will be subject to irrational response to their threat. While it is true that a place like Halabja suffered horrible destruction from a chemical weapons attack, that attack was a sustained one involving several hours and multiple sorties. In that instance, the chemical weapons were dropped all through the night. Can we really imagine a terrorist force or a hostile country bombing us from the domestic skies with impunity? Moreover, with as much dread as there is about chemical/biological weapons, do we really have a notion about how to defend ourselves against them? Can the average American even name the three most deadly chemical weapons and how to tell if they have suffered exposure?

No, and the reason may be that the threat simply all that real. Our military knows that chemical/biological weapons are not all that deadly relative to other conventional weapons in modern warfare. For instance, it takes over a ton of very expensive weaponized nerve agent to cause a single casualty because it is so easily dispersed into the air. Most of the threat of biological warfare are purely theoretical. Although, biological warfare has been around since the middle ages when dead lifestock were placed in the water supply of seiged villages, diseased corpsed were catapulted into fortresses, or even in the American West when blankets infected with smallpox were distributed to Apache tribes. The reason that this type of warfare is rare is unfortunately not that it is morally repugnant, but rather it has never proven very decisive.

The only real WMD it seems are nuclear weapons. A tremendous debate was carried on for decades with voices like Einstein, Sakharov, and many others stating firmly that the use of such weapons is inhumane and irresponsible. No matter what the yield ratio, no matter what the context or justification, maintaining a first strike option with our accrued knowledge of what thermonuclear warfare represents is repugnant. Such a pursuit debases our humanity and mocks the integrity of those who may still think of us as civilized.

If facts are ever allowed to seep into the highly-charged, emotive matrix of the media, we will maybe begin to wean ourselves from irrationalism and begin practicing sound threat/response scenarios, but not as long as raw fear is the mother's milk our government gives the feeble minded mainstream.

Now, when I say feeble minded mainstream, I of course do not mean you. You are brilliant and eclectic.