he debate over the Bush administration's Nuclear Posture Review has been hysterical even by the usual standards of any discussion involving the word "nuclear." The classified review was leaked on the eve of Dick Cheney's Middle East trip, in an obvious bid to embarrass the administration and wrong-foot it as it attempted to build international support for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. The press has been distinctly incurious about the source of the leak, eager to pound the administration for, in the words of the New York Times, wanting to make America "a nuclear rogue."The label is rank moral equivalence of the sort that had not been heard much since the end of the Cold War. Which, in case you missed it, has been over for more than a decade. The administration's review takes account of this historic fact by contemplating a nuclear force cut by two-thirds and oriented less toward a Russian threat and more toward the one arising from rogue states. This means, as Richard Lowry pointed out in our last issue ("The Nukes We Need"), developing a new nuclear weapon designed not to destroy Moscow, but the deep bunkers — invulnerable to conventional weapons — that rogue states use to house command-and-control functions and weapons of mass destruction.
Targeting those installations doesn't make nuclear war more likely, as the Times would have it ("menacing to the security of future American generations"). Instead, it makes it less likely by potentially deterring rogue states from developing and using mass-destruction weapons (or, in an extreme circumstance, making it possible for us to preempt their use). This is Deterrence 101. The Times and other liberals liked it when it was called MAD. It is mystifying why they would now find targeting rogue-state weapons sites so problematic, when they were happy to target entire Russian cities during the Cold War.
Behind much of the criticism of the administration is the arms-control theory that if the U.S. sets an example by eschewing certain weapons and practices, then the rest of the world will follow. Would that it were so easy. The high-profile targets of the Nuclear Posture Review — Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — are all already signatories of the vaunted Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. They just aren't serious about abiding by it. This fact, inconvenient though it may be, cannot simply be ignored. And here is where the example of the U.S. is truly important. The U.S. can shape the international environment by forthrightly declaring certain practices unacceptable, and making it clear that it will prevent and punish them — with any weapon that may be necessary to the task.
This doesn't mean that the U.S. is joining the ranks of the rogues, but instead that it's finally serious about controlling them.