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Fascinating article. And I agree entirely that the lesson for despots will be to have the nuke threat before menacing the USofA.

That said, I don't think it will work, not even for Iran, N. Korea, Brazil or other wanna-be world powers. Going nuclear requires inherent stability to sustain both the program to get there and infrasture, international prestige, and constancy in purpose to maintain it. Nukes for North Korea is a short term goal. Whatever long-term benefit it brings is beyond them. They will assume it will bring parity to the U.S. It won't, for the US, as this article notes, will not sit still. We are a dynamic, fluid force that adapts faster than our enemies can deploy.

The strategic and long term challenge for the United States is to manage this world of both asymetrical threat (aka, those who cannot face our conventional forces, or who avoid U.S. retaliation via amorphous, non-state structures), and nuclear parity. The question shall be what constitutes nuclear parity. One bomb? Ten? A hundred?

Would we have invaded Iraq were it nuclear? I say yes, for we would have brought our full might upon that threat. When it was removed, or nuetralized via retaliation, or threat thereof, we could move with the conventional war (which we have redefined, yet again, and less than a year past the last war... hell, the Iraqis have been fighting Somalia and Bosnia while we were fighting an entirely new war, constituted of old methods with new capacity).

We have a tremendous challenge in front of us, but it has been made infinitely simpler with the removal of Hussein.

America is defined by collective self-interest, the fountain of our genius. We will always prevail.

Southhack, your no. 31 in part answers my query, but not fully.

CT, JH2,thought you'd like to see this one.

"Going nuclear requires inherent stability to sustain both the program to get there and infrasture, international prestige, and constancy in purpose to maintain it."

The problem is that technology is going to continue to advance. Proliferation is going to continue. In fact, I predict that without external influence, rogue states will develop the capability to turn out WMD as easily as we turn out desktop computers today.

Thus while it may be possible for the US to stay ahead of the curve. We will have to be ever vigilant. And possibly excercise an ever increasing amount of control over such states.

I hate hate hate to quote Jimmy Carter. But there is some truth to his statement "We need to be building the kind of world we want to live in when we are not the biggest"

OK, Carter's a jerk for assuming that we will not be the biggest. But my concern is that biggest want matter. WMD will become so plentiful and easy to produce that size isn't going to matter much. Any country will be able to demolish any other county in a matter of a few seconds.

I'm all for missle defence systems, but I see them as possibly only a temporary stopgap.

We need to eliminate governments that would resort to the kind of savagery we've seen out of Saddam and NKorea's premier chia head.