Saturday, April 28, 2007
They call him crazy...
...but he makes a lot of sense to me.
How things have changed! Not many years ago, no Democrat could have gotten near the nomination without first endorsing a "no first use" policy regarding nuclear weapons. Now, Mike Gravel is the only one taking that position. And people are calling him nuts.
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3 comments:
Wow, very impressive.
I think he'd do better, however, as former Senator GRAvel. graVEL sounds so... French.
I hope he gains some traction. It could shift the whole debate, even if he doesn't win.
Omigod! Are you saying Dennis Kucinich withdrew? Say it ain't so, Joe!
sofla said...
I'm not sure when this supposed period of a policy of 'no first use' of nukes applied to Democratic presidential candidates. I think never, because I've never heard a Democratic presidential top-tier contender say such a thing. Not that such a policy of 'first use' was necessarily fully articulated, but that it was always there, unstated, without any contradictory positions being taken by anyone.
For we have never articulated such a doctrine of no first use, and in fact, throughout the Cold War, our policy explicitly envisioned (even if it was not loudly discussed in public!) that in the event of a massive Soviet overrun of NATO front lines, by a superiority of conventional forces, we would initiate the use of nuclear devices in the form of battlefield tactical nukes. This would have been as true under a President Dukakis or Mondale as it was under Presidents Reagan and Bush 41. It was our official doctrine.
In fact, it was under Carter's presidency that we began to develop and/or deploy all of our 'first strike capable' hyper-accurate weaponry, and they were acknowledged as such, from the MX missile to the Pershing IIs to the Trident D-5s and submarine launched cruise missiles, etc.
It was only late in Clinton's second term that he ordered an explicit no 'launch on warning' policy, to great howls of dismay, even though if we'd had such a policy and always followed it, the world would have already been incinerated in a large scale exchange with the Soviet Union several times in the past.
What is new these days is the threat to use nukes first on non-nuclear powers who are relatively impotent to do anything to us, in a 'preventative' manner which violates the General Charter of the UN, the Nuremburg principles and precedents, and the essence of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
If that is what you've referred to, I apologize for this demurral. But I thought it important to point out that this country has long had a policy of first use of nukes, without significant (or any) dissent from Democratic foreign policy elites.
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