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Entry: Killing Women and Children First Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/killing_women_and_children_first#34289 Post contents: An excellent piece, though some of it is antiquated--we do not build "city buster" bombs, and have not done so for a very long while. In fact, we build no nuclear weapons at all today, and there is a very real possibility that withing ten years we will have lost the technical know-how to reliably do so without atmospheric testing. We retain fewer nuclear arms now than we have in decades, and the number continues to decline. Moreover, despite the rhetoric of certain political figures, we do not maintain "hair trigger" alert--we've been off continuous air alert for close to twenty years, and our bombers do not go on "fail safe" missions in which a special code has to be issued to <i>prevent</i> attack, as was the case for many years during the Cold War. I could go on, but my point is that contrary to the impression an uninformed person might glean from your article, the situation as it stands today is really very different than it was during the Cold War. The main point, really, is that the direction that we have been trying to move in for some years is precisely toward the development of much smaller, less lethal weapons that can be targeted at discreet facilities without being forced to hold entire populations under threat. It is actually leftist politicians who have led the charge to prevent such a development, under the theory that as long as our choices remain either armageddon or peace, we're less likely to choose armageddon. (Having studied nuclear strategy as a graduate student, I'm finding it astounding how little people understand the actual dynamics of this debate, and how many people believe that threatening cities rather than military facilities is some kind of right-wing fixation, when the reality has been something rather different. The Nuclear Posture Review might be the poorly understood document to be punblished by any Presidential administration in my lifetime.) Sent at: 2008 12 01