"A world without nuclear weapons" is a horror story.

I like President Obama. I've heard him say a few things with which I've disagreed, generally rooted in a spiritual perspective that I can't realistically expect him to share; but he seems like a moral and thoughtful man, the kind of person God can lead, whether he recognizes it or not. I have some interpretive differences with him on the Constitution, and the fundamental role of government; but I've only ever heard him say one thing that I thought was just pure foolishness.

In a speech in Prague last April, President Obama stated his commitment to "seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons". That would seem to be a rather inoffensive sound-byte, a typical safe thing for a politician to say; and I sincerely hope that's all it was, because peace and security are the very last things we would get from a world without nuclear weapons.

We have experienced, since 1945, what may be the single most peaceful, stable era in human history, and it's precisely because of the atrocity embodied in nuclear weapons. Does anyone really believe that a Cold War without nukes would have stayed cold? Consider how close we still came, contemplating our extinction as a species, to going to war anyway. Without that looming horror to dissuade us, it would have been a practical certainty. It would have been a shorter war (let's hope), maybe a more decisive one; but America likely would have left her ascendancy behind on the Russian steppe, just like Napoleon or Hitler, along with a few million frozen corpses.

Or, consider how long we could have fought the Japanese if we hadn't horrified them into submission in 1945. Vietnam is our nation's current metaphor for insane Pyrrhic conflict; but imagine an enemy equally entrenched, equally zealous, and equally comfortable with suicidal guerrilla tactics, only with twice the population and three times the funding. And not trying to kill each other, too. It would have made Iraq look like Granada. (It was to be called Operation Downfall, read all about it; particularly the quote about a "fanatically hostile" indigenous population).

Then consider the broader implications. Buried in Japan through the end of the 1940s, it seems unlikely that the United States could have afforded the epic levels of foreign aid that constituted the Marshall Plan, rebuilding Western Europe and stifling Communist uprisings that were already brewing there. Seeing it all as prosperous and stable as it is today, it's hard to imagine what a desperate and precarious place Europe was in 1945, and how close it came to a disastrous experiment in Marxism.

The Soviet Union would then have succeeded where Hitler failed, creating a "Fortress Europe" and monopolizing the whole productive capacity of the continent; and the world would have spent 60 million lives to trade one insane dictatorship for an even stronger and more murderous one.

Often, similar "what-if" nightmare scenarios are concocted in books and film to illustrate the terrible consequences of nuclear war, and that's important; but it's also important to realize that war has always had terrible consequences, of which nuclear weapons are an indispensable reminder.

Since he gets quoted in fifteen-second sound clips and lacks the privilege of sitting down for a few hours and hammering out an essay, I can see why President Obama would stick to the socially-acceptable bumper-sticker rhetoric that "nuclear weapons are bad". Thankfully, in his actual policies, he seems to be much more nuanced. We don't need to be able to glass the entire planet three times over, and we don't need to piss off the Russians with a missile shield in Poland; 1,500 nuclear weapons is scary enough, and we need them pointed at actual 21st-century bad guys.

As long as this already is, I'll make a separate post on non-proliferation, which is the more philosophically interesting issue.