Iran.

Having learned from the Israeli destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, the Iranians have taken the step of locating most of their facilities well beneath the surface. Further, they've located many of them beneth civilian centers.

The Israelis (military) remain convinced that they can take out these facilities with conventional weapons, but the US has been working for several years to conduct conventional tests to simulate the effect of a low yield nuclear weapon on geological formations similiar to the conditions at Iranian facilities.

The name of this program is Divine Strake, officaly it has been cancelled due to intense public opposition in Nevada, and later in Indiana when news leaked of an intended test in that state.  In the latter case, the test was to occur in a limestone quarry in the southern part of the state.  Although the test consisted of multiple tons of conventional high yield explosives, the  yield being appromiately 0.5 kiloton, roughly in the same range as nuclear artillery deployed by the US in Europe during the Cold War. (It may have taken the Soviets 15 minutes to take Berlin, but a nuclear counterforce option could have annihlated a Soviet tank division crossing through the Fulda Gap.)

The point of nuclear weapons is that by raising the stakes of conflict to unacceptable levels, they help ensure peace.  That's MAD doctrine, mutually assured destruction, however a second doctrine called NUTs, nuclear utilization theory (no I am not making this up), argues for the development of subkiliton weapons to fill the gap between the blockbusters of the Second World War and Thermonuclear Armageddeon.

Would you like to play a game? (Y/N)  

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

ブッシュ大統領によると
イランはひどいそうです。
- According to president Bush, Iran is terrifying.

Surely, I can not tell what classmates were thinking, but relative silence felt like I was the first to come up with a negative (= unreasonable to believe) example. Someone later gave a sentence about UFO stories on the internet.

Yet, this is what "infallible" TV channels have to broadcast often.

(It helped me that the words for "president", "terrifying" and even "Iran" somehow came up in the material for that class.)

The first strike doctrine gave us the Cuban Missile Crisis. MAD (which is a retaliation doctrine) gave us more stability.

And we're still only eight years in. There's still plenty of time to beat last century's record.

Language.

MfM, you sound like me thirty years ago.

Sorry if that sounds patronizing, but there it is.
Your entire analysis could have come from a neocon geostrategic briefing paper. You make their most passionately held point--we need the Empire to manage the unruly nations, and the choice is ours or "theirs"--"them" being anyone else who might assert power.

The Generals speak the language of "military" think, in which the basic assumption is that diplomacy is powerless. Perhaps this blindness is caused by the fact that by the time the military option is exercised, the diplomatic one HAS failed. But, in general, (!!) there are few groups with less useful, more dangerous qualifications to make policy than the generals. Read my diary in which I remember Dr. Hansen, who wanted to nuke Red China as a humanitarian obligation.

http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2007/9/8/53024/82110

His logic was a lot like the logic that emerges above, and he was wrong. Had diplomacy failed, (or been absent from the discussion) he might have been proven right.

That said, you may well be right this time--and for the same reason. This sort of blindness creates a situation in which the game played becomes a very special type of game- a negative sum game in which if one player initiates the game, all must play. Think arms race.

This whole discussion deletes that most central human ability-to talk it over and find compromise, common ground, or at least a non-fatal strategy. The US today?

John Bolton:
"I don't do carrots."

More than once I have pointed out that because of this, and the loss of the Empire's other sources of power, the US is in danger of breaking the nuclear taboo.

As a grad student, I found myself traveling ever deeper into the land of the expert, which predisposes "expert think". When I discovered that I was becoming an expert, and therefore losing a broader picture, my education began a different path. I'm grateful for that discovery.
Good (or at least functional) policy is the province of generalists. Policy makers employ experts, and hopefully know when to gently put them back in their box. With luck, someone will be smart enough to put these guys away.

Eisenhower was the exception in the world of the military- he held onto the broader view. I don't know how, but it's a good thing.
 

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.

All the old levers of power have pretty much broken off in their hands.

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.