News about a “diplomatic” exchange between the US and Russia over an anti-missile system in Europe and Iran’s pursuit of WMDs underscores how little we really know about the threat of nuclear war.
The “we” includes not only those who have watched a half century of posturing on the subject from the outside but, in large measure, the generations of leaders who have been acting as if they knew what they were doing.
From today’s leak, we learn that President Obama sent a “hand-delivered” letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev three weeks ago saying “the United States would not need to proceed with the interceptor system, which has been vehemently opposed by Russia since it was proposed by the Bush administration, if Iran halted any efforts to build nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles.”
This was quickly followed by a Drudge Report banner, “Russia Brushes Off Obama: No “Haggling,'” over a picture of Vladimir Putin with a macho wink.
Under all that non-news seems to be the simple fact that Obama has indicated he is willing to talk about trading off the deployment of a missile system of unknown reliability for a Russian effort of uncertain effectiveness to slow down an Iranian pursuit of weapons, the status of which is not at all clear.
At the height of the Cold War, when JFK was pursuing a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, he urged Americans not to leave the debate to “experts,” since the survival of the human race was at stake.