State Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway, Bigelow and a more distant galaxy went on Facebook over the weekend and called for our country to wage limited nuclear war against ISIS.
I’m with him. I’m for it.
Limited nuclear war, that is, especially against those barbarians.
Who knew we could do limited nuclear war?
Rapert stresses that he’s talking about a small nuclear device that wouldn’t affect anybody other than the bad guys we’d be aiming at. He calls it a strategic attack, though I think he means tactical.
When you think about it, the main problem most of us have had with nuclear war was that it was not limited. The complication was always what got called mutually assured destruction.
We didn’t actually produce nuclear weapons for the purpose of using them. We produced them to keep the Soviets from getting away with using theirs. And vice versa. You see.
But this Rapert notion is different. One-sided destruction of our evil enemies in a narrowly contained nuclear incident? Now we’re talking.
As I understand the fiddling Arkansas legislator’s global plan for targeted thermonuclear incineration, it would proceed as follows:
• We would fire a relatively small-caliber nuclear bomb, which exists, into a strictly limited and isolated area—a house, maybe—filled exclusively with ISIS people. We’d wipe out those evil creeps.
• There would be no wider spread of radioactive material posing an imminent or longer-term public health threat to innocent bystanders or the regional ecosystem.
• Nobody in that region of the world would be bothered by our doing that. No impressionable youth in that area, already brainwashed with religious zealotry, would be driven to new heights of violent extremism by anger over the horrific way the distant empire had killed local men.
• Russia and China would be fine with our limited act of human incineration. Russia, which reportedly has more of these small-caliber nuclear warheads in storage than do we, would not make such weapons available for our enemies in the Middle East. In fact, the world would react as meekly as the world reacted after Hiroshima and Nagasaki—as if, that is, nobody but us had such powerful weaponry.
• Our European allies would not object to our violating nuclear nonproliferation treaties and irritating an already unstable region of the world closer to them, and a far greater direct threat to them, than to us.
Of course there is the possibility that all of those bulleted items actually are problems.
In fact, they all are.
ISIS operatives don’t all hang out in a single small and confined place.
Radiation seeps into the soil and out of the exploded pieces.
And the world would almost assuredly react in horror, whether real or feigned and whether for religious or propaganda or security reasons.
America would be an outlaw, a violator of treaties it had signed, and thus no longer credible enough to be deemed worthy of the trust that is vital to important defense alliances.
Arms-control specialists have argued for years that we should get rid of these small tactical nuclear devices because they actually pose a greater risk to nuclear escalation—the thing we’ve long tried to contain—than large ones.
They can be stolen. Firing one could cause the aggrieved party to fire in kind in retaliation. We could end up with more actual nuclear warfare than if somebody dropped a big one.
So it may be that the frequent idle cry to “nuke ’em” is just that: a frequent idle cry.
Some things are easy to say on life’s playground.
It may be that Rapert is no more on target in this latest grandstand stunt than in his last.
Remember that he labeled as possibly treasonous our bringing a brave American doctor suffering from the Ebola illness to the Emory University hospital in Atlanta, where he got well and infected no one.
What I suspect happened in the latest instance is that Rapert could no longer abide his low profile in the current legislative session, during which I’ve actually referred to him as a relative moderate in the new Arkansas legislative order.
We can now stipulate that “relative moderate” is no longer an operative phrase for the senator. His original bona fides are fully restored.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.