1. What Don Firth said, above, last night. / No first strike. Not unprecedented; but still un-American. / Albeit politically-incorrect to say so, and however ghoulishly: MAD works. Between US & USSR, it did prevent a WWWIII which was otherwise, absent the nukes, inevitable. Worth remembering this lonesome October, 40 years on.

2. Speaking of which, how would this updated JFK deterrent doctrine be, Don, Doug, & all other peaceloving 'Catters? "It shall be the policy of this government, to regard any attack using weapons of mass destruction, upon any nation or people anywhere, by Iraq, Iran, or North Korea, or by any entity proven supplied with such weapons or their components by any of the said countries, as an attack by such country upon the United States of America, requiring a retaliatory response as deemed appropriate by the United States, upon such attacking or supplying nation." / I got your MAD right here. / Hm? No?? Didn't think so. / Well, it was a thought.

3. The foregoing is not the celebrate the nukes, you understand. But re Hiroshima etc.: also worth remembering is that the Manhattan Project which produced the Bomb was instituted by Roosevelt at the behest of Einstein and others who, realizing that the physics now made it theoretically possible, *feared, rightly, that the Germans were working, or would work, on it*. If the Nazis had succeeded, we wouldn't be posting in English today; nor from the former UK at all, at all, with its radioactive half-life of ninety-nine years; and most certainly not expressing our opinions so freely. Fortunately, dumkopf Hitler apparently didn't grasp the implications well enough to adequately support a crash program; plus, he had made his best-and-brightest physicists refugees from the Holocaust. / None of which justifies our nuking Japan after Germany had surrendered & Nippon was beaten already. That, I suspect, was from an unholy combination of vengeance, showing off at Uncle Joe Stalin (who was so impressed he went out and stole it; smart move, Harry), and disappointment: "Waal shoot! Ah din't come awl this way jes' ta drap this thang in the drank! Whar's th' nearest target o' awp'rtoonity?" - Slim Pickens; "Dr. Strangelove". We didn't give a damn, we had the fiddle anyway.

3. Sadly, re science anyway, what we *can* be done, *will* be done. Despite all our sound protestations to the contrary. (Hopefully our genetically-"perfected" clones will remember us kindly. If at all.) Thus, the Bomb would come to be. Would that it could be disinvented. But no.

4. Re North Korea/Iraq - those of us who are rightly criticizing Dumya for intellectual inconsistency (HAHAHAHA! and now, let's critique the ostrich for his crappy flight patterns, the snake for lousy footwork...) ought to confess--I do--that we're also *glad* he's NOT suiting up for Pyongyang just yet. Hey, some diplomacy is better than none. And those NK missiles just *might* reach California. (And, my kid is there.)

--General Jack D. Pooker