Nukes = Peace

As Bush bangs the drum about Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon, I've wondered again and again just why nuclear proliferation is really such a bad thing. After all, only the first country to develop nukes ever used them in combat.

Inevitably, scholars have posed the same question, and it turns out that some political scientsts argue that the spread of nuclear weapons actually makes the world safer, not more dangerous. It's a counterintuitive idea - even a "perverse" one, according to a critic of it - but it's also compelling and pretty well borne out by the empirical data of the US-USSR Cold War, the India-Pakistan standoff, and the USSR-China stalemate. So let the mullahs achieve fission! We'll all be better off.

(I found this article via the Chronicle of Higher Education's amazing and compendious Arts & Letters Daily - a sort of high-brow Boing Boing.)