Will the Middle East Go MAD?

[Geee]

American Spectator:

In Jules Verne's brilliant Journey from the Earth to the Moon, a group of old artillery officers meeting after the Civil War try to figure out what to do with their now outmoded skills. "There was hardly a full set of arms and legs left among them," writes Verne, but the romance of ballistics had not deserted them.

And so they settled on the idea of building a cannon big enough to fire a capsule to the moon. As a measure of how prescient Verne could be, he chose the east coast of Florida as the blast-off site, within a stone's throw of Cape Canaveral. You achieve the shortest arc to the moon there. Most memorable in the book's wonders, however, is this short line: "In their quietest moments, they all dreamed of building a weapon so big and terrifying that no one would ever dare use it -- and wars would at last come to an end."

Verne wrote all this in 1870. Radioactivity wasn't discovered until 1895 and it took another 50 years to fashion this energy into a bomb. But he was right.

Although "peace activists" are always talking about "ridding the world of nuclear weapons," the fact is those weapons have kept the peace for 60 years. The Cold War was undoubtedly the longest standoff in history where two sides went toe-to-toe, fingers on the trigger, but nobody ever fired the first shot. The reason was transparent -- both sides knew the result would be world catastrophe. The people lamenting the possibility of "nuclear winter" were right. They just didn't see the point. The vision of total destruction was what kept everyone's worst impulses at bay.
Now we're about to see a rerun of this whole scenario in the Middle East.