At the end of the Cold War, America's Strategic Air Command was disbanded, and the Former Soviet Union promised not to target their ICBMs at United States soil anymore. The whole world breathed a big sigh of relief: We wouldn't go up in a holocaust of H-bomb fireballs after all. Post-apocalypse movies could stay in the realm of entertainment or doomsday warning parable where they belonged, and not become factual prophesy.

Remember that early-'90s euphoria? Seems awfully "retro" now, doesn't it? Maybe even tragically naive? At this very moment, two-thirds of George W.'s original Axis of Evil continue to either a) eagerly work on building atomic bombs (North Korea), or b) refuse to prove that they aren't, amid repeated reports that they are (Iran). Diplomacy and economic pressure may yet succeed in halting the current trend toward the brink. But lots of folks in the U.S. and elsewhere rightly dread the dawn of a new type of nuclear age: the first rogue-state or terrorist mushroom cloud rising over a major city or carrier battle group in real life.

How can our National Command Authorities and the State Department effectively prepare for the worst, while still hoping for and striving for the best?

This Special Feature will cover the problem of new-age nukes in multiple parts, due to the breadth of the subject. Not included in the discussion, on purpose, are three peripheral topics which will be handled in the background:

1) Radiological "dirty bombs," including assaults on civilian power reactors and their waste storage pools, because other open sources have identified any such strike as physically damaging only locally, and hence largely a psychological weapon.

2) Weapons-grade material smuggled from ex-USSR stocks, since that well-known danger presents a different spectrum of intelligence, Special Forces, and diplomatic/economic counter-terror challenges than does an Axis of Evil Bomb.

3) Disaster recovery issues pertaining to homeland civil defense, given that the emphasis here is prevention of a disaster to begin with.

I firmly believe that history is an indivisible whole, an unbreakable continuum; no portion can be understood well in isolation from its surrounding context and its precursors. Guidance for the present and near future can and must be acquired by studying old events within living memory first: We and our friends and opponents are exactly where and who we are at this very moment because of where we've been and what we've done collectively in years and decades past.

What to do about New Age Nukes will therefore start with a needed retrospective. This will give us the proper framework from which to clearly address options and solutions. To make this opening retrospective more relevant for readers who like to always "lean forward," I'll list some issues that will be covered in future parts:

1. The modern meaning (if any) of non-proliferation and deterrence.

2. America's own emerging New Age Nukes -- policy and technology.

3. What nuclear blackmail really means, and how to cope with it.

4. Precedents for and consequences of pre-emption if pre-emption is required -- and acts of pre-emption as ways to set new precedents.

5. Targeting vulnerable links in the chain from laboratory development to weaponization to actual delivery.

6. Forward-deployed containment, and elimination (or proportional retaliation), in the network-centric, asymmetric global War on Terror.

7. Dealing with ambiguity, emotionalism, and politics on the home front, in the UN Security Council, and in other places.

8. How to be moral leaders in an increasingly polarized, amoral world.

To recap, a crisis facing America is that Iran and North Korea are sovereign national governments, with the apparent capability and intention to assemble and possibly use (or sell to terrorists) fission weapons, by relying on internal resources alone. The CIA suspects that North Korea already has one or two completed atom bombs. And in recent months -- and days -- new information from credible sources identified Iranian nuclear weapons labs whose entire existence wasn't even known by UN inspectors.

In contrast, the Cold War was a simple (though scary) time. The United States and the Soviet Union faced off around the globe. Most other nations were allies or satellites of one side or the other. Major decisions came from two centers of gravity: Moscow and Washington. Half the world mistrusted and hated the other half, and vice versa, but the two superpowers kept everyone else in line.

That past history has valuable lessons to offer. The Cold War nuclear stand-off between the U.S. and USSR was by no means static. It unfolded in distinct phases, from a brief U.S. monopoly on fission (uranium or plutonium) bombs that could yield around twenty kilotons, to a time of "nuclear scarcity" when both sides had bombs but not many of them, through an arms race toward "nuclear plenty," with massive arsenals of deliverable fusion (hydrogen) bombs whose yields could reach tens of megatons apiece. The resulting "overkill" potential, with mutual assured destruction (MAD) guaranteed several times over no matter who attacked first, made sure that in the end not a single weapon was used in an act of war. (The damage -- besides the humongous financial costs -- was done mostly to the environment and human health, through early open-air weapon tests and the side-effects of weapons manufacture. Of course another significant consequence was the heavy impact on peoples' peace of mind.)

That period of MAD was characterized by an ever increasing abstraction, even an over-intellectualizing, of both strategy and tactics. Since fighting a full-scale nuclear war became unthinkable, all policymakers could really do was think. So think, and analyze, and wargame, they did in deadly earnest. Even the unclassified treatises from that era, while highly informative, are very tough going to read and follow today. Tortuous conceptual debates on "counterforce" (enemy military) versus "countervalue" (enemy city) strikes, and on whether to push the button based on "launch on warning" (they seem to be fueling their missiles) versus "launch on attack" (their warheads are hitting our homeland) form part of that literature. The arguments sometimes got bitter -- not surprising given that the survival of civilization was at stake. Would detonating small-yield tactical nuclear weapons on a battlefield, in a time of nuclear plenty, lead to inevitable escalation to a global H-bomb exchange -- with the instant deaths of hundreds of millions, and a worldwide nuclear winter, and then the slow death of billions? To this day we don't really know if, say, the use of a few five-kiloton tactical nukes between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in Central Europe would have unavoidably led to wiping out the human race. The matter was quite controversial, and respected experts in the U.S. sometimes disagreed vehemently.

People outside of government or think tanks and the military expressed their views vocally, too. "Ban the bomb" rallies were common. It was said that all nuclear arms were abominations. (And maybe they were.) Partly in response to these public concerns, nonproliferation treaties were signed. Arms limitation talks were held. But the only ban that seemed to count applied to countries who didn't already have the bomb. And while superpower weapon inventories were gradually reduced, they still numbered in the thousands or tens of thousands in the U.S. and Soviet Union alone.

And then the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came down.

More than a decade later, we're left with two "legacy" clusters of beliefs from that time of nuclear plenty that, depending on whom you ask, either guide or mislead us now:

1. All nukes are by their very nature satanic; the use of a single one for any reason by anybody would be a crime against humanity; nuclear arms should be totally abolished from the planet.

2. Distinctions of weapon yield, whether a fraction of a kiloton or a hundred megatons, don't matter; how, when, where, and why an American nuke might be used are all irrelevant; a single nuclear bomb dropped in anger would light a powder keg, inevitably leading to uncontrollable escalation that would quickly wipe out the world.

But the War on Terror is dangerously different from the Cold War. Enemies exist who don't find mass slaughter of innocents, anywhere, the least bit abhorrent -- some of them are attracted to the idea. And since these enemies, for the foreseeable future, will suffer nuclear scarcity themselves, their thoughts and motivations, their goals and actions, and their strengths and weaknesses are vastly different from anything the U.S. has faced in fifty years.

The keystone to coping with New Age Nukes, I suggest, is for America's citizenry to first accept, with hard-eyed pragmatism, the baseline fact that revulsion at using a nuclear bomb on populated turf simply might not be part of our adversary's psyche. We're discussing a subject where "might" can get a bunch of people killed. Pandora's Box was opened in 1945, like it or not. To think that now we can set an example through "atomic abstinence" and expect the other side to follow our lead could end up as the cruelest self-delusion of our time.

To be continued ...

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com