From 1978. Edited by P.J. O’Rourke. Recommended by DVM, seriously.
P.J. O’Rourke. “No-Nukes Turn Pro-Nuke.” The American Enterprise, April/May 2001, pp. 24-5.
The Republican humorist P.J. O’Rourke wants “to make you sick with fear at the prospect of an attack on America involving missiles armed with nuclear warheads.” He wants you to imagine yourself “in a pile of rubble, bleeding profusely.” He wants you to imagine hearing “[y]our spouse and children scream in agony” as they either “die…[or] waste away from hideous radiation sickness.”
O’Rourke then wants you to believe that such an apocalyptic nightmare enjoys support from “the ban the bomb bums, unilateral disarmament goonies, nuclear freeze sleaze, peace creeps and no-nukes kooks” who have “bragged about the horrors of atomic war” for decades, and who oppose the development of any American missile defense system. Such a system would eliminate these loathsome creatures’ political and cultural raison d’etre, don’t you know.
He equates sanity and respectability with this country’s support of nuclear weapons and of an expensive and unworkable defense against “rogue states—or rogue organizations, or just plain rogues[.]” He contends our roguish enemies can easily buy nuke-making information in “the free-market sunshine in which mankind has been basking” but doesn’t explain why they couldn’t just as easily buy, under that same sun, information for piercing any anti-nuke shield.
But never mind. Forget trying to abolish nuclear weapons. O’Rourke believes that with just enough money and stick-to-itiveness, America can instead develop a one hundred percent effective missile defense system, the first one hundred percent effective technological development in history.
March 25-26, 2001 (revised August 2, 2001)
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 