MAD isn’t an intellectual policy, it’s simple fact - although it may take the form of Tit for Tat if we’re very lucky when the third malice aforethought nuke goes off, as it inevitably will.

Liberals crow about things like ‘proportional response’, which always results in endless deaths and battles. What a silly and dangerous and cavalier way of dealing with reality.

Liberals believe having a strong military PROVOKES enemies, and somehow cutting back on our strength will convince them of our good intentions and everyone will be throwing flowers at each other.

I can’t forget school daze. If I fought the bully, he’d keep punching. If I tried to reason with him, he kept punching. If he sensed that I was giving up, he’d punch harder.

ONce he knew I’d fight hard every time, I had his respect. He moved on to easier targets.

When we build, they build. When we cut back, they build.

Nothing changes. Human nature is what it is. Reagan was right. IF you want peace, build for war.

1. Inviting back the demented psycho-world of the MAD energumen, which is the rut public thinking inevitably runs in when the sizes of nuclear arsenals (or even just nuclear procurement programs) are compared.

The Bush administration has not done well at dominating public discussions with its take on issues.

It is perfectly clear to me (and no doubt thee) that, since the abolition of the ABM Treaty, our nuclear policy under Bush has been not MAD but unilateral, national-interest deterrence. We don’t deter nuclear-armed nations from launching on us by a calibrated capacity to counterstrike; we instead propose to defend ourselves against first strikes with a missile defense complex. Nor do we focus on the comparative size, throw-weight, etc of our and Russia’s (or anyone else’s) nuclear arsenals; we focus on what substantive threats there are that we may need to deter (or, in the last ditch, deal with directly). We then determine the size and capability of our nuclear arsenal.

But I’m not sure much of the general public realizes that. I would guess that millions of people don’t even realize that our policy today is NOT based on mutual deterrence. This is a highly spinnable topic, and the danger is great that the thinking behind our old MAD policy will reemerge, and seem like wisdom.

2. If you think the NYT or WaPo is going to sit still and let DIA be “right” about Russia’s and China’s nuclear programs and intentions, well, I bet you money you’re on the wrong track. It takes very little to manufacture an intelligence failure. We weren’t right about everything regarding the former USSR’s military programs and holdings, which DIA has more means than anyone on the planet to know, having done a 10-year post-analysis of our Cold War-era intelligence from 1991-2001.

The purpose of that review was to evaluate our analytical “keys” from the Cold War era, and see if they had been leading us to the right conclusions, based on what we found afterward in the mutual inspections period of STARTs I and II. The analytical “controlling” for post-Soviet program hiding wasn’t perfect, but DIA did determine that, although the Russians cleared out or hid some of their most esoteric and forward-leaning stuff, we could say with some certainty that there were things we had simply been wrong about. Not major things — more along the lines of less progress on one program, or more on another, than we had thought; or smaller or larger inventories than expected. Some of these things, in the context of the programs in question, represented differences that mattered from the assessments of the US IC. On the other hand, not a single one of these post-analytical differences indicated that our Cold War policies had been misdirected because we didn’t properly understand the character and intentions of the Soviet state.

What the media would have done with these conclusions is evident in the treatment of the analysis of Task Force B, which CTD correspondent Jon S. brought up a few weeks ago. It is not clear-cut today whether or how much in error Task Force B’s analyses were, but the media, enabled by academics, have treated them as though they were in obvious error. They have also been careful to leave the impression that these errors (of overestimation) drove a needlessly confrontational and antagonistic policy toward the Soviets — an impression that it takes a rather in-depth understanding of the matter to refute.

It will be extraordinarily easy to do this again, because the people are ignorant, nuclear strategy and “stuff” are confusing, and intelligence is imperfect on particulars, however perfect it may be on the general. Remember the “Missile Gap,” AND the triumphant counter-cry that “There WAS no Missile Gap”? All of it political gotcha BS; both slogans caricatures of fundamental reality — and both of them, “intelligence failures,” by the Iraqi WMD standard. Keep that in mind as this topic staggers forward.