Since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade and a half ago, nuclear weaponry has been mostly relegated to back pages and mental back burners in the United States. A big media uproar about nuclear weapons is apt to happen only when the man in the Oval Office has chosen to make an issue of them.
Sometimes a “nuclear threat” has been imaginary. During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration went into rhetorical overdrive — fabricating evidence and warning that an ostensible smoking gun could turn into a mushroom cloud. The White House publicly obsessed about an Iraqi nuclear-weapons program that didn’t exist.
In sharp contrast, North Korea really seems to have a nuclear warhead or two. And because the Pyongyang regime is apparently nuclear-armed, Bush isn’t likely to order an attack on that country, as he did against Iraq and as he has been not-too-subtly threatening to do against Iran.
By all credible accounts, Tehran is at least several years — and probably more like a full decade — away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. But America’s top officials and leading pundits have been sounding urgent alarms…
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