Just Business

With all the goings on about loose nukes, time again to think about the unthinkable. In my case this leads to a question: Why don’t we just buy the damnable things C.O.D. from people (countries) who have them? How much? Maybe $10 million; maybe $100 million. Are we talking wholesale or retail? We’ve established who we are; now it’s just business.

Doing what we do best. Like they say, the business of America is business. All credit to the trigger-pullers on the ground and the master tacticians who GPSified and computerized the blitzkrieg. The strategists above them, however, are businessmen, arguably good at it. Yet they’ve eschewed a business approach, which has worked to keep the aspirations of those in a large and oil-rich area in check fairly well for a century or so…this time around. This time they turned to muscle.

Now people are dealing nuclear materiel on the open market, looking for a little more muscle themselves. Nuke pieces have become a commodity, like silver or soybeans…or hand grenades at a Baghdad arms’ bazaar.

I like business. Compared to war, pestilence, famine, homelessness and disease, it’s often cruel but less prone to real pain in the literal sense. Playing with money for keeps is better than playing with swords for keeps. And nukes are way further from swords than swords are from plowshares. Farther, too. Fifty megatons set off in Manhattan, as I recall it, and that copy of the Times you’re sitting 80 miles away reading on the deck in Litchfield, Conn., would burst into flames in your hands.

America gets to choose how to appear to the World these days. Tough or clever, honest or crooked, fair but tough, a sharp businessman, flinty-eyed and steely-nerved, or a tough thug.

So let’s support a program to buy nukes from other countries! Be bankers not muscle! Encourage others to play business with us. Negotiate. That’s really what it’s about, isn’t it? Everyone using leverage to make a deal?

Now, in all fairness, the money involved would be substantial. It would probably dwarf the Iraq bill, the deficit, the debt, etc. etc.

It would cost way more than flying people to Mars (and back) and is about as likely to be a permanent solution as whatever Pro baseball decides to do about steroid abuse.

But we could give anyone turning over a nuke a loan, a mortgage, offer IPOs on the profits of companies taking apart the damned things in Texas, create derivatives like they are doing on the unemployment numbers, whatever. Certainly, clever American businessmen on Wall Street can figure something out.

Near as I can tell if the money is put out there these places will become markets, people will buy things. Affluence will lead to higher wages, more freedom, and slowly erode the huge labor cost disparity between the West and the rest. This in turn will make it competitive to keep jobs in the West. Eventually.

Yes, yes, it’s a radioactive variation on the wonderful old Marshall Plan. What was wonderful was that it loaned people American money to use to buy American products, so the tax money fueled wage growth and employment.

A way everyone wins something. Folks with the bombs get to sell them to us. We already have so many that a few more won’t make us significantly more dangerous.

Even if we don’t get them all, which it mightily behooves us to, just getting nukes off the street one at a time makes more sense, to me, than jumpstarting the economy with a Mars voyage or a new war on steroid use in baseball.

After all, every nuke bought is one less able to ever fall into the wrong hands, terrorist or not, turning them into an instant global power. And the thing about power; it lets folks do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. ¶ 12:45 PM