A pointless anti-nuclear gesture

The Obama administration is entering its final months, but it’s never too late to further diminish U.S. influence and discomfit our allies.

President Barack Obama is considering adopting a policy of “no first use,” i.e., declaring that the United States would never use nuclear weapons except after a nuclear attack on itself or its allies. From Obama’s perspective, this change would have the dual advantage of being something he can legitimately do on his own and representing a radical departure in the country’s nuclear doctrine.

For 70 years, presidents have maintained a posture of nuclear ambiguity. We wanted enemies to have to contemplate the possibility of a U.S. nuclear response to aggression. This added uncertainty and risk to potential attacks on us or our friends, in the hopes of deterring them in the first place.

For the advocates of no first use, the very fact that ambiguity has been our policy for so long is a reason to abandon it. They urge that we get beyond “Cold War thinking,” a favorite line of President Obama’s as well. The end of the Cold War indeed changed the strategic environment, but it didn’t make nuclear weapons obsolete, or render ageold concepts such as deterrence inoperative, or eliminate international conflict.

The paradox of nukes is that they are weapons of cataclysmic destructive force at the same time that they have proven to be a guarantee of peace. As the strategist Bernard Brodie wrote at the dawn of the nuclear age: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.” It is thanks in part to the advent of nuclear weapons that we have averted the total wars between great powers that made the first half of the 20th century a vast killing field.

Declaring no first use would kick away an element of our nuclear deterrent. Yes, we no longer have to worry about deterring a massive Soviet army facing west. But Vladimir Putin has already changed the borders of Europe through force, and there’s no reason to think he’s necessarily done. A RAND Corporation study says that Russian forces could reach the capitals of the Baltic States in less than 60 hours.

Why would we make Putin’s calculation any easier in considering such a move, or ease the minds of other potential aggressors such as China and North Korea?

Obviously the risks in resorting to nuclear weapons would be mind-boggling, but taking the possibility off the table serves no purpose. If we are going to have nuclear weapons, we should take advantage of their deterrent effect.

Relying entirely on conventional forces for deterrence would require more military spending and more forwarddeployed assets by us and our allies. Of course, the analysts and activists who argue for no first use tend to be the same ones who think we spend too much on defense. One of these things does not go along with the other.

Our allies are freaked out about the prospect of no first use. They have long relied on our nuclear umbrella, and if it is being pulled back, countries such as South Korea and Japan will need to reconsider their decisions to forswear nuclear weapons. This is why no first use would contradict President Obama’s opposition to nuclear proliferation, and make Global Zero — the disarmament movement’s goal of a world free of nuclear weapons — even more of a pipe dream.

In short, there is nothing to recommend no first use unless you are a lame-duck president heedless of strategic reality and looking to make a gesture of antinuclear righteousness. No first use would make the world, at the margins, a more dangerous place — and be a perfect parting shot for President Obama.

We expect to hear a lot of lies during an election year, and this year is no exception. What is surprising is how old some of these lies are, and how often they have been shown to be lies, years or even decades ago.

One of the oldest of these lies is that women are paid less than men for the same work. Like many other successful lies, it contains enough of the truth to fool the gullible.

Women as a group do get paid less than men as a group. But not for doing the same work. Women average fewer annual hours of work than men. They work continuously for fewer years than men, since only women get pregnant, and most women are not prepared to dump the baby on somebody else to raise.

Being a single mother can be a major restriction on how much time can be put into a job, either in a year or over the years.

People such as Hillary Clinton can simply grab a statistic about malefemale income differences and run with it, since her purpose is not truth but votes. The real question, however, is whether, or to what extent, those income differences are due to employers paying women and men different wages for doing the very same jobs, for the very same amount of time.

We do not need to guess about such things. Many studies have been done over many years — and they repeatedly show that women and men who work the very same hours in the very same jobs at the very same levels of skill and experience do not have the pay gaps that people such as Hillary Clinton loudly denounce.

As far back as 1971, single women in their 30s who had worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men of the same description. As far back as 1969, academic women who had never married earned more than academic men who had never married.

People who are looking for grievances are not going to be stopped by facts. But where are our pundits and academic scholars? Mostly silent, either out of fear of being denounced as anti-women or because they have chosen to take sides rather than convey facts.

Nevertheless, there are enough scholars — including female economists — who have done honest studies over the years that there is no excuse for continuing to repeat a discredited lie, based on comparing apples and oranges. A book written by two women and titled “Women’s Figures” shows the results when you compare women and men with comparable qualifications.

It is much the same story with black-white comparisons. More than 40 years ago, my own research turned up statistics on black and white professors who had Ph.D.s from equally high-ranked institutions in the same fields, and who had published the same number of articles.

When all these things were held constant, the black professors earned somewhat more than white professors. But, since all these things are not the same among black and white professors in general, there is a racial gap in pay that allows some to loudly denounce racial discrimination among academics.

Too many people in the media and in academia abandon their roles as conduits for facts and take on the role of filterers of facts to promote social and political agendas.

In all too many educational institutions, from kindergartens to postgraduate university programs, students may never hear any facts that contradict the prevailing groupthink. How many students taught by Keynesian economists will ever learn about the 1921 recession, when the Harding administration did nothing — and unemployment dropped steeply as the economy recovered on its own?

There are many reasons why old lies, refuted long ago, are still heard every election year, and in all too many other years.