A few ideas in support of national survival

Mark Helprin’s article in today’s Wall Street Journal is an important one.  If you can gain access to it and you’re concerned at all about world peace and the future of the United States, I commend it to your attention:

“America’s Alarmingly Archaic Arsenal: The U.S. nuclear deterrent has kept the peace for years. If it withers, it will keep the peace no longer.”

I think, for example, that this is a significant point:

“Believers in total nuclear abolition fail to recognize that if they are successful, covert possession of just a score of warheads could mean world mastery.”

Also this:

“They seem as well not to grasp that whereas numerical reduction from tens of thousands of warheads would reduce the chances of accident, below a certain point it would tempt an aggressor by elevating the potential of a successful first strike.  Nor do they allow that Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran — which have through their conduct of war and in suppressing their populations callously sacrificed more than 100 million of their people — subscribe to permissive nuclear doctrines and thresholds radically different from our own. . . .   [S]hort of abject surrender the sole means of preventing nuclear war is maintaining the potential to inflict unacceptable damage upon an enemy and/or shield one’s country from such damage.”

Helprin proceeds, with grim detail, to sketch “a long-developing peril that . . . day by day strengthens the chances of Armageddon or capitulation.”  “The nuclear problem,” he writes, “has no adequate superlatives.  As great as all other concerns may be, they must yield to it.  For the force to be confronted is the breaker of nations and the destroyer of worlds.”

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In its sphere, this article by George Will treats a subject that is almost equally crucial to our nation’s future.  I recommend it, as well.  And, since it’s in the Deseret News, I know that it’s accessible:

“After the tax overhaul, America needs a balanced-budget amendment more than ever”

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And this article, also easily read in the Deseret News, is also a very important contribution to the discussion of an issue that has been much in the news over recent years:

“Consumer choice and provider competition are keys to lower medical costs”