It didn’t take long for US President Barack Hussein Obama to upstage the Nukeaphobes of the European Union, who are so frightened that they don’t even want a nuclear family, with his dramatic pronouncement he wants a world free of nuclear weapons. That’s good news for rogue elements who are planning on getting their hands on one and then will be the only ones who do. It’s a nice fairy tale, a nonnuclear world, but that atomic genie came out of the bottle with the Manhattan Project, and it’s not going back in no matter how wonderful a dream it seems. If Harry Truman believed that, World War II would still be going on and there’d be a million dead GIs in Japan. So while Obama, and the EU, who will undoubtedly support this grand idea, want nuclear powers to disarm, he says he’s going to use jawboning to convince Iran to give up its nuclear bomb programme, which it insists is designed for electricity. But when Iran gets a nuke, the man with his finger on the trigger will be its three-bricks-shy-of-a-load President Ahmadinejad, who wants to light up Tel Aviv, and not with light bulbs.

And the non-nuclear world won’t include North Korea, which has already launched a failed ballistic missile test which was designed so its leader Kim Jong-Il, who wears platform shoes and a bouffant hairstyle to look taller than his diminutive 5-3 (157 centimetre) lack of stature, and has been described by diplomats as a paranoid, cognacguzzling hypochondriac, can have a nuclear bomb too. It’s only fair. Ahmadinejad will have one, but Obama wants the US, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Israel, Pakistan, South Korea and South Africa to lay down their nuclear arms. In your dreams. After North Korea tested its missile, Obama said, “Rules must be binding, violations must be punished.”

How? The US has lifted most sanctions against North Korea and gotten almost nothing in return, although insisting North Korea is not proceeding with a nuclear bomb programme and has dismantled its ability to do so. Guess that doesn’t include ballistic missiles. Maybe Obama and the appeasement pacifists of the EU believe that only crazy characters in Tom Clancy novels want to seize or build a nuclear bomb or are hoping Jack Bauer will stop them if they do, but since Sam Colt made all men the same size, history has shown that if you build a better weapon that some people will want it and use it. It’s just a question of when, which Obama acknowledged when he said, “The threat of global nuclear war has gone down but the risk of nuclear attack has gone up.” He said the testing of nuclear weapons had risen and the technology of building a bomb had spread as a result, increasing the risk of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. It’s not much of a deterrent if they have one and your ammunition is harsh language.

Obama has designed a series of steps to eventually eliminate existing nuclear arsenals, which he said is the coldest legacy of the Cold War, and he wants to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons and proposed an alleged lockdown on material used to make them, a rich thought since the world can’t even scan luggage at airports without worrying what’s in it. He’s convinced Russian President Dimtry Medvedev to sit down and talk about it. He just hasn’t convinced Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-il, or any terrorists to attend that dinner party. And until he does, the only way to keep the world safe from nuclear weapons being used is to have them.

Deze column van Andy Dabilis verscheen ook in New Europe.

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