NUCLEAR WEAPONS REFLECT ENGINEERING TALENT,

TALENT THAT CAN BE MEASURED

THROUGH IQ TESTS. INTERNATIONAL IQ TESTS INDICATE

THAT NUMEROUS COUNTRIES CAN PRODUCE GIFTED

ENGINEERS. IT IS TIME TO PREACH THE GOSPEL: THE DEVELOPMENT

OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS MUST BE LIMITED.

Nuclear weapons present a very new and very practical problem to the American people. Previous generations had the  option of staying home or intervening.  What America did made a huge difference "over there" but no one doubts that America would still be here whether or not America intervened. Nuclear weapons change that. America is vulnerable.

For three generations, since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American political and intellectual establishments have made two fundamental errors: They wildly overestimated the importance of a big economy in the nuclear weapons story, and they wildly underestimated the kind of engineering talent that would become visible in Russia, China, India and other Third World countries, once peasant boys began attending school in very large numbers.

School systems, in very poor countries, produce the nuclear rifle now aimed at America's heart. The rifle is built, loaded and aimed by a gifted engineer.

School systems identify the most important element in the nuclear annihilation game: the really gifted student. Northern Europeans and Americans have been in school systems for over three hundred years. Much of the rest of the world has only been in school since some time in the 20th century. This delayed entry into school characterize both of the ethnic groups that can now threaten America with nuclear weapons: Russia and China.

School systems by their nature identify the kid who can write a 785 on the math SAT. That is the most important sentence in the critical chapter entitled "School Systems" in the three generation book called Nuclear Weapons.

Nuclear weapons by their nature, have not worked as a security system for the North American continent. They could never have worked to advantage America.  Nuclear weapons have advantaged the poor backward peasant society that can produce the gifted engineer. Once the peasant boy enters school, no matter how dirty, backward and poor the school may be, the really gifted future engineer becomes visible.

The alternative to "War By IQ" is "War By Big Economy." America is the only entrant in the war game with an 12 trillion dollar economy. In an instant of time, just 3 generations, everything changed. The big economy is not asset enough.

The really gifted engineer threaded into nuclear technology does not require a 12 trillion dollar economy to do great work. The central economic fact about nuclear weapons is that nuclear weapons do not underline and extend the reach of a 12 trillion dollar economy. They neutralize a  12 trillion dollar economy.

North Korea demonstrates the reality best. Because North Koreans like their East Asian neighbors, the Japanese and the Chinese, score very very well on IQ tests that measure quantitative abilities, they can present a credible nuclear threat to the blue-eyed people. 

The fact that North Korea would be destroyed in a nuclear exchange does not change the basic truth that nuclear weapons constrain the United States in a way that would be impossible in a non nuclear world. The blue-eyed idealist will not invade North Korea to kill people to introduce democracy, if North Korea can hit Hawaii with a nuclear weapon.

The great general theorem about how nuclear weapons fit with security for the North American continent is this: They did not work. Sixty years after Hiroshima there is a search for a defensive system for nuclear weapons because what American politicians and intellectuals thought about nuclear weapons in 1945 turned out not to be true. There is simply no question that 60 years of energy, money and talent to produce nuclear weapons have resulted in an American vulnerability that would have horrified Churchill's and Roosevelt's generation.