Colin Powell rewrites history
in an interview with the BBC: “Now, I think both sides recognise that the most horrific thing that could happen in the year 2002 is, for the second time in history, a nuclear exchange to take place,” he said (emphasis added). As many others have pointed out, Hiroshima was not a nuclear exchange: it was a one-sided nuclear first strike by the United States. Indeed, since the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal was used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was clearly an all-out nuclear war, albeit a one-sided one.
Note the word “horrific” is absent from all Bush Administration comments on the United States nuclear arsenal. Nuclear war, apparently, is only unthinkable when waged by other nations.
An early casualty of the war between India and Pakistan may be the credibility of nuclear deterrence. If the logic of deterrence were correct, the nuclear arsenals of Pakistan and India would be leading them away from the brink of war right now. Clearly no one thinks we are safer because of the nukes on the subcontinent. Indeed, the U.S. government has advised U.S. citizens in India to get out.