>>In other words, you're saying that during the Cold War there was some mechanism other than MAD that kept countries with equal nuclear weaponry from nuclear war?
Indeed there was, whether Lawrence was implying that or not. As I pointed out months ago in a reply to Simon, Truman bluffed Stalin about our nuclear capacity early on. We had two bombs and Stalin thought we had many. Truman moved our nuke-capable bombers to England postwar and it stopped Stalin from pushing over Europe and turning the whole Continent Communist. Check the history. That other mechanism was called uncertainty.
>>Put a different way, if Iraq had had nuclear weapons, would we haveinvaded them? Put yet a different way, if Iran had nuclear weapons, would we be threatening to invade them?
That has nothing to do with your original question! You are just trying to muddy the waters because Lawrence responded effectively to your question. So now you change your question to something else.
Irene, you seem to like psychological thought. What you are doing is called "lumping." You are aggregating unrelated issues. While the way you perceive individual issues may be highly accurate, the way you link them together is sloppy. Acute individual perceptions combined with invalid interpretations. What the USA would or wouldn't do to a perceived national threat has nothing to do with the question of whether Iran should or shouldn't have nuclear weapons.
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