Free Counter Poised by John Spikenard Page B

laughed as he poured cups for himself, George, and Buffalo. “I have no problem trading with Latin America. It’s the Middle East I want to stay away from. And the last I heard, we don’t import a great deal of Middle Eastern coffee!”
    George snickered. “Hey look, for the last five years, the country has followed President Thornton’s isolationist policy and even initiated a serious program to develop alternative energy sources—not to protect the environment, but because the politicians thought if we freed ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, we wouldn’t have to deal with the Middle East any longer. Hell, ever since the DC attack we’ve been hunkering down here with this bunker mentality, and as we’ve learned this morning, the terrorists are still threatening us. And they’re still blowing up unarmed civilians.”
    “So you think their only goal is to kill us?” asked Lannis skeptically.
    “To me, their real goal is simple—they want to spread their venomous version of Islam to every corner of the globe. They won’t be satisfied until every Western democracy has been turned into a radical Islamic state. They want to see the equivalent of the Taliban controlling the U.S. and all of Europe. It wouldn’t be so bad if they just proselytized. However, using mass murder to achieve their Islamic state is wrong. They attacked the U.S. with a weapon of mass destruction, and someday, somehow, someone is going to see they reap the consequences.”
    “Yeah, well good luck with that,” said Lannis with disdain.
    “I just want justice , that’s all,” George shot back. “There’s a basic unfairness when the U.S. and other Western countries are forced to live in fear of terrorists, but cannot use our most potent and lethal weapons against them. Terrorists can attack the U.S. with a nuke, and we can’t respond in kind because we don’t know where to strike; they don’t have a country or even a part of a country we could hit in retaliation. Remember the good old days of the Cold War, Buffalo, when the MAD doctrine kept the world at peace for fifty years?”
    Buffalo looked at George. Oh no, here we go again. “Yeah,” Buffalo responded so that George could preach to Lannis. “Mutually Assured Destruction. Kind of has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Those were the days when it meant something to serve on a boomer.”
    “It sure did,” said George, taking his lead from Buffalo. “In my opinion, of the three legs of the U.S.’s strategic defense triad—land-based ICBMs, long-range strategic bombers, and ballistic missile submarines—the submarine force played the primary role in deterring nuclear attack during the Cold War. Missile silos and air force bases could be destroyed in a nuclear first strike, but boomers patrolling in secret locations could not. It was clearly the survivability of our boomers that kept the ‘Assured’ in the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.”
    “Well, MAD is dead,” said Buffalo matter-of-factly. “Teats on a boar hog.”
    “Not entirely,” Lannis responded. “We still have enemies or potential enemies out there who could hit us with long-range ballistic missiles. What about China and North Korea? Our boomers are still a deterrent for those guys.”
    Buffalo responded, “Well North Korea hasn’t shown they can really do it yet, and China is more of an economic rather than a military adversary now. The Chinese economy has mutated to one with more and more capitalism and free enterprise over the years. They’re becoming communist in name-only in a lot of ways.”
    “Yeah, MAD is dead all right,” George continued undaunted, “because political correctness prevents our country’s leaders from acknowledging what is really going on—a holy war between radical Islamists and the rest of the world. For MAD to work today, we would have to announce that in response to any terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction, we would target our nuclear weapons