While any declaration ostensibly marching toward any kind of nuclear disarmament is almost universally perceived as noble, such declarations never take into account the critical and inevitable eventuality of enforcement.

The world has witnessed exactly one enforcement action against nuclear proliferation: the Israeli pre-emptive fighter bomber demolition of the French-built Iraqi plutonium breeder reactor. Has anyone forgot the universal censure the Israelis, not the French, and not the Iraqis, then received?

The world has witnessed countless contingencies whereupon nuclear deterrence was decisive. Who has been more ruthless, unto his own women and children, with the use of poison gas than Saddam Hussein? Yet the realization of the IAF F-15s, alerted and standing by fueled and armed with nuclear bombs, ready to assuredly incinerate Baghdad, was sufficient to convince Saddam to use conventional explosives in the Scuds he rained on Tel Aviv.

The world has witnessed two nuclear attacks, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The terrifying reality of their devastation, and the promise of similar action throughout Japan, convinced the executors of the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere to accept unconditional surrender.

American estimates of 1,000,000 casualties, to be incurred in the assaults on Skikoku and Honshu, proved moot. Contrary to the infinite post-war hand wringing over the morality of these attacks, this writer recalls the sentiments of his US Army Normandy to Berlin father, when his orders to proceed to Marseilles for transport to the Pacific Theater were annulled by the actions of August 6 and 9, 1945.

In the freedom of their own democracies, Europeans may indeed decide to undertake their own nuclear disarmament. On this side of the pond, the forces in support of a credible nuclear deterrent have decided otherwise.