Little boys and their nukes

Explaining nonproliferation to a five-year-old

American politics
Democracy in America

MY five-year-old son is very interested in missiles. Also cannonballs, bullets, arrows, bombs, jet planes, torpedoes, robots, and killer whales. (The ozone layer and reducing carbon emissions, too—he's not a complete sociopath.) Last week we watched Brad Bird's excellent animated movie "The Iron Giant" together, and yesterday my son asked whether it was possible to mount one of those really big missiles, like the one the kind-hearted robot destroys at the end of the movie, on a tank. I explained that those kinds of missiles were too big to put on a tank.

Could they blow up a tank? he asked. I said you wouldn't use that kind of missile to blow up a tank, because the bomb on that kind of missile was so powerful that it would blow up everything else, all around; it would just blow up too much, including whole cities, so people didn't really use those kinds of missiles in wars. They were actually very bad missiles.

He looked quite serious. It was the first time I had ever seen him get upset about a type of munition. So, he asked, why did people have them?

Just in case, I said. Countries had them just in case some other country got them. Only a few countries had them—America, Russia, China, France, England, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. But North Korea didn't really have that kind of missile yet, they just had the bomb part, but it was too big to fit in a missile; and they only had a few of them, maybe three or four.

Dad, he said, North Korea is the best country in the world. (Verbatim. I swear I'm not making this up.)

What? I said. Why?

Because they only have not very many of those very dangerous bombs, he said.

No, I said, North Korea is a very bad country. They have a bad president. America has to have those powerful bombs because, if a bad country got one, and said, "Give me a million dollars or I'll blow you up!", then...

I tried to sketch out playground versions of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction and of how arms control treaties between America and Russia worked. By the end, he seemed convinced, in the way that children are convinced by whatever their parents tell them about life. For my part, I was noticing how many contradictory parts my explanation had, how long it was taking me to lay it out, and how unappealing it was as something to teach your kid about the world.

Today Barack Obama will chair a meeting of the UN Security Council that will adopt a call for renewed efforts to reduce nuclear weapons, and may call for the elimination of nuclear weapons altogether. I grew up thinking of that position as naive and misguided, even when it was being espoused by Ronald Reagan. In an age when only superpowers could build large nuclear arsenals, nukes guaranteed a hard-headed kind of security. Over the past ten years, things have changed. It seems increasingly naive and misguided to believe that superpowers can keep small countries from obtaining nuclear weapons of their own, while those weapons are viewed as signs of prestige and membership in the club of most developed nations. Better to argue that Iran and North Korea should not have nuclear weapons because no one should have them. If that requires America to promise to give up its nukes if others will too, so be it.

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